Under the agreement, we’re told that Apsalar will be able to measure and attribute app installs and remarketing events driven by Pinterest.

Widely known as “the world’s catalog of ideas,” Pinterest enables users to discover new products, plan purchases and connect with brands in “uniquely enriching ways.”

The popular platform attracts more than 150 million unique users around the world every month.

The company says that by joining the Pinterest Marketing Partners program, Apsalar has further expanded its extensive measurement footprint, which includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, and 1,000+ network and traffic source integrations.

“We’re proud to be among the first mobile app measurement partners for this highly influential property,” said Michael Oiknine, Apsalar Cofounder and CEO. “Advertisers are looking for lean-forward media opportunities to engage users deeply, and we look forward to helping our clients understand the business value of their Pinterest programs.”

The post Apsalar Tapped for Pinterest Marketing Partners Program appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

“Pinterest had been considering how it could implement video ads for months,” noted Garett Sloane in a post for Digiday. “Promoted video pins are being tested among a small group of users, and internally at Pinterest, according to one source briefed on the tests.”

The videos reportedly employ an autoplay function that sets them in motion when a user stops scrolling over them. Pinterest is also said to be testing video ad length.

“They would be wise to launch video ads, as video consumption trends continue to rise,” said Orli LeWinter, VP of strategy and social marketing at 360i. “That said, video behavior is not an organic one on Pinterest, so I’d be interested to see how they end up performing.”

At this point, Pinterest is staying mum. There’s no info on what brands are placing the first test video ads.

“Pinterest is not known as a video destination like Facebook and Twitter have become, building video players into their platforms and offering new features like live streaming,” according to Sloane. “Facebook is now doing 100 million hours of video views a day, with more than 8 billion views.”

But video ads should complement Cinematic Pins, which play only as a user scrolls and then stop when a user stops scrolling. Pinterest launched Cinematic Pins last year with support from brands including Wendy’s, Nestlé, Walgreens, and Suave.

“Cinematic Pins are still running. I think they are a very interesting and engaging ad format, and they perform pretty well,” LeWinter said.

“Pinterest has been trying to make its platform more accessible to advertisers, developing its ad serving software and opening it to more partners for buying,” noted Sloane. “There have been some in the ad world who feel Pinterest has been too slow to roll out all the tools advertisers need, however, to make investing there worthwhile.”

One thing’s for sure: video is the growth arena on every social site — and this won’t be the last news we hear about how Pinterest’s foray is progressing.

The post Pin This: Social Site Pinterest Now Testing Video Ads appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

What’s on the docket for 2016? Mobile, for starters.

They’re also investigating responsive design and app development, as well as search optimization and customer acquisition.

“A survey from Shop.org, Forrester Research and Bizrate Insights asked retailers in North America what their top three priorities for their digital business in 2016 were. More than half (59 percent) of respondents said mobile and marketing were,” reports eMarketer. “In addition, 41 percent of retailers said that site merchandising was a leading priority for their digital business this year.”

According to surveys, retailers also anticipate checkout overhauls, omnichannel efforts, and a variety of international expansion initiatives in the new year.

“While social—like integrating with networks such as Pinterest—fulfillment and shipping, organization and customer service were also leading priorities, they ranked lower on the list,” reports eMarketer.

In sum, mobile’s criticality is utterly apparent.

“In 2014, 57 percent of retailers worldwide surveyed by Payvision experienced major growth in mcommerce sales. Among the total, 33 percent strongly agreed that growth was significant—already a sizeable share,” according to eMarketer. “And by 2015, the evidence in favor of mcommerce was overwhelming. Nearly half of respondents were in the “strongly agree” group, with an additional 34 percent agreeing more generally.”

The post Retailers Set Digital Priorities for 2016 with Mobile at Top of the List appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

SparkPost, a cloud email service provider, says that Pinterest is integrating with SparkPost Elite as its new email delivery service.

Pinterest has consolidated the sending of both engagement and transactional emails onto the SparkPost Elite platform, taking advantage of its proven high inbox delivery rates and dedicated enterprise class service.

After researching the cloud email services on the market today, Pinterest selected SparkPost Elite, citing its excellent global ISP relations, ability to stream real-time event data via webhooks for use in personalization and sending, as well as SparkPost’s experience at providing white-glove service, an announcement from SparkPost explains.

