A Pinterest ads audit built for buyers who plan first.

What we check in a Pinterest ads audit

Pinterest visitors behave differently from Meta or TikTok traffic. They search, save and come back, often weeks later and on another device. That changes what an audit has to check: tracking that survives a long gap, a catalog that stays accurate, and a page that still makes sense to someone returning to a product they saved.

Updated October 2026 for Pinterest’s Conversions API guidance, Performance+ controls and the 2025 and 2026 ad format changes.

Can Pinterest see your sales?

Pinterest can only optimize toward the conversions it can measure, and the gap between a saved Pin and a purchase is where measurement breaks. Pinterest reports that brands running the Conversions API alongside the Pinterest tag measure an average of 24 percent more attributed conversions and a 9 percent better cost per action, based on its analysis of 5,638 advertisers in mid-2024 (Pinterest).

Setup quality decides whether you get that. Pinterest’s guidance is to send server events in real time, within an hour, to deduplicate them against the tag with a shared event ID, and to aim for a Good Event Quality Score (Pinterest Help). We check all three, and we check that purchase values arrive with the events, because value is what lets Pinterest bid for revenue instead of volume.

Enhanced match matters more on Pinterest than on most platforms. It sends a hashed email address with site events so Pinterest can match them when no Pinterest cookie is present, and Pinterest describes it as the only way to track checkouts that happen on a different device from the click (Pinterest Help). For a platform where people browse on a phone and buy on a laptop, an account without it under-counts its own results.

Is your catalog feeding the right ads?

For an ecommerce brand, the catalog decides which products Pinterest can advertise at all. Before uploading one, a merchant needs a business account, a claimed website, an installed Pinterest tag and a site that meets Pinterest’s merchant guidelines, including visible contact details, shipping and refund policies. The feed must include an ID, title, description, link, image link, price and availability, plus an item group ID for products with variants, and if any required field is missing or malformed the whole catalog fails to ingest (Pinterest Help).

We check the feed for errors and warnings, for price and stock that no longer match the site, for variants grouped correctly, and for titles and descriptions written the way people search. A hosted feed is fetched daily, so a stale export on your side shows up in ads within a day. Out-of-stock products in retargeting ads are a common and quiet waste: the ad works, the click is paid for, and the visitor lands on a product they cannot buy.

What is Performance+ doing with your budget?

Pinterest launched its Performance+ suite globally in October 2024 for consideration, conversion and catalog sales campaigns. It automates targeting, budget and bidding with about half the inputs of a standard campaign (Pinterest). Automation is only as good as the controls left in your hands, so this is where we look hardest.

Pinterest’s current help documentation limits Performance+ targeting to country, age and customer lists, and allows lifetime or average daily budgets with automatic bidding. A Sales campaign automatically creates a prospecting ad group on all products plus a Dynamic Retargeting ad group, and the advertiser cannot opt out of the retargeting group or set how spend splits between the two (Pinterest Help).

That split matters for a growing brand. Retargeting people who already viewed your products tends to report a strong ROAS, much of it from shoppers who were coming back anyway. We break results out by ad group, compare Pinterest-reported revenue with new-customer revenue in Shopify, and recommend where a standard campaign with your own controls should sit alongside Performance+.

Are you comparing like with like?

Attribution on Pinterest runs on a longer clock than most platforms. Pinterest’s help center states that when no conversion window is set, data is shown on a 30-day click and 1-day view basis (Pinterest Help). That longer click window suits a platform where people plan purchases, and it also means Pinterest takes credit for some orders that other channels touched later.

The windows also changed. Pinterest’s developer newsletter announced that engagement-window data would stop being returned after March 31, 2025 (Pinterest Developer Platform), and attribution settings that combined click, engagement and view windows were simplified. Any year-over-year comparison that crosses April 2025 compares two different definitions of a conversion. We note where the change breaks a trend line and reconcile the account with Shopify orders for the same days.

Then we look at search. Pinterest says people run more than 80 billion searches a month on the platform, most of them visual and more than half commercial (Pinterest). Pins with search-friendly titles and descriptions get found there; Pins written like social posts mostly do not. In September 2025 Pinterest put Top of Search ads into beta, citing a 29 percent higher average click-through rate in testing (Pinterest), and in September 2026 it announced Visual Search Ads for Performance+. We check which of these your account is eligible for and whether it is using them.

The part most Pinterest audits skip: the page after the click

Published Pinterest ads audits mostly stop at targeting and creative. A Pinner who clicks has often saved the product already and is comparing; they want the exact item from the Pin, the price, shipping and a reason to buy now. We check whether the landing page matches the Pin, how fast it loads on mobile, whether bundles or multi-packs give the planner a reason to order more, and whether someone returning on a laptop can find what they saved on their phone.

This is the half of the audit we fix ourselves. At the same spend and the same clicks, a 30 percent lift in landing page conversion rate cuts cost per acquisition by about 23 percent. Model it with the conversion rate calculator, or see our landing pages for paid traffic.

How the free audit works

The audit is free, commits you to nothing, and never changes your account.

Request the free audit ↓

Audits are led by Andrew Cowan, Parah Group’s founder, a former brand-side CMO with close to 15 years of buying social media ads. Findings come as specific, ranked changes, each marked as a tracking fix, a catalog fix, an account setting or a page fix. Pinterest reported 640 million monthly active users in the second quarter of 2026, 106 million of them in the US and Canada (Pinterest Q2 2026 results); whether that audience is worth more of your budget is one of the questions the call answers. If you want us to run the account afterwards, see our Pinterest ads agency page, and for budgeting, our guide to what Pinterest ads cost.

Signs your Pinterest ad account needs an audit

• Campaigns stopped spending, or spend stays near zero after Pins were approved.
• Pins get clicks and saves, and Shopify shows few or no orders from them.
• Pinterest reports more conversions than Shopify shows for the same period.
• The catalog shows errors or warnings that nobody has cleared.
• Performance+ runs the account and no one knows how much goes to retargeting.
• The same Pins have run for months with no new creative.
• Trends in your reports broke around April 2025 and were never explained.
• Every Pin sends people to the homepage.

Pinterest ads audit FAQs

Other audits we run