Good news for shopaholics! Pinterest just made it even easier to discover items you love through the platform.

Last week, Pinterest announced that it has fully automated “Shop the Look,” the popular feature that tags items within an image and leads users to a checkout page to purchase them.

The automated Shop the Look feature is currently only available on iOS and within the home decor vertical, but is anticipated to expand to Android and additional verticals in the near future.

While this is excellent news for avid Pinners, what value do features like these have for advertisers? Let’s take a look.

 

What’s so Big About the Automation?

 

Before Pinterest automated Shop the Look, the feature was primarily managed by real people behind the scenes. This means that real live experts would scan images for the most shoppable pieces and manually tag those products so that users could find purchase them.

The big issue with this? Scalability.

People can only tag so many products before there’s too much content to keep up with manually. That’s why Pinterest integrated computer vision to automate the process and match products to full scenes automatically.

 

Has Shop the Look Automation Improved the Mobile Shopping Experience?

 

While the feature is still new (and still limited to one vertical on one operating system), Pinterest has reported that it’s already seeing great success, including:

● The new automated feature has increased Pinterest’s Shop the Look Pin coverage by 22.5X across billions of Pins and products.

● The automation has also increased engagement by 7%.

 

Why Does It Matter to Advertisers?

 

With 250 million monthly active users, 175 billion Pins, and 2 million users who save shopping Pins to a board daily, Pinterest has huge potential for marketers in the eCommerce sector and beyond. With the latest Shop the Look automation, advertisers can now expect even more perks from hosting their content on the platform.

For starters, the new automated feature will:

● Improve Discoverability
Pinterest prides itself on being a platform where users can go to discover, shop, and get inspired by recipes, style, decor, and much more. An automated Shop the Look feature makes discovering products within these images all the more seamless.

● Level the Playing Field
This automation provides a great way for small businesses to compete with big name brands on the platform, since product discovery won’t be determined by the size of your budget. Moreover, Pinterest says 97% of its 1,000 most popular searches are non-branded, meaning that Pinners search by general phrases (like “bookshelves”) instead of by brand name directly.

● Expand Reach
Pinterest reportedly delivers 600 million visual searches every month. Combining this with an automated tool to tag more items will inevitably make more products more widely available to an even wider audience.

 

To assess your Shop the Look impact, you can measure engagement at every step of the funnel; from how often your tagged Pins are seen, saved, added to a board, and clicked on, to when they ultimately drive a purchase.

As always, you can rely on Pinterest Analytics as your North Star or join forces with a third-party partner to simplify your insights along the way.