Pinterest promoted pins vs Etsy Offsite Ads for small sellers

There are two very different ways to pay for your Etsy listings to appear on Pinterest. Etsy's Offsite Ads program advertises your listings for you (on Pinterest and elsewhere) and takes a fee when an ad leads to a sale. Pinterest promoted pins are ads you run yourself, on your own Pinterest ad account, paying Pinterest for the ad delivery. They suit different shops, and many shops end up with both.

How Etsy Offsite Ads work

Etsy places ads for your listings on sites and apps outside Etsy, Pinterest among them. You don't choose which listings, where they run or what they say. You pay nothing up front. Instead, Etsy charges a fee on orders it attributes to an ad. According to Etsy's help article on Offsite Ads:

• Shops that have never made $10,000 USD or more in any 365-day period pay a 15% fee on attributed orders, and can opt out.
• Shops that reach $10,000 pay a discounted 12% fee and must stay in the program for the lifetime of the shop.
• The fee never exceeds $100 USD per order.
• An order counts as attributed if the buyer clicked an ad and bought within 30 days.

The appeal is obvious: no risk of paying for ads that don't sell. The catch is that you can't steer it, and 12 to 15% of an order is a lot for a small handmade business whose margins are already thin after Etsy's other fees, materials and time. A buyer who clicked an ad once and came back three weeks later through a search might still count as attributed.

How Pinterest promoted pins work

A promoted pin is an ordinary pin with a budget behind it. You choose:

• which pins to promote (usually ones that already get saves and clicks without help),
• who sees them (interests, keywords, locations, and audiences you build),
• how much to spend per day and for how long.

Pinterest bills you for delivery, by clicks or impressions depending on the campaign's goal, whether or not anyone buys. The pin keeps linking straight to your Etsy listing, and anyone who saves it keeps it on their boards after the campaign ends.

One limit for Etsy-only sellers: Pinterest's catalog and shopping ads need a website you can claim, and you can't claim etsy.com. So for an Etsy shop, promoted pins means standard image pins that link to your listings, not product catalog ads. That's still the core Pinterest ad format, and the one most small shops start with.

Side by side

	Etsy Offsite Ads	Pinterest promoted pins
Who runs the ads	Etsy	You
You pay	A share of each attributed order (15%, or 12% once you reach $10k in 365 days; max $100 per order)	Pinterest, for clicks or impressions, at a budget you set
Cost if nothing sells	Nothing	Your ad spend
Choose listings and audience	No	Yes
Can opt out	Only under $10k in 365 days	Stop any time
Where ads appear	Pinterest and other sites Etsy chooses	Pinterest
What you learn	Attributed orders in Etsy	Impressions, saves, clicks per pin in Pinterest Analytics, plus visits in Etsy Stats if your links are tagged

Which makes sense for a small shop?

If you're under $10,000 a year, Offsite Ads are optional. Leaving them on is reasonable when your margins can absorb 15% on an occasional sale; turning them off is reasonable when they can't. Etsy's help article explains how to change the setting.

If you're over $10,000, Offsite Ads are on regardless, so the question becomes whether promoted pins add anything on top. They can: you choose your strongest pins and the audience, which Offsite Ads won't let you do.

Before spending anything on promoted pins, pin organically for a few weeks. Your Pinterest Analytics will show which pins earn saves and outbound clicks with no budget at all. Those are the ones worth promoting. Promoting a pin nobody clicks just buys more people not clicking it.

Start small and measure. A modest daily budget on three to five proven pins for two weeks tells you more than a big budget on everything. Compare the spend with the visits and orders you see in Etsy Stats (tagged links help here).

Watch your margin, not just sales. For either option, the useful question is "after the fee or the ad spend, did this order still make money?" A $40 order with a 15% Offsite Ads fee costs you $6. Promoted pins have no per-order fee, but if a campaign costs $60 and brings two $40 orders, that's $30 of ad spend per order.

Where organic pins fit

Both options work best on top of steady organic pinning: fresh pins from your best listings a few times a day, with keyword-led titles and links straight to the listing. Organic pins cost nothing but time, they find out which listings Pinterest users respond to, and they give promoted pins a head start. Our guide to getting Etsy sales from Pinterest covers the basics.

Pinforge handles the organic side automatically, and promoted-pin campaigns for the pins that perform best are rolling out on the Growth and Pro plans.