Pinterest has published new guidance on how to optimize the feed of your products in the app, so you can enhance the performance of Pin listings and thus create a more responsive in-app presence.

Which for both newcomers to the app and regular brands means refreshing the feed to maximize engagement.

Here's what Pinterest has to say:

Your product feed You might also have heard it referred to as a data feed, a data source or a product catalogue. It actually powers important lower funnel tools, such as product Pins and shopping ads. The information contained within your product feed is directing our system about how to recommend your content across Pinterest and who might be seeing it. It also determines how your brand shows up on the site; for instance, the important details relating to product description and images will actually feature on real Pins.

Based on this analysis, Pinterest states brands ought to do the following four things:

Have rich metadata listings 

The feeding process of Pinterest's product feed ingestion requires to many fields like title, description, price, and category. As reported by Pinterest, brands should fill in all these elements precisely and clearly with specific details on every single product which they are selling.

Think about the types of traits that your customers will be concerned with and will really help describe what they are purchasing"
Use keywords in your title and descriptions.

Much like other forms of SEO, Pinterest recommends brands to think about those terms which people use when searching for their products and add those terms into their product listings.

"Using a mix of wide and specific words and phrases will allow you to trigger more searches.".

You can find connected search terms and trending queries with the trend insights page from Pinterest.

Optimize your product groups

Pinterest recommends that brands take a glance through their product categories, and how they list their items within different segments.

According to Pinterest, more in this regard is better because it will assist the system better in guiding users toward relevant matches.

"Tagging your products into multiple levels of categorization will help you score higher in relevant searches and shopping categories. Skip a category-and you might accidentally skip a shopper."

As an example, Pinterest suggests that when listing headphones, you may look to make use of the type of categorization like this:

Electronics > Audio > Audio Components > Headphones and headsets > Headphones

Pinterest further states that brands should post their products only once in a particular category.

Dont Targeting Restrictions

Finally, according to Pinterest, brands should let its algorithms work during the shopping campaign so that reach to interested users can be maximized.
At first, it might seem counterintuitive to add restrictions: the more you limit who can reach you and see your content, the less our other tips will be able to work for you. Trust the feed, trust the process. Let Pinterest's algorithms, combined with your metadata, do the heavy lifting."

As ad targeting systems improve, more platforms push advertisers toward their AI-powered targeting tools, which, in many cases, perform better than more refined targeting.

There will always be variations based on the ad creator, but automated targeting is generating better results over time, and it may be worth experimenting with fewer versus more targeting parameters.

Here are a few useful tips for Pin marketers which might put your approach on the right track for 2024. When the platform begins approaching 500 million users, all of whom are coming to the platform with shopping intent, perhaps it is time to consider where Pinterest might fit into your marketing strategy.