A (0:00)

Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Simple Pin podcast. Today I'm going to be covering all the latest features that Pinterest has released from May to November in 2025 and they have done about two to three updates or new feature releases at least each month, all with the idea of helping to create a better experience for the Pinner content creators and advertisers. So what I'm going to do is go month by month through what we've seen released, who it benefits and how it can help you in your business. If you want to stay up to date on all the changes and updates happening on Pinterest, then the best place for you to get those in real time is our Pinterest Made simple newsletter that is released every single Wednesday. So go to simplepinmedia.com newsletter and you can get access to the that there it is, filled with all the latest changes, any articles we find from Google and so much more. Let's go all the way back to May, which seems kind of crazy. May is when we first saw generative AI labels. This would be where users would now see on their pin modified with AI. I believe it's in the bottom left hand corner and and that would tell you if it was created with AI or not. This was a way to then alert users who couldn't see the difference between AI or not AI, an opportunity to detect that it was AI. This has been a little bit of a bumpy rollout and part of it was to try to combat AI slop. It's also when we saw the Visit site button emerge as well. Actually I'm going to go back even one month. That was in April. So we saw saw visit site attached to pins. Instead of being able to click on a pin, you had to scroll down a little bit and click on visit site. And then we saw this generative AI labels. Now the jury's still out whether or not this is helpful or not. We've seen it pop up on some images that were created with AI and some images that weren't. We've also seen it pop up on actually human created images, which means there's a little bit of a flaw in the filter. I will say whenever you get new updates released on any platform, there's always going to be this learning time or a glitch time. So it's important to give patience during those windows so that we can see how it's going to perform and then see how they course correct. Jury's still out on this one. There's been an update since May that I think will correlate with this one. But obviously I'll get to that when we talk about it. Also in May, we saw a visual search update. Visual search is this really important piece on the platform where when you look at an image in the bottom right corner there is a little magnifying glass. If you click on it, then you can hover over any part of the image and it will actually show you a certain portion of that image. Say you're looking for a lamp on a table. It will all of a sudden zero in on that lamp and show you options for where you can purchase. So getting better at this visual search is really important to Pinterest because it's all visual based and this is fueled by AI in order to help users discover and refine their ideas through this multi module, multimodal modal. There you go, search. So that was May. June we saw AI powered auto collages. This is an advertiser tool, which means if you're running Pinterest ads, you might want to try some of this. This is where advertisers can turn their catalog into shoppable collages. Let's say you had four to five slides that were showing an image of a boot that maybe you have in four different colors. You could easily scroll through those in the Pinterest ad to be able to target customers in a more detailed way. So let's say the the customer was looking for a brown boot and your ad was surfaced, but now they can see that it comes in a camel color or a brown suede or a brown leather or black. It gives an opportunity for more purchasing. The next was a Trends tool update. We saw the kind of beginning of trends getting an overhaul. So so we saw shopping trends, trends in the spotlight and editors pick. If you've never used the Trends tool, let me say right now it's one of the most powerful tools we have with Pinterest marketing. Simply go to Trends Pinterest. Com and you will continue to see refinement happen over there. What I love about this update is we really had this broad here's the trends. But now we're going to be able to drill down into content and shopping where, which are two very different things on Pinterest. The Pinterest user might be going there to search for a product that they're going to use, maybe travel accessories or travel outfits. And maybe they even want to look for five tips for traveling to Portugal. One is content, one is products. This helps you as a marketer Figure out how to target them when they're searching for these two particular things and in those two silos. Right. Also in June we saw what was called Pinterest Brand Studio. This is a one stop shop suite of solutions for creative experts. They're designed to help advertisers make more inspiring, effective ads. Again, this is an ads tool. So if you are a company and you are really struggling with creative, you don't know how to make a really great pin. You're just in general feel like you're lacking. If you are working with a Pinterest rep, you can contact them and say, I would love to connect with the Pinterest brand Studio. Now I know nothing about how much this costs, what you need to spend per day, but I do know that our team at Simple Pen Media, we do this for our ad clients and we make amazing images for our ad clients. Just want to push, put that plug there. All right, let's go to September. September is where we see a new release for product sellers. These are called where to Buy links. Where to Buy links were released and these are for product sellers that can now drive customers directly to an available item. Now I don't understand how this is different from a basic product pin, but it says these are going to be available in the Pinterest Ads Manager. So I'm going to go with the fact that this is more of an advertising feature, a more quick, quick feature for you to click on this pin ad specifically and go to purchase pretty quickly. So where to buy thing links might allow you to see where you can buy at more locations. So that let's say you're a CPG brand which is called Consumer Packaged Good. You sell granola. I went to the Food show back in January of 25. It was really fascinating. It was called the Fancy Food Show. I'm thinking all of these retailers, let's say you sell a protein bar or you sell a protein granola and you're trying to get into Whole Foods, or we have a local grocery store here called New Seasons or you wanted to get into Kroger, you might not have your own standalone store or maybe you might, you could have both, but you would like to show the Pinterest user where they can buy this particular product. So take an example of granola. You are running ads and you have this amazing protein granola and you want to knock it out of the park in January and February because that's what everybody's thinking about, health. Then you would get access to this where to buy integration and all of a sudden it would show that it would be Whole Foods or Kroger or whatever. So people could go to the store and buy. That's a pret great thing because a lot of what the Pinterest user base is informed by is what they see on Pinterest, but then they might go to the store that is really difficult to track sometimes. So I see this as an opportunity with an in store purchase, but also an online purchase. If those retailers make it possible. The next in September, which I'm going to dub September Ad update because we really mostly saw updates that that came to ads. The other one is top of search ads, meaning the ads will appear directly within the top 10 search results and in related pins. This is in beta. This is probably so expensive. I'll just put that there right now. So what they're saying is that when people shop on Pinterest they often begin with a visual search. 45% of clicks occur in the top 10 search results with 96% of top searches being unbranded. These are the moments when users are most open to discovering and deciding on new products. So in order to help brands reach these high intent shoppers, they are previewing Pinterest top of search ads, which is a beta across all monetized markets. Again, they appear right up at the top. I've seen those in my app. If you've not, I would imagine right after this conversation you can go open your app and you will probably see them again. If you are not, if you have not dove, if you have not jumped into Pinterest ads, you can't jump into this anyway. But it is just good to know this little tidbit of information. I said it a second ago, but I think it's really important. 45% of clicks occur in the top 10 search results and also in related pins. That's actually really good to know and where you would probably get the bulk of your clicks. Let's move to October and then I'm going to get to November. You are listening to this in December. Obviously I had to record in November so there could have been updates in December, but we're just going to stop in November. October saw another layer to generative AI content controls. So remember back in May we saw the Jennai labels that sounded like I said Jedi but generative AI labels. Now we have in October generative AI content controls. Users can now choose how much AI content they want in their feed for topic categories. And right now I believe at the time of recording There are 10.