In this episode, Erin Harding, our Pinterest Ads Director at Simple Pin Media, teaches us why $5 ads don’t work and what your average Pinterest ads cost SHOULD be. She breaks down how to figure out your budget, based on the type of ad campaign you want to run.

Erin has managed hundreds of campaigns for clients and consulted on hundreds more for our ads students in the Simple Pin Ads Society. One thing she sees all the time is people trying to run ads campaigns with just $5 per day, and wondering why they’re not getting any results.

RELATED: 3 mistakes you’re making with Pinterest ads

two women looking at laptop with text "why $5 ads don't work on pinterest".

pinterest ads campaigns

Let’s start off by looking at the structure of an ads campaign:

CAMPAIGN LEVEL – This is where everything is housed, also where the objective is chosen and budget is set.

AD GROUPS – These live inside the campaign, and you typically have 2-4 ad groups per campaign. This is where targeting is set and testing can be done.

ADS – These live inside the ad groups, and best practice is 2-3 ads in each ad group.

What does this look like? A standard ads campaign would have 4-8 ads inside of 2 ad GROUPS.

campaign types

Awareness, consideration, conversion, and catalog campaigns all use campaign budgeting. This means that the budget is set for the entire campaign, not individual ads or ad groups. Campaign budget optimization works to automatically adjust spend over ALL of the ad groups. 

What do each of these campaign types optimize for?

  • Awareness objective – impressions
  • Consideration objective – Pin clicks
  • Conversion objective – conversions
  • Catalog objective – Pin clicks or conversions, based on your bid type 

Read more about campaign types here.

campaign budget

Each campaign type has a best practice suggested for budget amount.

Consideration – $25-$50 per campaign

This is a range, but think about how many ad groups and ads you have. If you have one ad group with 2-4 ads, you can budget on the lower end. If you have 2+ ad groups with 2-4 ads each, you will need to budget on the higher end.

Remember, your budget is allocated across ALL your ad groups.

Conversion – 4-10 times your cost per action (CPA)

If your CPA is $10, your minimum daily budget should be $40. Ideally, your budget should be closer to $60-$100 based on the formula, but $40 is a good minimum.

Catalog – About $1 per product being promoted

For example – if your product group has 30 products, the budget should be a minimum of $30. If you’re promoting multiple product groups, one with 30 and one with 15, your budget would need to be $45.

If you’re following best practices with your Pinterest ads cost, not one of them is even close to suggesting just $5 per day.

why do $5 pinterest ads not work?

Let’s break it down. Here at Simple Pin, we ran a $5/day consideration campaign.

here’s what we learned:

  1. Our $5 budget didn’t last the entire day. This is not surprising! When the average CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is between $2-$5 you will most likely spend $5 fairly quickly. The longest our $5 lasted in a day was about 10 hours.
  2. We followed best practices by having 3 ads total in one ad group. This only allowed each ad about $1.66 to spend each day. Not surprisingly, the click through rate (CTR) was low on all 3 ads, because they weren’t served to enough people.
  3. Our ads were only seen by 30K people in a 2 week period with a cold audience of over 5 million – so we are really limiting our reach with only $5 per day. Once the $5 is spent – your ads won’t be served the rest of the day.
  4. We did get a few conversions, but not many, because we limited ourselves so much with our budget.

bottom line

When you spend only $5 per day on a Pinterest ad campaign,, you are doing yourself a disservice. You’re not giving Pinterest enough ad spend to work properly. So while you may get a few conversions here and there, you will not reach the full potential of your ads.

And what’s the point of spending any money, if you don’t spend it wisely?

corded headphones on desk next to note pad and pencils.

We believe that savvy business owners, just like you, can learn how to run Pinterest ads on your own, eliminating the cost of someone else managing ads for you! We have lots of resources here at Simple Pin to help you learn, especially our monthly ads membership, the Simple Pin Ads Society.

We’d love to hear from you! What type of ads are you running and if you feel comfortable sharing, what budget range is working the best for you? Let us know where you’re at by leaving a comment on this blog post or sending us a DM on Instagram.

For further reading/listening:

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