Pinterest Ads Not Spending (Reasons And Solutions)

With over 450 million reported monthly users in 2022 alone, Pinterest dominates the social media world by being the 14th most popular social media.

It’s a great platform to promote and market your products. But sometimes, Pinterest ads may not spend at all even though set up the campaign properly and allocate enough budget.

In this post, I’ll go over some of the possible reasons why your Pinterest ads are not spending the budget and provide tweaks to fix the mishaps to help you get the most out of your advertising spend.

Why Are My Ads Not Spending?


1 Low CTR

If your click-through rate (CTR) is low, you could be missing out on potential traffic.

If you want to ensure that your images are visible in the algorithm, then you must have a minimum click-through rate of .54% or higher. If not, you will get outbid by other advertisers with higher CTRs.

Solution 🛠️

The problem usually arises when the campaign is set to custom bidding. To fix this, switch the campaign to automatic bidding.

This allows Pinterest’s algorithm to learn from the data and optimize bids for you in a good way.

⚡ Also Read: Why are my Facebook ads active but not spending

2 Poor Ad Relevance


Relevance is an essential aspect of any advertising campaign. If your ads don’t pique the interest of potential users, they are unlikely to engage with them or even notice them.

In this case, you will see a lot of ad traffic initially and then a sharp drop off in results as users become bored and uninterested.

Solution 🛠️

Change the interests to highly relevant interests to the product being advertised. Use Pinterest’s targeting tool to identify other similar topics that are related to your business and gain more reach.

Additionally, you can use A/B testing to compare different versions of the same ad to see what resonates best with users.

The other reason for the poor ad relevance problem is irrelevant keywords.

  • Pinterest has the option to choose both interests and keywords for your ad targeting.
  • When you are deciding which keywords to use, make sure they accurately reflect the product or service that you offer.

🔥 Pro Tip: For this, you can use Pinterest keyword tools such as Keyword tool and KeySearch to find the most relevant and high-volume keywords for your ads.

Utilizing this approach will help you specifically target the most applicable audience for your ad, ensuring that it is received by only those who are likely to be interested.

3 Limited Targeting


If your targeting is not comprehensive, it can lead to a scarcity of potential customers viewing your ads, thereby reducing your reach and, ultimately, your ad spend.

⚡ Also Read: Pinterest ads vs Facebook ads

It is thus crucial to optimize your targeting options and refine them further, as this will support you in identifying the relevant audience for your products or services.

4 Inadequate Budget


Pinterest Ads is a competitive platform, and increasing your bids or budgets is necessary to keep up with the competition.

Ensure that your budget is aligned with your business goals and that you are spending enough to effectively reach your target audience.

5 Paused Ads


This is an obvious one, but if your ads are paused, then they won’t be running, and you won’t get any results. Sometimes, you may have inadvertently paused an ad and forgotten to turn it back on.

In this case, you will see the status of your ad is set as Paused, and you will need to reactivate it in order for your ad to run.

Reactivating the ad isn’t a daunting task. Just click the Off/On button located on the left side of your ad in the Ad Manager, and you are ready to go. Just remember, no ad running = no results!

Frequently Asked Questions


How Long Should I Run Pinterest Ads?

Experts recommend that you run Pinterest ads for at least a month. This is because Pinterest is a different platform that takes time to catch traction.

The more you stay in the game, the more likely you are to get noticed by your target market.

Why Is My Pinterest Ad Not Getting Impressions?

The main reason why your Pinterest ad is not getting any impressions is irrelevant targeting.

You need to add relevant interests and keywords to get a laser-targeted audience for your pins. If the ad isn’t relevant to the interests and keywords you submitted, then you won’t get enough/any impressions of your ad.

Final Words


If your Pinterest ads aren’t spending, consider yourself lucky because you still have time to fix the problem and haven’t wasted any money yet.

What sucks is when your ads are running and you don’t get any engagements and conversions.

If your visual ad isn’t captivating enough and your copy isn’t persuasive, you will face the real problem of losing your money for nothing.

So, make sure you are confident in the quality of your ads before allowing them to run. Your wallet will thank you!

⚡ Also Read: Does Pinterest show you who viewed your profile?

About Author

Lito James is the founder of Massivepeak.com. He is an entrepreneur and marketing specialist who helps businesses to get more leads, subscribers, and customers. Massive Peak has been featured on G2, Cloudways, Sujanpatel, GetResponse, Renderforest, and many more. Follow on LinkedIn | Twitter

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