Some useful tidbits from PINS management commentary from SA transcript.
Expanding shopping (partnered with Shopify for seamless integration)
The fourth and final priority is shopping. To us, our mission isn’t complete unless we help people create the life they dream about offline. And so often being able to buy the ideas they see is what makes that action possible.
Last year, we made progress in the shopping front. We made it easy to switch directly into shop mode from the search query. So we introduced new features from merchants, all of which led to a 6x increase in shopping advertisers on Pinterest in Q4.
This year, we’re planning to build on this momentum by continuing to help more businesses get their products on Pinterest, and help Pinners discover, evaluate and buy products throughout their shopping experiences. Finally, we want to expand these features more globally, so that no matter where you live, you can shop on Pinterest.
Expanding reach to serve more advertisers more effectively
Over the last year, we’ve invested in our ability to better deliver returns accountable performance advertising, including scaling, conversion optimization, ads, shopping, ads, and building improved automation to help advertisers of all sizes more easily onboard and realize the value of being on Pinterest.
We also expanded our sales team in Western Europe to monetize our engagement there. Drilling down, auto bid was once again a meaningful contributor to our strength in Q4 and was especially so for small, small and medium sized businesses. And I’m pleased that our international business grew 145% year-over-year on the back of strong advertiser demand. International markets now represent 17% of total revenue.
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So your question was more specifically about the growth in shopping inventory. Looking in – going from Q3 to Q4, we increase the number of active catalogs by over 60%. And we also have really improved the discoverability of those products. And so in Q4, we expanded the scope of shopping engagement. And we allowed Pinterest to pivot into that shopping mode from any search query. That’s resulted in a really significant uptick in product search. It’s grown roughly 20x in the last year. But I do still think that we’re in early days. We’re certainly in early days in terms of international rollout. But even from a user experience side, while we’ve made a lot of progress, we still have a gap to close before we reach that vision of being able to go from an inspiring scene, or an inspiring video, or an inspiring story on directly to set up products that are easy to buy. And that’s something that we’re excited to invest in.
Also say that on the advertising side, we do see shopping, advertising growing faster, as a proportion of our overall revenue growth. And it’s just one example, Wayfair has really scaled their shopping campaigns with us over the past year, primarily because of measurement and the ability to drive incremental sales. So we think those are kind of great early indicators, but it is early days for us. And we’re going to be working hard to improve that experience over 2021.
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Todd Morgenfeld
So Colin, on the second question about being advantaged because of the search characteristics of the platform, I would start by saying, there’s a fair amount of uncertainty around this in general. So I don’t want to overstate what we know. But what we do know about our platform is that we have high degree of commercial intent and planning behavior. And that planning behavior drives a fair amount of on platform signal. So things like board creations, things like visual and text based queries, saves, that are based on that planning behavior that creates a fair amount of on platform signal that helps to inform targeting.
And so relative to other platforms, offsite signal is probably less important for us, because of the intent that we’re able to capture first party on our platform. All that said, when you think about measurements, there are some products and improvements we can continue to make on that front, but that’s where the ambiguity comes in. And I wouldn’t want to overstate our position relative to others. But I think from a targeting perspective, we’re in an enviable position based on the use cases and the planning behavior of our user base.
On pricing ( monetization / getting better value)
Ben Silbermann
Thanks, Doug. So what I would say is we’re seeing more balance these days in terms of both impression, growth and pricing growth, driving volume. So in the past we talked a lot about – most of our revenue if not all of our revenue growth being driven by impressions, as opposed to effective CPMs or pricing. What we’ve seen and saw in the fourth quarter and through the course of 2020, is that – there’s far more balance. And now that we’ve started to see as we’ve been telling you over time, eventually pricing will start to contribute more to our revenue growth. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. That’s in part due to industry-wide demand, and auction pressure, we’ve continue to grow the number of advertisers on the platform and gotten more share of wallet with our incumbent advertisers, which has been important.
And the most encouraging part about this, as well, pricing is increased across objectives. We’ve seen the most pricing opportunity and build end results in our performance. Against performance objectives, we were better utilizing or becoming more efficient in delivering against the ad inventory that we have. So it’s not necessarily driven as much by cost per action, but by more efficient delivery of those slots, which is a really encouraging trend. I don’t know if that gets to your question.
On accelerating international monetization (where they also have huge user growth…
Todd Morgenfeld
I think that covers most of it. But I think the only thing that I would add, that we’re doing a little differently in international markets relative to what we’ve done in the U.S. is we’re investing in that smaller and medium business cheer of advertisers more in parallel, internationally, relative to what we did in the U.S., which was more sequence. So a lot of what Ben talked about building on the product side will apply more directly to SMEs outside of the U.S. to quicker. We talked about the agency tools return beta, some shopping features will be rolled out more comprehensively internationally over time too. And that’ll be important.