How Visual Discovery Delivers ROAS

Warm cinnamon buns slathered in sweet icing, creamy vodka sauce over pasta, a fresh scoop of pecan praline ice cream. The words alone may catch attention, but visual content tingles taste buds, fills the air with the memory of aroma and motivates consumers to add to their grocery carts. It is this power of visual discovery that I explored with my Pinterest colleagues at Advertising Week New York. 

The sheer power of visual discovery was captured in a consumer survey Circana commissioned: almost half (49%) of Americans are influenced by images of products when they’re making a purchase decision and almost one-third (30%) have purchased a product after seeing it advertised on Pinterest. So how can you harness the power of visual search to increase the return on advertising spend (ROAS) for your brand? 

To answer this question, my team worked with Pinterest to conduct a new multi-year, Circana Meta-Study. Custom Meta-Studies combine the results of ad effectiveness studies to provide deep insights for how brand campaigns perform on a publisher’s platform. One of the applications is to give publishers a set of best practices to share with brands to help them deliver even more effective advertising. The findings uncovered in this Circana Meta-Study provided crucial best practices for how advertisers can maximize ROAS on the Pinterest platform. 

In our presentation, we shared an ice cream brand example. In a Häagen-Dazs campaign for their line of frozen treats, they used a combination of targeting tactics and featured a nice mix of ad formats that helped the brand scoop up a 3% sales lift across the Häagen-Dazs portfolio, as measured by Circana Sales Effect. The Meta-Study found both of these strategies to be best practices on the Pinterest platform. Way to go, Häagen-Dazs! 

A big THANK YOU to James Yoon and Andrew Knoop for their collaboration. It was fun—here’s to hoping next time we can do it in person! 

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