“SparkPost Elite provides us with the enterprise-class service we require,” said Cole Rottweiler at Pinterest who led the evaluation. “We use A/B testing and SparkPost’s streaming webhooks email metrics data to dynamically adjust our content and how we send emails based on live feedback. This improves engagement and lets us monitor the health of our email channel in real-time.”

To learn more about SparkPost, check them out here.

The post Pinterest, SparkPost Partner to Personalize Email Campaigns appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

That’s the take from eMarketer, citing stats from

RBC Capital Markets and Advertising Age which found that 72 percent of U.S. marketers surveyed are interested in allocating money to Instagram for advertising.

Instagram walloped second-place Pinterest (41 percent) in terms of spending ad dollars.

In other words, there is high interest among brands when it comes to advertising on visual social networks.

Snapchat captured the interest of 36 percent of marketers surveyed — which put it in third place.

“According to comScore, Snapchat penetration has risen dramatically among smartphone app users in the U.S.,” reports eMarketer. “Among 18- to 24-year-olds, a majority now use the app — though its reach is still a tiny 8 percent among those over 35. eMarketer estimates that 40.7 percent of U.S. smartphone users will use Instagram at least monthly this year, while 18.1 percent of internet users will use Pinterest.”

The post Top Platforms? Marketers Gravitate to Very Visual Social Sites appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

This extra-mile effort will provide Bigcommerce merchants with the opportunity to promote and sell products to more than 100 million monthly active Pinners through Pinterest’s iOS mobile and tablet apps.

Bigcommerce merchants will be among the first to have access to Buyable Pins, providing them the ability to offer a secure checkout experience optimized for mobile buyers. According to a recent study1, 87 percent of U.S. consumers have been influenced to purchase a product after seeing it on Pinterest, with more than 80 percent accessing the visual discovery tool via mobile devices.

“Pinterest has become an indispensable shopping resource for millions of consumers that use it to discover new ideas and find inspiration prior to making a purchase. Through Buyable Pins, our merchants will be able to extend this further and complete the sale while purchase intent is the highest,” said Brent Bellm, chief executive officer of Bigcommerce. “Enabling this capability for our clients, and providing them with access to new revenue opportunities, illustrates how Bigcommerce continues to lead the industry in helping merchants sell more across every channel and through every device.”

The post Bigcommerce Hypes Availability of Pinterest Buyable Pins appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

“Pinterest quickly attracted a substantial audience of committed users, and marketers are more interested in it than ever with the promise of social commerce on the horizon,” reports eMarketer. “But women are still the site’s main audience, with male internet users in the US avoiding the network en masse.”

The hoary details? Spring polling from the Pew Research Center revealed that 44 percent of female internet users in the U.S. are also users of Pinterest. Among male internet users? Make that share a measly 16 percent.

It should come as no surprise. While national stats show men are spending more time in the kitchen these days, Pinterest is still a place where more women congregate to talk cooking, crafts, and kid stuff.

“No other demographic characteristic had such a major effect on Pinterest usage,” adds eMarketer. “Though older adults were less likely than their millennial and Gen X counterparts to spend time on the image-oriented site, the differential was closer to a factor of two than to a factor of three. And usage rates were comparatively even depending on income or ethnicity/race.”

Pinterest probably shouldn’t mind. Women are big internet buyers, and the site’s recent addition of “Buyable Pins” could strike a chord with its largely female audience.

According to eMarketer, 47.1 million US internet users will use Pinterest monthly this year.

The post Social Media Marketers Take Note: Women Way More Likely to Use Pinterest appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Pinterest is quickly becoming a major hub of marketing for moms.

“Though Pinterest has a reputation for solely uniting women from the four corners of the globe, there’s much more to it,” say the digital marketing experts at Fusion 360 in Salt Lake City, Utah. “In reality, she’s an efficient platform from which all businesses can market their respective brands.”

The team at Fusion 360 recently put together this insightful infographic illustrating how and why Pinterest matters to moms when it comes to marketing in the modern age of social media.

The post What You Need to Know About Mommy Marketing Via Pinterest appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Maybe so, according to Digital Current’s Troy Ireland. Ireland recently discussed the power and potential of the Pinterest social media site, which turns five years old this month, in his second essay for Forbes Magazine, “Five Ways Pinterest is Beating Facebook.” The column has piqued much interest.

