Pinterest has made some crazy adjustments to their Creator Rewards Program AND the functionality of Idea Pins. Even if you don’t partake in either of these two features, be sure to watch this because it will likely affect your Pinterest marketing strategy in the future.

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Hello, I’m Sarah Potter. I am the owner of PinPro Studio. I’m a
Pinterest marketing strategist, and today I’m here with a very interesting
Pinterest update that just got announced today or yesterday actually. And I
think it’s really going be interesting to see how this plays out. So basically,
a year ago Pinterest rolled out a huge fund to create idea pins.

The problem that creators had with idea pins is that they don’t
link out to anything. You cannot add a link to them. So users were accessing
these pins and getting this information and. Creators were like, Hey, what the
heck? I’m not getting any website traffic from all this work that I’m doing.
And then users were getting frustrated because they’re seeing all these great
recipes and all of this home decor stuff, and they don’t have access to
actually move over to the website and get more information.

So everybody was getting frustrated. Pinterest decided to roll
out with what they called the Creator Rewards Program, and that was basically a
way to incentivize creators to submit these idea pins because they were really.
Prioritized in the algorithm. In fact, in some niches and in some keywords,
idea pins just completely took over and nobody was getting any outbound clicks
because nobody could find the standard pins.

It was just idea pins. And so, the Creator Rewards program was
a way to incentivize creators like me and you to create these idea pins and get
paid for them. So, you had to meet certain criteria each week or each month. So
maybe it was to get so many shares, so many likes, whatever it was.  If you met the criteria, then you would get, basically get paid for it.

So, over the course of time, the payout for the Creative Reward
program continued to decline and it got harder and harder to actually meet those
criteria based off of the algorithm and a lot of different factors. And as of
yesterday, and this is November 30th, 2020, when I’m recording this Pinterest
announced that they are discontinuing the Creator Rewards Program.

And in order to remedy that, they are adding links to the back
end of idea pins. Now, idea pins have already had links on them if you run a
paid ad. And that was their way of starting the process and making sure, I guess,
it was working properly. So, from here on out, you will eventually be able to
add a link to the back end of an idea pin.

Now, some people already have access to this. I personally do
not. So, I don’t have a ton of data, but from what I have heard from my peers
is that it is just like a standard pin. You can click on it, and you can move
over to a website from there. So that is the big update that just happened.

Now, my prediction with this is, it’s going take some training
to get people to actually click on these idea pins because we have been taught
that, hey, they don’t go anywhere. And even the people who are running the ads
are seeing the same thing that. Pouring money into running idea pin ads is not
quite as productive as running a standard pin because people are used to
clicking on a standard pin and moving over to website, whereas they’re not used
to that with an idea pin.

So, if I was you and you decide to use idea pins, do it with
the intent of training the algorithm and training your audience to use them as
a standard pin. So that they can actually remember hey, this has got a link to
it. I can actually go over to your website. So, if you have access to them,
drop a comment and let me know.

 I’m actually interested to see how this pans out. I don’t have access to them yet. I’m sure I will hear soon. None of my clients have access to them. I do know there’s some Canadian people who have idea pin links. So yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see this play out and let me know. Do you have access to idea pin links?

That’s it for today. I hope it was informative, and we will see
you later.

–        Sarah