Pinterest Shares New Insights Into Its Evolving Personalization and Recommendation Tools

Have you considered how Pinterest might fit into your digital marketing strategy?

The discovery platform is steadily increasing its focus on personalized recommendations, through the use of AI, and its unique buyer intent signals, which Pinterest says has had a huge impact on overall engagement and opportunity.

This week, Pinterest held its 2023 Investor Day to provide an in-depth overview of its future growth plan and development principles. And there’s a lot to take in, with the full presentation deck from the event clocking in at 158 slides.

Yeah, you might not want to click through the whole thing, so in this post, I’ve pulled out some of the key highlights and graphics, to give you an understanding of the main developments at the app.

First off, Pinterest shared an overview of its evolving growth strategy, and where it sees its fit in the modern discovery process.

This unique positioning enables Pinterest to hone in on its key value adds, which has also helped it to refine its data flows and focus.

As you can see in this slide, Pinterest has been steadily driving increased user activity in each key area, with save and search data helping to fuel its improving recommendation systems.

That, Pinterest says, is a key differentiator for the app, both in terms of AI development, where it’s boosting its investment:

And in regards to the cookie-less future, where brands will have less third-party data to go on.

Based on this, Pinterest believes that it’s now well-placed to become a bigger focus for retail advertisers, as it continues to refine its AI systems, based on saves, collages, item recognition, and more.

Which is an interesting consideration, that Pinterest is evolving its data banks beyond other platforms due to the granularity of its intent data. Which it can then feed into its evolving AI engine, driving more relevant Pin matches, and ads.

“AI-driven optimizations power our ads delivery funnel Compared to 2022, we’ve grown our model size by 100x, allowing us to deliver more relevant and engaging ads to users.”

Pinterest also notes that video content in the app is on the rise, with the platform seeing a 170% increase in video uploads year over year. Pinterest also notes that it’s recently added mobile deep linking, which enables brands to redirect users to a shopping page in their app, has driven a 235% lift in conversion rates.

The Pinterest team also provided an overview of its usage growth, and in particular, the increase in user engagement.

Again, based on its personalization efforts, more users are now spending more time in the app, and saving more pins, which provides Pinterest with more data for customization.

Pinterest also says that it’s back on track on the user growth front, after seeing a decline in growth following the COVID bump.

Pinterest also shared its latest data on user demographics:

Along with this interesting overview of its expanding reach among younger users:

These are some interesting, and potentially valuable notes, which could re-frame how you view Pinterest for your marketing outreach. I mean, it’s not for everyone, and not every brand is going to see success in Pins. But it is likely worth digging into the latest Pin Trends in your niche, just to see what’s happening in the app, and how it’s evolving data-matching tools are personalizing user journeys, in different verticals.

You can check out the full Pinterest presentation (158 slides) here.