Pinterest continued the slow process of pinning down its advertising plans today by announcing updates to its privacy policy, effective Oct. 19.
Yes, one month from today. “Our plan now,” wrote Pinterest’s Julie Park in a blog post, “is to make Promoted Pins more relevant to Pinners, and help advertisers understand how their ads impact their business. On October 19, 2014, we’ll make a few updates to our Privacy Policy to explain those plans.”
The popular social bookmarking has been testing Promoted Pins since last October, but has been accelerating its work this summer. In June, it launched a self-service ad dashboard for a larger group of testers; in August it released a robust analytics product for all business users.
Now, while stressing that Promoted Pins are still only a test, the company appears to be laying the foundation for an eventual full rollout. From today’s blog post:
1. We want to help advertisers better understand how their Promoted Pins are doing. For example, an advertiser may want to know how often their ads are showing on Pinterest or how many people bought a product after clicking on a Promoted Pin. In the future, we’ll report that info to them. 2. We also want the Promoted Pins you see to be relevant to you and come from brands you’ve shown interest in. We hope to incorporate information advertisers share with us so that we can show you Promoted Pins that don’t feel random or distracting.
That’s all pretty vague, as Emil Protalinski of The Next Web pointed out, but it sounds like standard language for any social network with an advertising plan. They all want to make sure the ads they serve are relevant and don’t make users less likely to stick around the network.
As a shopping discovery tool for many of its users, Pinterest is seen as fertile ground for marketers, who are already making use of the network’s organic tools.
Pinterest posted a preview of the policy, which you can read here. The main change as far as I could tell is the addition of section on how advertisers can use customer data:
Sometimes our partners may let us collect information when you use their services, or may share with us the information they collect. For example: Some websites or apps use Pinterest features like our “Pin it” button. If so, we may collect log information (described above) from those sites or apps. Online advertisers typically share information with the websites or apps where they run ads to measure and/or improve those ads. We also receive this information, which may include information like whether clicks on ads led to purchases or a list of criteria to use in targeting ads. To learn more about the types of information advertisers may share with us, please see our Help Center.
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