Dive Brief:

• Pinterest is rolling out three new ad targeting tools, including a visitor retargeting tool that enables marketers to reach consumers who have visited their site on Pinterest, according to a blog post from the company. 
• The other two tools are customer list targeting and lookalike targeting. The customer list targeting tool allows marketers to reach existing customers using emails or mobile ad IDs, while the lookalike targeting tool allows marketers to reach users with similar profiles to their existing customers. 
• Other social media platforms, such as Facebook, offer similar tools for marketers. The new targeting capabilities should help make Pinterest a more attractive marketing venue by enabling more precise and personalized campaigns. 

Dive Insight:

The new tools come at a time when Pinterest — and social media overall — are in a state of transformation. While Facebook remains at the top of the social media universe, the company is consolidating the advertising options it and Instagram offer marketers, with Instagram recently rolling out new Facebook-like advertising tools. Twitter is struggling with stagnant user growth and decreasing ad revenues, while the video-centric Snapchat platform is quickly rising in prominence with marketers, this week releasing a highly-anticipated ad partner program and application programming interface (API).

Meanwhile, Pinterest, which long promised to be the most commerce-centric social media platform of them all, has been challenged by poor performance in sales conversions compared to Facebook, Instagram and even Twitter. Pinterest has boasted over 100 million active monthly users since September last year, but has not released any new figures since then. It's unclear how many users Pinterest currently has, but adding the new targeting tools to its advertising platform should help attract ad dollars. 

The new targeting tools come as marketers are trying to increasingly personalize messaging to consumers. Personalization is a powerful tactic that can improve user engagement with marketing messages and advertisements. Visitor retargeting in particular should allow for a high level of personalization, since marketers already have data on visitors' behavior on their website. The platform recently also increased the number of keywords advertisers can use for promotions from 30 to 420, and added marketers’ first-party email subscriber data as a targeting option. 

These new tools allow marketers to use their own data for ad campaigns, instead of using only Pinterest data, which should help create more sophisticated campaigns, according to Ad Week. Pinterest has been opening up its platform to more — and more sophisticated — self-service advertising, much like rival social networks Facebook and Twitter have been doing for the last few years.