Pinterest Is Continuing To Roll Out More Ads - Here's What It Looks Like For Businesses

It looks like Pinterest is one step closer to rolling out its ads product to all businesses, as it continues to add new ones to the Promoted Pin beta test that it first launched in May.

Pinterest launched Promoted Pins with only a small group of advertisers, but has been gradually adding new businesses. The company just added a new wave of advertisers, based on an invitation to advertise that a source showed Business Insider.

Once Pinterest fully releases its ads API, the impact will likely be huge. Pinterest already controls 23% of referral traffic to e-commerce sites across the web. Injecting ads into Pinterest's retail traffic referral mix will make it one of the more important shopping sites on the web.

Here's what it looks like for businesses setting up Promoted Pins:

First, they pick a pin they want to promote and specify which search keywords they want to attach to it, as well as what geographies, genders, and languages they want to advertise to, and on what devices:

Pinterest uses a cost-per-click model, meaning advertisers only get charged when users click to visit their websites. Advertisers select how much they're willing to pay for each click - there's no minimum bid.

They also set up start and end dates for their campaigns:

Throughout the campaign, advertisers can check out detailed analytics that Pinterest provides, including which Pins and boards are driving the most clicks, repins, and impressions:

At this point, Pinterest isn't releasing a specific date when the program will be available to all businesses, but a spokesperson said that right now the company is focusing on making sure that Promoted Pins are a great experience for advertisers as well as regular pinners, figuring out how to best help partners manage campaigns and measure results, and enhacing its ability to target ads.

Generally, when a tech startup releases its ads API, that is the point it has finally become serious about generating revenue. The step after that is usually an IPO or an acquisition. Facebook's IPO came six months after its Ads API was launched. Twitter's IPO came nine months after the same event.

The continued rollout makes sense for Pinterest, because brands have already started swarming the site. In general, Pinterest is a product-and image-driven environment where brands are embraced, and it has already proved that it powers a huge amount of social commerce.