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Pinterest event forwarding extension

Last update: Fri Sep 29 2023 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

CREATED FOR:

  • Developer

Pinterest is a visual discovery engine for finding ideas such as recipes, home decor, style inspiration, and more. There are billions of pins on Pinterest, which can also be shared with others on Pinterest. You can collate the user interaction events and leverage Pinterest Analytics to understand user behavior and run targeted advertisements.

The Pinterest Conversions API event forwarding extension allows you to leverage data captured in the Adobe Experience Platform Edge Network and send it to Pinterest. This document covers the use cases of the extension, how to install it, and how to integrate its capabilities into your event forwarding rules.

Conversions access tokens are the authentication method used by Pinterest when interacting with the Pinterest API.

Use cases

This extension should be used if you want to use data from the Edge Network in Pinterest to take advantage of its customer analytics capabilities.

For example, consider a marketing team in an organization. The team captures user interaction event data from their website and loads it into Pinterest using this event forwarding extension.

The marketing and analytics teams can then leverage Pinterest Analytics capabilities to understand key user interactions and behavior, allowing you to better understand users and target them for targeted ad campaigns.

For more information on use cases specific to Pinterest, refer to the Pinterest use cases documentation.

Pinterest prerequisites prerequisites

You must have a valid Pinterest business account in order to use this extension. Go to the Pinterest registration page to register and create an account if you do not have one already.

You will also need a Pinterest developer account, which will need to be associated with your Pinterest business account. To associate your developer account with your business account, refer to the Pinterest developer account.

Gather required configuration details configuration-details

In order to connect the Experience Platform to Pinterest, the following inputs are required:

Credential
Description
Example
Ads Account Id
Your Pinterest Ads Account Id. Refer to the Pinterest documentation for guidance.
123456789012
Conversion Access Token
Your Pinterest Conversion Access Token. Refer to the Pinterest Conversions API document for guidance.
You will only be required to do this once as this token does not expire.

Install and configure the Pinterest extension install

To install the extension, create an event forwarding property or choose an existing property to edit instead.

In the left navigation, select Extensions. Select Install on the card for the Pinterest extension in the Catalog tab.

Catalog displaying the Pinterest extension with Install highlighted.

Configure the Pinterest extension

IMPORTANT
Depending on your implementation needs, you may need to create a schema, data elements, and a dataset before configuring the extension. Please review all the configuration steps before starting in order to determine which entities you need to set up for your use case.

In the left navigation, select Extensions. Select Configure on the card for the Pinterest extension in the Installed** tab.

Pinterest extension shown in the Install tab with Configure highlighted.

On the next screen, input the Ads Account Id and Conversion Access Token that you previously gathered in the configuration details section. When you’re finished, select Save.

The Pinterest Configure screen highlighting the Ads Account Id and Conversion Access Token input fields.

Configure an event forwarding rule config-rule

Once all your data elements are set up, you can start creating event forwarding rules that determine when and how your events will be sent to Pinterest.

Create a new rule in your event forwarding property. Under Actions, add a new action and set the extension to Pinterest. To send Edge Network events to Pinterest, set the Action Type to Send Event.

The Pinterest Send Event rule creation.

After selection, additional controls appear to further configure the event. You need to map the Pinterest event properties to the data elements that you previously created.

Event Data

The following event data will be required to create the new rule:

Field name
Description
Example
Event Name
The type of the user event. This can be any event type however, to leverage Pinterest Analytics it is recommended to use Pinterest event codes
* checkout
* add_to_cart
* page_visit
* signup
* [User-defined event]
Action Source
The source indicating where the conversion event occurred.
* app_android
* app_ios
* web
* offline
Event Time
This refers to the event time. The default time format used is UNIX, in the format <seconds>.<miliseconds> depending on your local timezone. For more information, refer to the Pinterest API.
1433188255.500 indicates 1433188255 seconds and 500 milliseconds after epoch, or Monday, June 1, 2015, at 7:50:55 PM GMT.
Event ID
A unique id string that identifies this event and can be used for deduping between events ingested via both the conversion API and Pinterest tracking. Without this, the event’s data is likely to be double counted and will report metric inflation.
ba7816bf8f01cfea414140de5dae2223b00361a396177a9cb410ff61f20015ad
Event Properties
A JSON object containing custom properties of the event. Select from providing raw JSON or using a simplified set of key-value inputs.

