Interest Targeting

Interest targeting shows your ad to people based on the topics and categories they engage with on Pinterest.

You pick interests from Pinterest's taxonomy, which runs from broad categories like Home Decor down to narrow sub-interests like Scandinavian bedrooms. Pinterest then serves your ad to people whose saving and browsing behavior maps to those topics. It works without the tag, which makes it the default for reaching people who have never been to your site.

A cookware brand targets the Cooking and Meal Prep interests and reaches people actively saving recipe Pins, whether or not they have ever heard of the brand.

This is a reach tool, not a precision tool. Advertisers stack a dozen interests expecting tight targeting and get a wide, cheap-looking audience instead. Interests tell you what someone likes, not that they are ready to buy. Treat it as the top of the funnel and pair it with a conversion objective doing the real optimization.

Interests find the crowd; they do not qualify it.