Performance+ is Pinterest's automated campaign type, launched in October 2024. By the first quarter of 2026 about 30 percent of Pinterest's lower-funnel revenue ran through it, and Pinterest said advertisers using it grew their lower-funnel spend about twice as fast as those who did not. In 2026 Pinterest kept adding to it.
What it automates
- Objectives: consideration, leads and sales.
- Bidding: Performance+ bidding sets the bids.
- Targeting: reduced to country, age and customer lists. There is no interest, keyword or language targeting.
- Budgets: lifetime or average daily.
- Ad groups: created automatically, with remarketing and prospecting groups for sales campaigns.
- Creative: generated backgrounds, automatic resizing, and product Pins turned into collections and shopping ads.
What Pinterest recommends
- Install the Conversions API or the Pinterest tag.
- Set a budget of about five times the target cost per acquisition.
- Aim for more than 50 conversions a week in leads and sales campaigns.
- Put ten ads in each ad group.
- Allow about two weeks for learning.
New in 2026
- New customer acquisition, for Performance+ only, which Pinterest says raises new-customer conversions by 64 percent on average, and one-click Performance+ shopping campaigns for Shopify stores.
- Dynamic creative selection, launched in June and available globally, which picks the best creative for each impression. Pinterest says it raised clicks by 7.5 percent against the previous model.
- Smart Assembly, in early testing, builds ads from uploaded images for advertisers without a catalogue.
- Priority Products, self-serve A/B testing and an app promotion objective, in beta for qualified advertisers, all announced in September.
- A campaign optimisation score in Ads Manager that grades setup, creative mix and signal strength.
- AI bidding linked to an advertiser's own measurement, in a pilot that expanded in the third quarter.
AI tools around the campaigns
- Business Assistant, an AI assistant in Ads Manager and the mobile app that shows breakout trends and suggests Pins to promote. It is in closed beta in the US.
- A Pinterest MCP server that gives outside AI tools access to campaign data, analytics and keyword insights, in testing with agencies including Dentsu, Havas, PMG and Omnicom's Jump450.
- Canvas, Pinterest's own image model, behind generated backgrounds. Pinterest's management says it costs an order of magnitude less to run than third-party models.
Results Pinterest cites
Mejuri saw 46 percent higher return on ad spend and 62 percent more conversions in a four-week test; small advertisers using return-on-spend bidding saw 28 percent higher return in testing; and catalogue sales campaigns on Performance+ had 20 percent lower cost per acquisition in 2025. These are Pinterest's own figures, so treat them as reasons to test.
Measurement and TV
- The Conversions API sends events from the server for web, app and offline sales, with integrations for Shopify and Google Tag Manager. Pinterest says brands using it measure 28 percent more attributed conversions.
- Measurement partners include Northbeam, Triple Whale, AppsFlyer and Shopify.
- Pinterest bought tvScientific, a connected TV advertising company, for 465.1 million dollars in February 2026. It starts in the US and is due to be folded into Performance+ by 2027.
Budgets
Pinterest does not publish a minimum budget; the widely repeated five dollars a day is not Pinterest's figure. Budgets can be lifetime, flexible daily or fixed daily, and daily spend can reach 125 percent of the daily budget.
For Gulf accounts
- Performance+ was among the formats offered in the region in 2024. Confirm current availability through DMS, Pinterest's regional partner.
- Targeting is reduced to country, age and customer lists, so for bilingual audiences the language of the creative does much of the targeting.
- Install the Conversions API before launch, since automation needs conversions to learn from.
- Give each ad group variety: ten distinct ads rather than versions of one.
The UTM builder on this site tags Pinterest links consistently, so the client's own analytics can check what Pinterest reports.
