Pinterest Ads Costs For Fashion Brands & Online Fashion Businesses

Today I am going to focus on the CPC option within Pinterest Ads for the fashion segment. Fashion is a huge market that includes clothing for men and women, sunglasses, accessories, handbags and jewellery. If you are in the fashion business or you are doing marketing work for one, you are probably sick and tired of thinking that you have to rely only on Instagram. I know the feeling. This feature is going to delve into how much it costs do run a fashion Pinterest ads campaign. I think my breakdown will work for you if you are a small business owner, an entrepreneur, a founder of a startup or an agency professional. I am not starting from the basics but I want to jump into the actual details of running an ad campaign on Pinterest from a budget perspective. If you need introductory help, don’t hesitate to contact me and I would be happy to help you.

Even if you aren’t involved in a fashion or beauty related business, it should help you understand Pinterest advertising costs. Pinterest adverts are expensive and that is a fact – however if you are looking to find customers who have commercial intent and you want other options besides AdWords, Pinterest could be an avenue that you can pursue.

How much should I spend on Pinterest?

It depends on your objectives. Pinterest ads work for generating sales and building awareness for your business but you shouldn’t rely on them as your sole source of paid traffic for your online fashion business.

If you are beginner, your Pinterest budget should be divided into what I call your preliminary budget and the ‘real’ one. For example, if you have never done a Pinterest ad campaign before, start testing with $10-$50 per ad campaign. Why? The average CPC for Pinterest ads won’t be clear unless you spend more than $50 cumulatively because of how complex the system is.

For B2C brands, up to $500 for an initial test is enough to get started and to understand trends across several ad sets with different headlines etc. Ideally if you can, you should try and spend $500 on your first Pinterest campaign that should be working across 7-10 days. When Pinterest asks you what type of ad campaign you want to create, you should choose the ‘Traffic’ option.

The average CPC for Pinterest Ads depends on the keywords and verticals that you are targeting. For example, the following keywords (summer fashion, fashion lookbook and fashion inspiration) can reach between 6M-8.8M on Pinterest:

Example of Pinterest Keywords

The CPC for these 3 keywords is $1.78 USD

Cost of fashion keyword CPC

If you were going to launch a fashion line that is targeting women and you plan to offer summer fashion products such as dresses, skirts and swimwear, these word be keywords that you should consider including in your Pinterest ad campaign. Pinterest suggests using up to 25 keywords to reach as many people as possible but sometimes it can work to be targeted because the searches for summer fashion for example yielded 5M+ Pinterest searches per month.

Advertising on Pinterest requires you to think about what you are selling. Fashion is a mammoth market with plenty of different types of niches, verticals and segments that can be targeted and the CPCs will reflect that.

$1.78 CPC is pricey but you can stand to generate income and revenue off Pinterest customers if you know how to retarget them and if they purchase, with their permission, you can put them on your email list to help increase incremental email revenue.

How can I get the best value for money with Pinterest ads?

Using this $1.78 CPC for fashion as an example, your job as a marketer is to keep the Pinterest customer engaged. There are three options that await you if you are promoting on Pinterest:

• The cold traffic Pinterest customers buys off the bat (Rare but it happens)
• The visitor browses but doesn’t purchase (Likely)
• The visitor browses, doesn’t buy but felt inspired by your product and buys it on a marketplace website instead (Likely and Irritating to say the least)

The value in advertising on Pinterest comes from what you do with the traffic. If people are clicking on your ads, you are being charged so you need to retarget traffic and use exit-intent pop-ups on your website to get them to sign up for your newsletter. This is easily done for online fashion businesses because your business will exist off new arrivals coming in your store so you will have content to share.

How do I avoid overspending on Pinterest Ads?

Keep tabs on your Pinterest spending by setting daily spend limits within the Ads manager and remember the date that you chose to switch off ads. Pinterest advertising costs are expensive if you don’t know what you are doing. To get a grip on them, you should use this framework as a foundation to create a Pinterest ads budget that makes sense for you. Some brands can spend $10K per month on Pinterest ads while others can only afford to spend $500.

Get as lean as possible and be as specific as possible when it comes to targeting people for your online fashion business. If you sell denim, use Pinterest to target women who like searching for denim dungarees in the UK. If you sell women’s jewellery, search for women who like fashion and costume jewellery in the US. As you can see from these examples, it is all about being as specific as possible in order to get the best ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) for your online fashion business.

For Pinterest, I would advise clients to aim for x3 ROAS in order for it to be worth your money. It doesn’t mean that you will spend exactly $1.78 CPC for each click; you could spend more or you could spend less. Always look for a x3 CPC return and use a Google Analytics tracking code for all of your Pinterest traffic so that you can track conversions accurately.

How are you going to make Pinterest ads work for your business? Feel free to let me know and ask me any questions about Pinterest CPC costs.