Get ready: ads are coming to your Pinterest homepage

Pinterest is testing out Promoted Pins as the first thing users will see when they come to the site

Pinterest has been very successful with its ads rollout so far, enough so that it felt comfortable opening them up to all advertisers earlier this year. Partially that has been because Pinterest has not inundated its users with them. Until now, users have only seen them during searches, and nowhere else on the site.

That couldn't last forever, though and now the company feels ready to expand those ads much further.  In fact, Pinterest is essentially making them the first thing that users will see when they enter the site, as it is starting tests to bring its Promoted Pins to the homepage, it was announced on Tuesday. 

"Your home feed is the first thing you see when you come to Pinterest, so we want to make sure you’re always welcomed with Pins that are beautiful, relevant and tasteful—and that includes Promoted Pins," the company wrote in a blog post.

"Of course, if you don’t like a Promoted Pin, you can always hide it from your feed and tell us why you didn’t like it. We’ll use your feedback to improve what you see in the future."

In addition to the homepage, the blog post also says that the ads are being tested in "different places" around the site, but a Pinterest spokesperson tells VatorNews that it is "only testing ads in the home feed now and continue to show ads in the category and search feeds."

It's no shock that Pinterest wants to make ads as ubiquitous as possible, given how successful they've been. The company revealed last month that during its beta test of Promoted Pins, it saw a 30% increase in “earned media," a.k.a. the number people who save a Promoted Pin to one of their boards, for advertisers. 

The benefits for Promoted Pins even lasted beyond the campaign itself. As Pinterest noted, "Pins are evergreen and last forever," so they typically saw another 5% bump in earned media in the month following the end of a campaign.

Pinterest first announced that it would be starting its first monetization effort with Promoted Pins in October 2013. Promoted Pins work the same as any other type of pin, except they have a label at the bottom that denoted that they are "promoted." It also contains a link to learn more about what that means.

It then revealed a number of partners in May of this year, including ABC Family, Banana Republic, Expedia.com, Gap, General Mills, Kraft, lululemon athletica, Nestle (which includes Purina, Dreyer’s/Edy’s Ice Cream and Nespresso), Old Navy, Target, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, Ziploc.

On the strength of those limited tests, announced it would be opening them up to all advertisers at the beginning of this year.

This news comes right off the company announcing that it bought purchasing recommendation engine Kosei in order to better improve ad targeting for brands and marketers.

(Image source: ubergizmo.com)