Pinterest Introduces Promoted Pins to Select Audiences for Testing

When you next log into Pinterest, you could see promoted pins in your pin stream. Pinterest announced that it has officially begun including promoted pins on their site.

This new feature comes after Pinterest announced last month they would be experimenting with advertisements, using promoted pins as the company’s first real drive toward monetizing the site.

Promoted pins appear almost identical to regular pins on user boards. You might not even realize you’re seeing a promoted pin, unless you notice the small “Promoted Pin” notation at the bottom, which appears underneath the photo, description, and the company that pinned.

Promoted pins are quite seamless from a user perspective, with the only differentiation between paid and non-paid pins the small “Promoted” label.

Promoted pins will appear first in search results and category feeds, on both the web and in mobile apps.

They’re free for advertisers during the testing period, but not all Pinterest users will see the pins, as they are only shown to some members, TechCrunch reported:

The company is declining to disclose which advertisers are the first to test Promotional Pins, but would say that currently the advertisers are not paying for these placements. However, the pins in the wild starting today will look and act like they would if they had been paid ads, allowing Pinterest time to refine and further test the experience ahead of a wider launch.

Pinterest also said that while the pins are appearing online and on mobile, there’s a chance that you won’t see them for yourself because right now they’re only rolling out to a subset of Pinterest users at first.

There’s no word on how long the free promoted pins testing phase will last, nor when it will roll out to all users. However, I suspect they will want to have this in place for the upcoming holiday shopping season.

This article was originally published on http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2300211/pinterest-promoted-pins-debut.