Pinterest is a visual search tool, not a social feed, so users arrive looking for ideas they’re planning to act on rather than just for entertainment.
Pinterest CPC sits at roughly half of Meta’s on like-for-like benchmarks, for certain businesses they will get huge value from the cheaper clicks.
This piece tells you whether you’re one of them, where the cost gap comes from, and what a starter campaign should look like if you are.
Pinterest is built for people looking, not scrolling
Pinterest operates as a visual search engine, people open the app to look for ideas. That might be a kitchen renovation, a wedding outfit, a holiday plan or a Sunday lunch recipe. The platform’s job is to help them find those ideas and save them for later. Pinterest hit 600 million monthly active users globally in Q3 2025, up 12% year-on-year. Of those, 88% say they’ve bought something they discovered on the platform.
Women make up roughly 72% of the AU user base and Gen Z is the fastest-growing cohort here. They save around 2.5 times more Pins and create 66% more boards than older generations. Most of what they’re saving is purchase research: weddings, renovations, wardrobes, holidays.
Pinterest Predicts 2026, released in December 2025, forecasts what users will be searching for and saving against this year. It’s built from billions of searches on the platform. Most AU agencies don’t use it, which is why their advice on the channel reads like a generic tutorial.
It tells you what customers are already mood-boarding. You can build inventory, content and ads against demand that’s already forming.
What that means for cost
Pinterest’s economics work differently because the user is already searching when they see your ad. WebFX’s 2026 Pinterest benchmarks put average Pinterest CPC at $0.50 to $1.50. Meta sits at $1.06 to $1.72 across comparable benchmarks. On a like-for-like read, Pinterest CPC is roughly half of Meta’s. CPMs follow a similar pattern where WebFX has Pinterest CPMs at $6 to $9 while Meta CPMs sit closer to $14 across most industries.
Fewer advertisers have moved to the platform, so it’s less saturated than Meta’s. But mainly the users who are there have come to search for ideas, which means they’re already in a buying mindset when ads appear. The categories that perform are narrower than on Meta, keeping competition for the right keywords low. On Pinterest, you can cast a very small and specific net, businesses in the right categories get cheaper clicks from warmer audiences.
The advantage may not hold forever, but it’s certainly worthwhile in 2026. As more advertisers move budget across, the auction will tighten. The Pinterest CPC of 2026 won’t be the Pinterest CPC of 2028. The structural reason Pinterest is cheaper, that users arrive on the platform already searching for something, won’t change.
For businesses in the discovery categories, the right move is to take a slice of Meta spend and run a real Pinterest test for a quarter. The test needs enough budget for Performance+ campaigns to learn from. Token spends just confirm hypotheses that were never properly tested.
Who Pinterest Australia fits
Pinterest Australia works for businesses where customers plan their purchase by browsing visual references. The shorter the planning window and the less visual the decision, the worse the fit. Here’s where we’d put each major AU business type today.
| Business type | Pinterest fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Fashion and apparel | Yes | Customers plan outfits, build wardrobes and save before they shop |
| Interiors and homewares | Yes | Renovation and styling are research-led behaviours that map to Pins |
| Beauty and skincare | Yes | Routines and looks are visual references customers come back to |
| Food, beverage and recipes | Yes | Weekly meal planning and entertaining sit at the centre of the platform |
| Weddings | Yes | The single highest-intent planning use case on Pinterest |
| Visual e-commerce (gifts, lifestyle, accessories) | Yes | Discovery-led shopping that benefits from product feed and Performance+ |
| Home services and renovations | Worth testing | Top-of-funnel for planners; conversion path is longer than retail |
| Travel and accommodation | Worth testing | Itinerary research is strong, but booking happens elsewhere |
| Real estate (developers, builders) | Worth testing | Strong for inspiration phase; weaker for transactional searches |
| B2B services | Unlikely | Buyers aren’t planning B2B purchases on a discovery platform |
| Local services (trades, legal) | Unlikely | Demand is immediate and search-led; inspiration doesn’t drive the decision |
| Finance and professional services | Unlikely | Wrong audience, wrong context, wrong intent |
A few things to call out. Fashion, interiors and beauty are the strongest fits. Customers in these categories save before they buy, often weeks or months in advance. Weddings are the highest-intent category on the platform globally. Most major bridal and venue brands run on it. Food and beverage works because Pinterest is where people plan what they’re cooking this Saturday.
If you’re in one of the yes categories, our Pinterest Ads management is worthwhile. The platform rewards consistent feed quality and creative refresh more than bid management. That’s a different specialist skill set to running Meta well.
The starter playbook for Pinterest
If your business is in the yes column, two things separate the campaigns that work from the ones that burn money. Get your product feed in order, and put aspirational, pinnable creative in front of it.
Both matter more on Pinterest than on Meta, because the platform rewards what users want to save.
Get your product feed in order
Pinterest is a feed-driven platform for e-commerce. Titles, descriptions, attributes and image quality all feed the algorithm that decides what to show. Messy feeds get messy results, regardless of how much you spend on top of them. If your product feed is held together with masking tape, fix the feed before you launch any campaign. Distl’s e-commerce builds focus on feed quality from the start. That’s a useful starting point if you’re rebuilding the store anyway.
Focus on aspirational, pinnable content
Pinterest rewards images people save. The bar for creative is higher than on Meta because users come to the platform to collect references they’ll come back to. Stock photography doesn’t earn saves, and flat white-background product shots don’t either. What works is product shown in context. An outfit styled on a real person at a wedding venue will outperform a studio mannequin shot. The same goes for a room photographed with the rug placed and lit, against the rug on a white background.
Pinning is a planning behaviour, more like a bookmark than a like. When a user saves a Pin, they’re storing it for a decision they intend to make later. Creative that earns saves shows the product in the world the buyer wants for themselves. That’s why aspiration matters more than catalogue-style accuracy on this platform.
If you want a Pinterest read on your specific business, or help building a Pinterest Ads program that suits the platform’s strengths, let’s have a chat.
Becca Humphrey
Paid Media Service Lead
