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Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Simple Pin Podcast. I'm your host, Kate All. If you are new to listening to the podcast, one of the things that we like to do is review Pinterest financial investor reports. They do these quarterly. Pinterest is a publicly traded company, which means they are required to file these in order to show to their stockholders how they're doing. What we take away from these, which actually might sound kind of boring, is not boring. We actually take away a lot of great things for our marketing. One of the number one things that I look for is the health of the company. Is it growing both financially and as well as numbers? Where is it growing? What are we seeing? So I like to review these and I like to have my team review these so that we can get an understanding of as to where Pinterest is headed and what their priorities are. So that's what we're going to cover today. But before we dive in, I did have slated for this episode a holiday advertising get ready for Q4 type of podcast. But actually when I went back and looked through the archives, I realized we have done this a lot, which stands to reason because the podcast was started in 2016. So nine years later, we've definitely covered quite a bit of Q4. The reason we cover Q4 is because that is when we see the majority of traffic, the majority of product sales. And we like to remind people in August, September to get ready. Sometimes we even like to remind them in July. But I'm going to link for you some episodes down below that we have recorded below. If you are watching on YouTube, some of these might only be in podcast or article form. So just know that you might have to do audio only, not just video. But we also have a free holiday advertising campaign checklist for those of you who run Pinterest ads. If you want to go through this checklist again, it's totally free, just click down below. It'll walk you through making sure you have the right campaigns set up. If you've heard any of my past episodes where I've talked about Pinterest ads and Q4, you will know that those who start early definitely get the greatest results and the greatest return on ad spend. So whether or not you're doing Pinterest marketing or not, make sure that you click down below to see what episodes we have as well as the checklist. Okay, let's dive into Q2 2025 financial investor results from Pinterest. A quote that we want to take away from this particular report is that Pinterest is more popular than ever as we're driving record highs in users, winning with the next generation and deepening engagement per user. And at the core of that is really what we've made. And at the core of that is that we've really made AI essential to everything we're doing. Love it or hate it, AI is here to say so they're gonna. In this report, there's about 5ish things I want to call out and things that have stood out to us about this one. It was another record quarter of users and revenue growth. We have been on this trajectory for a while. Historically, Pinterest saw a boom in 2020 and they doubled their users because everybody was at home. And then we saw a decrease over late 21 and 22 as people returned to work. And it was a little bit of a bummer because we thought, well, are we going to stay on this downward trajectory or is Pinterest going to jump back up? And what we've seen over the last several quarters is that Pinterest is doing actually quite well, which is pretty Great. Pinterest ended Q2 with 578 million global monthly users, which is up 11% year over year. Now, remember I said global. So this means in the US and Canada we now have 102 million monthly users. In Europe 146 million, and the rest of the world 329 million. So the rest of the world is growing at a clip of about 14% year over year. Europe is 7% year over year and the US is 5% year over year. Their revenue reached 998 million, which is up 70% year over year, showing that there's a strong advertising demand. The takeaway from this is that a growing audience means more chances to get your content in front of new people. Keep posting consistently on trending and seasonal topics to tap into this momentum. So this is kind of our top line metric. What we love to see is that Pinterest is actually growing and we love to see it for markets that are on the global stage as well a lot. I know Brazil is a pretty active market. They are the second, I believe, behind the US and Canada. So this is great. For those of you who listen to this podcast that are in, you're outside North America, the number two takeaway is the AI powered personalization is driving engagement. Pinterest proprietary AI models that are trained on both image and text have made the platform 30% better at identifying and recommending relevant content compared to other platforms models. These improvements have led to a deeper curation, more relevant recommendations and stronger Pinterest gets me moments from their users. It's very interesting. The platform attributes much of their user growth to their AI developments, which is interesting. I want to say this because I know I've had some past episodes here about AI. I've had conversations about where I stand with it, but I think it's important to understand that AI images and AI engineering are two like really very different things. I am not a proponent of the spammy tactic of whipping up an AI website. Whipping up AI images and then blasting it and driving as much as you can to Pinterest, which actually roots it undermines really great creators and product sellers. I am not for that, but I think this is an interesting AI engineering technique that will be really great in the long run. And what they say is that when you use clear keyword rich descriptions alongside strong visuals, Pinterest AI can accurately match your content with the right audience. I learned about this recently when I did a call with Pinterest about discoverability. If you did not know, I am part of an educator program that Pinterest is running right now. We get to meet with people on their team and ask them questions about how the product is built and developed and one of them was about discoverability. I am going to be covering that on a podcast coming up. I'm actually working in collaboration with Pinterest to create this podcast because there were just so many good takeaways that we