Pinterest plans to help advertisers track performance of Promoted Pins, serve ads based on pinned brands

Pinterest today shared its latest plans for Promoted Pins, the social network’s advertising and monetization scheme. The company explains it will be updating its Privacy Policy on October 19, 2014 to reflect the changes.

Pinterest is thus giving exactly a month’s notice before it starts serving “more relevant” Promoted Pins to its users and before it starts helping advertisers track how their ads are performing. A preview of the new policy is available here.

The company has also shared what it is aiming to achieve, in two points:

• 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.
• 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.

If that sounds very vague to you, despite its length, that’s because it is. In short, the company is slowly but surely building out an advertising platform, not much different than what other social networks like Facebook or Twitter have.

The company’s policy says it will be collecting log data, cookie data, and device information. If Pinterest users don’t like the idea of being tracked, they can manage their account settings, though it’s not clear to what extent this will be effective.

Back in May, Pinterest started experimenting with a small group of US advertisers eager to try Promoted Pins. The company still plans to keep the test in the US, though will likely expand its advertising system internationally once it’s ready.

See also – Pinterest is trying out a questions section for your pins and Pinterest adds a full-blown messaging service to help you send and chat about Pins

Image credit: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images