The Pinterest Event Data highlighted in the rule action.

The following event properties can be configured:

Field name
Description
Event Source URL
URL of the web conversion event.
Application Store ID
The app store app ID.
Application Name
The name of the application.
Application Version
The version of the application.
Device Brand
Brand of device being used by the user.
Device Carrier
User’s mobile carrier for their device.
Device Model
Model of the user’s device.
Device Type
Type of device being used by the user.
OS Version
Version of the device’s operating system.
User Language
Two-character ISO-639-1 language code indicating the user’s language.

User Data

The following user data can be entered by are not required fields:

Field name
Description
Example
Email
User email address or a SHA256 hash of the user address email.
ebd543592…f2b7e1
Mobile Adverstising IDs
Sha256 hashes of user’s “Google Advertising IDs” (GAIDs) or “Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers” (IDFAs)
ebd543592…f2b7e1
Client IP Address
The user’s IP address, which can be either in IPv4 or IPv6 format. Used for matching.
192.168.0.1
Client User Agent
The user agent string of the user’s web browser.
Mozilla/5.0 (platform; rv:geckoversion) Gecko/geckotrail Firefox/firefoxversion
Customer information data
A JSON object containing other customer information. Select from providing raw JSON or using a simplified set of key-value inputs.

The Pinterest User Data highlighted in the rule action.

The customer information properties that can be configured are:

Field name
Description
Phone
User contact number. Only digits are accepted and should be entered with country code, area code, and number.
Gender
Gender can be entered as either “f” for female, “m” for male, or “n” for non-binary.
Date of Birth
Birth date, entered as year, month, and day.
Last Name
User’s last name.
First Name
User’s first name.
City
User’s residency city. This is mostly used for billing purposes.
State
User’s state, which is provided as a two-letter code in lowercase.
Zip Code
User’s zipcode, which is mostly used for billing purposes.
Country
Two-character ISO-3166 country code indicating the user’s country.
External ID
Unique id from the advertiser that identifies a user in their space. For example, user id, loyalty id, and so on.
Click ID
The unique identifier stored in _epik cookie on your domain or &epik= query parameter in the URL.
IMPORTANT
Before sending the data to the Pinterest API endpoint, the extension will hash and normalize the values of the following fields: Email, Phone Number, First Name, Last Name, Gender, Date of Birth, City, State, Zip Code, Country, and External ID. The extension will not hash the value of these fields if a SHA256 string is already present.

Custom Data

The following custom data can be entered for the rule:

Field name
Description
Currency
The ISO-4217 currency code. If this is not provided, Pinterest will default to the advertiser’s currency that was set during account creation.
Value
Total value of the event. Accepted as a string in the request. This will be parsed into a double digit.
Search String
The search string related to the user conversion event.
Order ID
The order ID. Sending order_id will help Pinterest deduplicate events when necessary.
Number of Products
Total number of products of the event. For example, the total number of items purchased in a checkout event.
Content IDs
List (array) of products IDs.
Contents
A list (array) of objects containing information about products, such as price and quantity.

The Pinterest Custom Data highlighted in the rule action.

Validate data within Pinterest

Once the event forwarding rule has been created and executed, validate whether the event that was sent to the Pinterest API is displayed as expected in the Pinterest UI.

If the event collection and Experience Platform integration were successful, you will see events within the Pinterest UI.

The Pinterest event manager

You can further drill through and view the Pinterest event data distribution.

The Pinterest data distribution

Next steps

This guide covered how to install and configure the Pinterest event forwarding extension in the UI. For more information, refer to the official documentation:

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