How Consumer Brands Can Use Pinterest to Influence Purchase Decisions

Pinterest’s Role in the Media Landscape

Pinterest has a large and growing user base, with 631 million global monthly active users and more than $1 billion in quarterly revenue reported. But scale alone isn’t what makes the channel valuable. It is how the audience behaves.

People come to Pinterest to research or look for ideas they haven’t fully formed yet. They search for things like “small kitchen storage ideas” or “summer outfit ideas” the same way they would on Google, but the experience is much more visual, easier to shop from, and scrollable. For consumer brands, that creates a highly valuable window: the consumer is actively engaged and searching, but has not committed to a brand or product yet.

Where Pinterest Fits in the Customer Journey

One of the most common mistakes brands make with Pinterest is treating it as a single-purpose channel. Whether that means viewing it purely as an awareness play and never building toward conversion, or expecting it to perform like bottom-funnel search from day one. Both approaches miss how the platform actually works. Because of the nature of the platform, it can support multiple stages of the customer journey when each stage has a clear role.

Discovery

Pinterest reports that 96% of its top searches are unbranded, meaning consumers are exploring categories and aesthetics rather than looking for a specific product. They search for ideas like “apartment bathroom organization,” “vacation outfit ideas,” and “easy weeknight dinners.” Brands that create content around unbranded, intent-driven searches in their category can reach consumers before they have decided on a brand or product.

Consideration

When someone saves a Pin, searches the same category multiple times, or clicks through to check pricing on a brand’s site, Pinterest uses those actions as signals to surface more related content, including ads. For brands with shoppable product Pins and active consideration campaigns, those signals can help keep products in front of consumers as they move closer to a decision.

Conversion

As consumers continue saving, clicking, and returning to Pins, Pinterest gets stronger signals about what they are interested in and what they may be ready to buy. That is where conversion becomes more likely. Brands can use those signals to serve more relevant products, re-engage people who have already shown interest, and make the path from discovery to purchase easier.

The goal is not to treat Pinterest like bottom-funnel search. It is to use the intent created earlier in the journey to make the next product interaction more relevant when the consumer is ready to buy. 

Building a Paid Media Strategy for Pinterest

In a brand’s media mix, Pinterest tends to get deprioritized in favor of Meta and TikTok, which feel more immediate and scalable. But that treats Pinterest like a social platform, which it isn’t. For media teams, that means the question is not “Should I move dollars from Meta to Pinterest?” It’s “Where in the journey am I not reaching consumers, and can Pinterest fill that gap?” 

Meta and TikTok put your brand in front of large audiences quickly. Google captures demand at the point of search. Amazon and retail media convert demand closest to the point of transaction. Pinterest can support all of these stages, but where it adds something the others don’t is earlier in the journey, when consumers are still researching, planning, and deciding what they want. Once you know the role Pinterest needs to play, the campaign structure should follow that objective:

• Brand awareness optimizes for impressions and reach. It puts your Pins in front of people who are browsing or searching in your category. This is the right starting point if your brand has no presence on Pinterest and you need to establish visibility before you can drive any lower-funnel action.
• Consideration optimizes for clicks, either within Pinterest or out to your site. Use this when the goal is to get people to engage with your content or visit your product pages. 
• Conversions optimize for specific actions on your site: purchases, add-to-carts, or sign-ups. Pinterest uses data from your Pinterest tag or Conversions API to find users most likely to take those actions. 
• Catalog sales pulls products directly from your product feed and serves them to users based on what they are searching for and saving. If you have a strong, well-maintained catalog, this is one of the most direct paths to conversion on the platform.
• Performance+ is Pinterest’s automated campaign type. It handles targeting, bidding, and optimization using the platform’s intent signals. It can be used for Consideration, Conversion and Catalog sales objectives.

The right campaign type depends on where Pinterest fits in your media mix and what part of the customer journey you are trying to cover.

WITHIN helps consumer brands evaluate Pinterest in the context of the full media mix, identify where it can create incremental value, and build a campaign structure that matches the role the channel is meant to play.

How to Measure Pinterest’s Full Impact

Pinterest drives in-app conversions, but it also influences purchases when someone saves a product, researches it, or returns to it over a few weeks, eventually buying through Google or directly on the brand’s site. Most attribution models only capture the first scenario.

KPIs 

On-platform engagement can fill in some of those gaps. Standard paid media KPIs like impressions, clicks, CPA, ROAS, and conversions still matter, but they don’t tell the full story on a platform built around planning and discovery.

• Saves and save rate are the clearest Pinterest-specific signals because they show someone is collecting, planning, or intending to return to an idea later.
• Pin clicks and Pin click rate show when someone wants to take a closer look at your Pin, even if they are not ready to leave Pinterest yet.
• Outbound clicks and outbound click rate show when someone moves from inspiration into evaluation by visiting your site, product page, or another destination.

Together, these signals show you how consumers move from discovery to consideration on Pinterest.

Measurement

To understand whether Pinterest is contributing to revenue across channels, there are a few approaches. The simplest is tracking branded search lift: if branded search volume increases during or after Pinterest campaigns, that is Pinterest-driven demand showing up in another channel’s reporting. Incrementality testing can take it further by isolating whether Pinterest is driving conversions that would not have happened otherwise. For the most complete picture, media mix modeling can quantify how much revenue Pinterest is driving relative to your other channels.

Why Pinterest Matters in 2026

Pinterest sits at the intersection of search, social, commerce, and increasingly, AI-powered discovery. A lot of platforms want to be in that space, but not many actually are. It reaches consumers while they are still finding inspiration, figuring out what they want, saving ideas, and planning for a future purchase. For consumer brands, the biggest opportunity is showing up before preferences are set, connecting products to ideas people are already exploring, and turning inspiration into action.

If you’re evaluating how Pinterest should fit into your 2026 media strategy, WITHIN can help identify the right role for the channel, build a testing roadmap, and measure its impact across the full customer journey.