“Pinterest, launched in 2010, and with approximately 40 million monthly active users, is increasingly grabbing the attention of Web marketers and firms specializing in search engine optimization due to the site’s revenue-generating capabilities based on the intersection of consumer-generated content and its 17-month trial with ‘promoted pins,’ ads created by marketers in the style of Pinterest site content,” Digital Current explains.

“In the world of social media, news happens fast and maturity happens even faster. YouTube, the world’s most popular video uploading site, turned 10 in February and is already considered a ‘legacy social media’ platform in some circles. Based on this standard, Facebook, with its 1.3 billion members and now 11 years old, might be ready for retirement, too. That is unless the uber-popular networking and content-sharing site can learn a thing or two from its younger sister Pinterest, the crafting and image-pinning site.”

Being the older cousin doesn’t help (MySpace, anyone?) But that’s not the whole story.

“By this measure, more than any other, Pinterest is beating the pants off Facebook and it’s a phenomenon digital marketing companies are taking note of,” said Ireland. “From its visual content style and long content shelf life — pins are arguably available forever — among other pluses, the average consumer purchase order value is already significantly higher than search engine-based purchases from Google, shopping site Amazon, and Facebook.”

Whoa, really?

“Indeed, the average order price coming from Pinterest is $80 versus $40 from the above-mentioned Web platforms, a 100 percent increase,” the report notes. “Driving this effectiveness isn’t your traditional SEO clumsily inserted into online content in an effort to impact search engine algorithms and page rankings. This is a return to something more human and more genuine: quality content.”

OK, now we’re talking. It really is — eventually — about content. In other words, marketers need to evaluate the quality of their content as much as they evaluate what they’re peddling — and equally important, it needs to be more genuine.

“It’s amazing to think that in our excessively plugged-in, multi-screened, and Wi-Fi-enabled world, we forget that brands are human,” Ireland explained. “And marketing to consumers requires sparking that humanity in genuine ways that inspire purchases. Even Google, the epitome of the digital librarian, is ultimately human because the people behind the screens and the fingers tapping away at the keyboards are human too. It’s incumbent on digital marketers to ensure that smart SEO and compelling content are intricately joined.”

Content, narratives, stories. They matter.

“As Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, a search marketing website and consulting firm, was quoted as saying in (a recent) article, ‘There’s an odd correlation with brand narratives and successful brands,’” the report concluded.

The post Pinning Facebook to the Mat? Pinterest ‘Can Teach Facebook About Social Media Monetization,’ Says Analyst appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The latest embellishment? Multi-image ads, often referred to as “carousel” ads, which offer marketers a way to showcase either more than one product, or a variety of views of one piece of merchandise.

Pinterest is the latest company to get aboard the carousel. Facebook also recently announced its own multi-image ad offering.

“Although Pinterest is actively pitching the ad to agencies, it’s unclear when the ad will hit the market,” noted Digiday after it contacted ad honchos at Pinterest. “The new ad is just one aspect of Pinterest’s aggressive monetization push. It comes amid the company’s effort to raise $500 million in venture capital funding at a $11 billion valuation, according to The Wall Street Journal. Further, Pinterest faces skepticism about how well its existing ads perform.”

Not everyone is optimistic about the feature.

“Jeanne Bright, director of paid social at digital agency DigitasLBi, said that Facebook and Twitter have similar ad products — Facebook’s multiproduct ad and a Twitter feature that allows for multiple photos in one tweet,” according to Digiday. “But so far, the formats have been underutilized by marketers, and she suspects that will be the same for Pinterest.”

Reportedly, Pinterest is also designing a “Buy” button to let users to purchase items directly from its pages, rather than direct them to another e-commerce site.

Another change: Pinterest will ban affiliate links.

“Affiliate links allow individual account holders to be compensated for sending traffic to brands’ websites or e-commerce destinations, and some speculated Pinterest made the decision so as to prevent influential users from competing with its forthcoming e-commerce business,” according to Digiday.

Pinterest is definitely tightening all the pins and looking to make good on its claims of delivering real value to marketers and brand partners. From promoted pins to its new carousel plan, Pinterest wants to make sure that what goes around (ads) comes around (profit).

The post Jumping on the Carousel: First Facebook, Now Pinterest Plans New Multi-Image Ad appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.