Promoted Pins or Facebook Ads - What's Better, Cheaper, & Gets More Sales?

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Pinterest Promoted Pins or Facebook Ads – What’s Better, Cheaper, & Gets More Sales?

Facebook has been a force in the online advertising industry. They’ve really changed the way we advertise online with the amazing targeting options they offer. It was only a matter of time until the other ad networks followed with advertising options.

While Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram all have ads available – we’re going to break down the difference between Pinterest Promoted Pins and Facebook Paid Advertising. I also ran a little case study and will show you the results.

Pinterest promoted pins is the new kid on the block. They recently rolled out the option to promote pins / advertise on Pinterest in the last few months. In fact, they are still rolling out the platform to people with a Pinterest Business Account so if you don’t have a Pinterest Business Account – get yourself set up and request the Pinterest Promoted Pins feature.

Now, let me tell you a little about each platform and their benefits.

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Facebook Advertising –

By far the most comprehensive targeting platform on the market. What most people don’t know is that Facebook actually purchases data from 3rd party companies – data on their users (you and me) and they entered that in their database about YOU. This gives Facebook data about who you are, what you like, where you live, your behaviors, your demographics, your interests….yeah (It’s a lot of information.)

Targeting:

One of the most important parts of advertising because it allows advertisers (the companies paying to put their ads out there) the ability to get directly in front of their target market. The target market that’s most likely going to take action on their ad.

Let me give you an example of Facebook Targeting and how amazingly detailed it is:

You can target: women, age 25-35, who are moms, who live within 25 miles of San Diego, who have kids 3-5, who drive a toyota, use an iphone, like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Oprah.

No, I’m not kidding. See for yourself…

Other types of Targeting you can select on Facebook:

Behaviors
Demographics
Interests
People who like your Facebook Page
People subscribed to your email list
People who have visited your website or a certain web page
People who “looklike” people who have liked your Facebook page, or subscribed to your list, or have visited your website

This is just to name a few, there really are incredible options with Facebook targeting so no matter what you do, you’ll be able to target your ideal target audience with all of those options.

Objectives:

Facebook gives you several objectives or goals for your ad and you can choose what works best for you. You can boost a post to get it seen by more people, drive traffic to your website, get more video views, optimize for conversions, and more. This really helps you achieve your objective and you’ll have a lot of detailed analytics to review your results.

Placement:

This is another one I give Facebook an edge up. You can choose where you want to place your ad. They have the desktop News feed, mobile News feed, Desktop Right Column, & Instagram. You can pick and choose specifically where you want your ad to display.

Images:

One caveat to Facebook ads is the ad can’t have more than 20% text on the image. They’re very strict about this rule and the idea behind it is they don’t want overly promotional images appearing in the news feed. This goes against the “social community” nature of the platform so they’re restrictive on what you can advertise.

They offer a “Grid Tool” to show you how much text your image has used but even this can be labor intensive to squish or condense your text down to 20%.

Ad Copy:

There is no limit to how much text you can include in the copy. Obviously, all ad copy needs to comply with their terms of service.

Cost:

Ad cost varies – largely. There are a lot of factors that go into how much you spend for what you get.

Just a few examples: If you’re targeting an Interest page that several other advertisers are also targeting, you ad cost will be higher. You can’t predict this. If you’re targeting a very small audience, it’s going to cost more to reach them because of how specific the targeting is.

I’ve had clicks as low as .01 and as high as over $1.00.

I’ve also had conversions (subscribers) as low as .20 and again, over $1.00.

Overall – Facebook is incredibly effective in reaching your target audience, growing your email list, and selling your products.

Let’s switch gears and talk about Pinterest Promoted Pins.

Pinterest promoted pins have quite a few differences.

Targeting :

On Pinterest – we target Keywords.

Pinterest is basically its own search engine and the way it works is people search for keywords or terms to find results.

When Targeting on Pinterest, you’ll want to target words you think your target market is searching for.

See how different this is than Facebook where we were targeting a mom with kids under 5?

On Pinterest, we have to know what that mom with kids under 5 would be searching for on Pinterest. Maybe it’s preschool lunch ideas? Or Crafts for a 5 year old.

Besides your term targeting, here are the additional options you have, no where near as many options as Facebook but, in my opinion, just as effective.

Pinterest has also rolled out some highly effective custom audiences like website visitors, email or customer list, actalike audiences, and engaged audiences targeting people interacting with content from your domain! (We cover this extensively here)

Objectives:

You have four objectives with Pinterest Promoted Pins. Build Brand Awareness, Boost Engagement, Drive traffic, App Installs. with your pin OR get more engagement (Pins, Repins) on your pins.