want to cover it more in depth. But one of the things that was so important was that the the AI engineering had the ability to make sure that the pin that went to your website it matched and everybody was in the right place. Right? So they emphasizing this Pinterest just gets me moment actually further supports what we've been seeing more and more with the matching of the images or the matching of the content. So just know that it's trying to make sure that the user has a great user experience and doesn't feel like they're in the wrong place. That's really important. Third takeaway that we have is that Pinterest continues to be at the forefront of visual search. A little bit back to what I just said. Shaping how people discover and shop visual search now drives 2/3 of user interactions with many searches starting before users type a word. Because Pinterest proactively surfaces relevant ideas based on their tastes, the home feed activity is increasingly seen as part of the search journey, making visual search seamless as the process goes along. The tip for you is design pins with discovery in mind. Aim to instantly communicate your product, your idea in order to stay stop the scroll and spark engagement. We have been teaching on this, really telling our audience this for years because it's so important that your visuals connect with the user that quick like a snap because they can easily frame up is this for me or is this not for me? And if it's not for them, they'll scroll on by but if you really catch them they they'll stop and they'll want to learn more. Number four takeaway is that the platform is resonating with Gen Z now more than ever. This is interesting. We hear a lot of conversation around Gen Z and what they're going to use and the tools that they're going to use because they are the up and coming generation that is coming upon online and they're coming online at a really interesting time where parents are having this recheck with how much access they get to phones, how much access they get to social media. Gen Z Now makes over 50% of Pinterest monthly active users, they said. Adobe research shows that 47% of Gen Z surveyed have used Pinterest as a search engine. This generation of trendsetters and shoppers that grew up online feels a strong connection to the visual and intent driven search search model. A tip for you is experiment with video collages or other visual first formats that appeal to Gen Z's content habits. I want to say something here though for those of you that Gen Z is not your target demographic. If your target demographic is Gen X or Millennial or even Boomer, it's important that you create visuals that target those types of people. Don't feel like just because Pinterest is saying Gen z makes over 50 makes up over 50% of Pinterest active user that you suddenly need to reframe everything that you're doing and make it serve Gen Z. If your product does not fit for them, that is not a right fit. That's not the way that you want to go. So really think about what the age range is for the people that you are targeting on Pinterest. Use visuals that are designed to connect with them. The last takeaway we have is improved features and ad tools are better boosting monetization, enhanced board functionality, new formats like collages. I did a whole video on collages. You can go watch it. And AI driven recommendations are helping take users further down the shopping journey without any extra effort. Tools like Direct Links, Mobile Deep Links and Pinterest performance plus ads have boosted ad relevance. Early tests show a 5% lift in conversion rates for lower funnel campaigns. By the way, lower funnel means the purchase, the opt in. It's where they actually take action. For advertisers, product sellers and affiliates. Think of a full funnel by finding unique ways to inspire, to educate and simplify the buying process. I actually had the opportunity to teach. Not to teach, but just to share pieces of our experience in a webinar with Pinterest recently. And one of the things we talked about was that full funnel approach to ads at the top. Really thinking about beautiful pictures. The planner who is spending six to nine months thinking about their trip, their home decor, remodel, their future exercise plan, whatever it might be, be so that your ads can get them in this like, oh, this is awesome. Then the middle of the funnel is definitely. I want to learn more. How can you get people curious with your advertising? Right there in the middle. And then of course, the bottom is conversion, where they say yes to you, where they say yes to purchasing your product, or yes to opting in for your email list. If you are new to ads on Pinterest and you want to dive in, that is awesome. We have something for everybody who wants to learn about ads. In fact, I'll link below to a product that we have that'll get you started with ads. One of the things I want to say is that if you've been doing organic for a while and you are nervous about ads, don't be nervous. It's getting better and better. I'm getting more excited with the results that we're seeing for our clients. You never ever run it for just traffic. You always run it for a conversion. That means you're going to sell a product or you are going to get people to opt into your email list. So it's just a tip for you if you're thinking of diving into advertising on Pinterest. Okay, that is it. That is the Q2 2025 investor report from Pinterest. Great news all around. I love that it's growing. I love that it's actually still doing pretty well. And you know, there's times where we might be a little bit nervous about where our platform is going that we're marketing on. It growing, is it decreasing? What is it doing? But Pinterest is still really healthy and doing really well. Alrighty. Thanks so much for listening. If you have never left a review, would you take 30 seconds to do so? If you are an Apple podcast, this is really important because it allows people to see how this podcast can impact their Pinterest marketing. If you are on Spotify, you can just click the five star and that will let us know that you are finding great favor with this podcast. You're loving it after nine years of recording. We want to continue to deliver for you the latest, the greatest and the best when it comes to Pinterest marketing education. Thank you so much for taking that 30 seconds. I really appreciate it.