Pinterest couldn’t stop talking about performance in its Q1 earnings call. The word itself was mentioned at least 40 times. Variations of “click” came up over 20 times. “Conversion” appeared around 18 times. It’s no surprise—Pinterest reported Q1 revenue of $855 million, up 16% year-over-year. CEO Bill Ready attributed the growth to “the strong performance we are driving for advertisers.”
The company repeatedly emphasized its role as a full-funnel platform—not just upper-funnel awareness, but lower-funnel conversions, too. See this part of the call, for example, by Ready:
“Turning to our lower funnel ad offerings, over the last few quarters we’ve rolled out and expanded our performance solution set to drive advertiser value, while improving the efficiency of advertisers’ time and dollars. These efforts continue to yield benefits, with clicks to advertisers up significantly year-on-year, even as we lap the rollout of direct links. They also compound. As advertisers adopt multiple tools, they see more benefits accrue. As a result, some of the most sophisticated performance marketers in the world are spending 5% to 10% of their advertising budgets on Pinterest as they lean into our lower funnel tools and the improved performance in the form of increased clicks and conversions that we are delivering.”
In line with that performance focus, Pinterest also spotlighted its AI-powered Performance+ solution, aimed at driving more conversions for lower-funnel marketers.
Why This Matters:
The market responded well to Pinterest’s Q1 earnings, with shares popping immediately after the call, though they’ve since cooled off a bit:
Pinterest also unveiled it’s tapping Magnite as its SSP partner. In response to an analyst question about third-party demand partners, Ready explained that while Pinterest has worked closely with larger players like Amazon and Google, there’s now an opportunity to partner with “smaller players that can bring incremental demand to the platform.” Magnite, he said, will serve as their primary partner to “aggregate smaller sources of demand.” He also noted there are “no additional SSPs that we plan to scale with in the immediate future.”
It’s a solid win for Magnite, which seems to be on a bit of a hot streak.
Experts React:
Some notable tweets about the earnings report include:
Our Take:
Pinterest has long existed in a kind of purgatory between inspiration (awareness) and action (conversion), but its full-funnel, performance-focused message seems to be resonating, at least judging by the numbers. If Pinterest can keep proving out its lower-funnel value, it may finally shed the “just discovery” label for good (which will also be key in a down economy).