Placement:

Your only option on Pinterest is to appear in the stream.

Images:

NO 20% TEXT RULE! Woohoo! I love this part about Promoted Pins. Being able to have that extra text can really grab you extra clicks. You don’t want to cover your image in text but there’s no rule against it.

One difference here is on Pinterest images – you can’t reference anything “FREE” and the reason is because Pinterest is evergreen – meaning pins last forever and if your image promotes “FREE” they can’t guarantee what you’re offering is free forever.

Ad Copy:

Again, same rules apply with image text in the ad copy. No reference to anything for “FREE” for the reasoning above. Always check with the terms of services to see what is and is not allowed.

Ad Cost:

From my experience, it’s cheaper than Facebook. There’s less competition right now which makes it more affordable to go after those popular search terms.

Traffic campaigns cost more per click than Engagement campaigns.

I’ve seen clicks as low as .17 and as high as .70 from Pinterest. The average click cost I’ve seen is about .30.

Case Study

(Let me start by saying I’m not a scientific or technical advertising expert. I run ads on Facebook and Pinterest and am very familiar with the ad platforms, I know how to get results, and I get phenomenal results with ads. This is to show you the difference in the platforms and MY results.)

I ran two ads with a $5 budget for 3 days – the same ad optimized for each platform. Meaning, my Facebook ad was sized appropriately and in compliance with the text rules and my Pinterest ad was sized appropriately and in compliance with the text rules.

My goal with these two ads was to get them into my sales funnel.

***Side Note – You can see that the ad I ran on Facebook was run previously – this is the report during the 3 day ad run time.

***The budget also didn’t run the full $15 – even though it was set to run at $5 per day for 3 days, Facebook won’t charge the full budget unless it runs the entire 24 hour period

I told you I was not scientific 😉

Facebook Results:

Pinterest Results:

Let’s review the results next to each other:

As you can see, the Pinterest ad performed better. It reached more people, had a higher engagement rate and lower cost per result.

The Verdict

In my opinion, Pinterest crushes Facebook.

Let me tell you why…

I started testing a custom Pinterest strategy a few months back and within 30 days – Pinterest was bringing me more traffic, more subscribers, and more sales.

While everyone is fighting over the Facebook newsfeed, I’ve been silently crushing it on Pinterest.

It’s an untapped market
There’s less competition
It’s cheaper
The Targeting is LASER Focused
Pinterest users are BUYERS
Pinterest converts to SALES

If you know how to strategically use promoted pins to grow your business – there’s no limit to the success you can see.

Because of the amazing results I was getting, I put together a course, Pin Funnels that shows you step by step how to achieve these same results.

I made over $9,000 the FIRST month I implemented this strategy, with products I already had.

Setting up a Pin Funnel is a LONG TERM Business strategy.

When you run a Facebook ad, once you stop the ad – no one is going to see it. It doesn’t organically appear in the feed, people can’t search for it, it’s pretty much gone until you choose to advertise it again.

On Pinterest, after you promote a Pin, that pin will get more engagement – more repins and comments. This gives your pin “weight” that tells Pinterest that YOUR pin is a popular result for people searching for that specific keyword.

What does that mean? It means, that after you promote your pin to give it weight – after you SHUT OFF your ad – it will CONTINUE to be provided as a result. On Facebook – your ad dies. On Pinterest, your Pin gets MORE engagement.

Are you following me?

Here’s an example of a pin funnel that I promoted:

I say pin funnel because I set this pin up to direct all traffic into my funnel where I can sell products and services. It’s the most popular Pin Funnel I have running and I’m not even advertising it!

I only spent a few dollars in the beginning to give it the boost it needed.

As you can see, I’m the FIRST result on Pinterest for the term Female Entrepreneur…and to my surprise – I’m also the 5th result with another Pin Funnel I created.

These pins drive over 10,000 hits of traffic to my website every month. They drive hundreds of subscribers to my funnel each month. They get me sales – every single day.

If you’re looking to market on a platform that’s not covered with competition, has buyers who are looking to make purchases, where your content lives forever, where ads are cheap and where you can automate a system – Pinterest is for you!

My results show you that this is a traffic GOLD MINE and the power of Pinterest is incredibly powerful. There’s a HUGE opportunity here for business owners, direct sales, and eCommerce retailers to take advantage of.

Since Pinterest ads are new, you have the opportunity to take advantage of high quality – converting -traffic BEFORE it gets expensive and packed with competition.

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