You can add third-party tracking to your ads to track your Pinterest activity via other platforms. For example, you can track clicks with third-party URLs, like Google DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM) or Kenshoo, to verify campaign delivery and gather reporting data.
Add third-party tracking to your ads
We support impression tracking and two types of click tracking: cross-domain redirect click-tracking and parallel click-tracking.
Cross-domain (X-domain) 3rd party click-tracking
There are several 3rd party providers of click tracking: Google[Doubleclick], Adobe[DTM], Facebook, Flashtalking, etc. These URLs begin with the 3rd party’s domain and redirect to your domain and landing page. The user’s browser will momentarily load a 3rd party tracking domain before loading your final landing page. Common issues are broken links and percent-encoding issues.
These URLs are placed in the “Promoted Pin destination URL” field in Ads Manager or column in bulk editor.
Parallel click-tracking
With parallel click-tracking, Pinterest pings a click-tracking URL in parallel with the promoted Pin's destination URL. This decreases the time between when a user clicks on Pinterest and when the advertiser's landing page loads. Parallel click tracking URLs aren’t loaded by the user’s browser and don't redirect to the final landing page, they're only pinged to track events.
Parallel click-tracking URLs are placed in the “Third party tracking URLs” column in bulk editor along with impression tracking URLs.
Impression Tracking
With impression tracking, you can verify the serving of your ads on Pinterest. We support these impression tracking partners:
- Doubleclick (DCM)
- Atlas
- Sizmek
- Flashtalking
- Trueffect
You can add impression tracking links to your campaigns via the ‘Tracking URLs’ field in ad creation. Select “impressions” and paste the URL from your third party in the text box.
To add impression URLs via bulk editor, use the ‘Promoted Pin Third Party Tracking Urls’ column.
Add dynamic tracking parameters
You can add dynamic tracking parameters to your URLs directly or in addition to your third-party tracking URLs. We also support dynamic tracking parameters, which allow advertisers to collect additional information from Pinterest on a click for campaign tracking purposes. They are placeholder text that start and end in curly brackets and can be added to URLs.
Supported dynamic parameters for promoted pin destination URLs:
- {campaignid}
- {campaign_name}, {campaignname}
- {adgroupid}
- {adgroup_name}, {adgroupname}
- {keyword}
- {keyword_id}
- {creative_id} - the pin promotion id
- {adid} - the pin promotion id
- {device} - ‘t’, ‘c’, or ‘m’ for tablet, computer or mobile
Supported dynamic parameters for (server-side) parallel click tracking and impression tracking:
- {campaignid}, {campaign_id}
- {campaign_name}, {campaignname}
- {adgroupid}, {ad_group_id}
- {adgroupname}, {ad_group_name}
- {adid}, {ad_id}, {creativeid}, {creative_id} - the pin promotion id
- {itemid}, {iterm_id} - the pin promotion’s item id
- {insertionid}, {insertion_id} - the pin promotion’s insertion id
- {creative_name} - the pin promotion name
- {device} - ‘t’, ‘c’, or ‘m’ for tablet, computer or mobile
- {device_platform} - mobile device type, ‘iOS’, ‘Android’ or empty string
- {publisher} - hardcoded it as ‘Pinterest’
- {timestamp}, {click_timestamp},
For example, a landing URL provided by a retailer may look like this: retailer.com/mens-clothing/?cid={campaignid}. If the Pinterest campaign id is 1234, we will serve this URL as retailer.com/mens-clothing/?cid=1234.
Specific dynamic parameters for Search Campaigns:
- {keyword} - the percent-encoded keyword string (e.g. running%20shoes) that matched the promoted pin
- {keyword_id} - the keyword ID that matched the promoted pin
Dynamic parameters we don’t support will be ignored. For example, if the retailer provides the URL retailer.com/mens-clothing/?cid={CAMPAIGN-ID}, we will ignore the tracking parameter and just serve the URL as retailer.com/mens-clothing/?cid={CAMPAIGN-ID}.
Specific dynamic parameters for Shopping Campaigns:
- {product_partition_id} - product group ID
- {product_id} - product ID
- {lpurl} - Used only in the campaign structure it will be replaced by the URL from either “adwords_redirect” or “link” field in the feed. * {lpurl} will automatically be encoded as well as encode the following characters: ?, =, ", #, \t, ', and [space] when placed after or in a tracking URL. ** When placed before any tracking {lpurl} will not be encoded.
Example:
- link field URL: http://hello.world.com/shoes-sneakers
- Tracking URL: https://ad.tracker.com
- {lpurl}?http://ad.tracker.com becomes http://hello.world.com/shoes-sneakers?https://ad.tracker.com
- https://ad.tracker.com?{lpurl} becomes https://ad.tracker.com?http%3A%2F%2Fwww.helloworld.com%2Fshoes-sneakers
- {unescapedlpurl} - Does not encode the the link URL or any additional characters after the URL regardless of placement
Please note that the {keyword} parameter isn't supported for tracking links on any Promoted Shopping Pins.