Pinterest Holiday Path to Purchase: Trends & Shoppable Pins for BF/CM

Holiday shopping doesn’t start on Black Friday in stores anymore; it starts on Pinterest. As shoppers create wishlists and inspiration boards weeks before Cyber Monday, the platform has quietly become the first stop in the holiday path to purchase.

So, how can brands move from being merely pinned to actually purchased? And what creative patterns are driving clicks over saves this season?

In this article, we unpack Pinterest’s 2025 holiday trends — from early gift-planning behaviors to shoppable Pin formats that turn discovery into revenue. With planning beginning as early as October and AI-powered Shopping Ads now linking directly to checkout, Pinterest’s influence spans the entire funnel.

For marketers, mastering this sequence isn’t optional; it’s how you capture intent before consumers ever type “Black Friday deals.”

The Holiday Head Start: Why Pinterest Peaks Before Black Friday

Pinterest is a pre-season engine for holiday shopping momentum. In fact, many of Pinterest’s most powerful moments in the holiday funnel happen weeks before Black Friday or Cyber Monday even arrive.

For marketers, recognizing and activating during that early period is essential. Below, we break down the trends, behavioral insights, and real brand evidence that show how Pinterest leads holiday discovery — and how being ready early can give you a competitive edge.

Early Planning Is Built into the Platform’s DNA

Pinterest’s own data for 2025 underscores how early the holiday mindset begins. During the festive season, the platform averages 10 new boards created per second — a signal that users are actively curating ideas well in advance. Moreover, Pinterest reports that 31% of its audience begins creating gift lists as early as October.

In other words, people are mapping out gift ideas long before the November “deal frenzy.”

Users on Pinterest are inherently “idea collectors.” Many use the platform not just to browse, but to save and revisit potential gifts over time. In that sense, Pinterest functions as both an inspiration engine and a visual wishlist ledger.

Higher Propensity to Convert (vs. Typical Social Users)

Pinterest isn’t just about browsing — it drives purchase behavior. The platform reports that users spend 12% more during the holidays compared to non-Pinterest users. Because of the planning behavior, Pinterest users often have stronger purchase intent by the time Black Friday arrives.

Beyond spending, weekly Pinners are also more open to new brands: 63% say they are willing to try new brands during the holiday season. That presents an opportunity: your brand can enter the consideration set early, before competitors flood the feeds.

Finally, Pinterest notes that click-based conversions across Pins are up 51% year over year during the holiday period. That rise suggests that not only are Pinners active earlier — they are also increasingly clicking through to buy.

Brand Examples That Built Early Momentum

Nestlé Toll House is a standout poster child for early holiday activation. For the 2022 holiday season, Nestlé aligned their campaign with Pinterest Trends to capture surging interest in holiday baking. They employed a mix of recipe-driven static and video Pins, using “make it” and “add to cart” calls to action tied to retailer links.

The result: an 8% incremental sales lift and a 3.53× increase in year-over-year ROAS. Half of the incremental sales came from new brand buyers.

Waitrose, a U.K. grocery and food retailer, used a full-funnel Pinterest strategy (inspiration → consideration → conversion) over the holiday season. They achieved a 6.1% sales lift and a 7.6% increase in checkout conversions.

Their success underscores that even in “lower-consideration” retail categories (groceries, food, consumables), early holiday activity on Pinterest pays dividends.

Burberry is another telling example. In its holiday campaigns, the luxury brand leveraged Pinterest’s visual and planning strengths to deliver a 7.4% lift in gifting intent while reducing CPMs by 36%.

For a brand in a highly competitive vertical, achieving efficient cost metrics while nudging purchase intent is a strong signal of Pinterest’s relevance early in the season.

Why You Must Be October-Ready

1. Win the mindshare before deals dominate: By October, fewer brands have fully activated holiday content, so Pinterest boards and Pins gain more visibility and shelf life. Capturing early saves and follows positions you in users’ ongoing browsing cycles.
2. Leverage sustained intent signals: When a user saves a Pin to a holiday-related board, it’s not a random click — it’s a signal of intent you can later retarget or nurture.
3. Fuel momentum into BF/CM with built-in demand: If your Pins have already been live and gathering saves, clicks, and engagement, you can funnel that warmed audience into paid promotions during peak sale events — often at lower incremental cost.

The period between October and mid-November is not just pregame — it’s a critical window. Build boards, publish Pins, and seed your holiday narrative early. Your presence then won’t just compete — it will amplify when the floodlights go on come Black Friday.

The Pinterest Path to Purchase Across the Holiday Window

For brands and marketers using Pinterest during the holiday season, the trick isn’t just to post more Pins; it’s crafting a sequenced content journey that aligns with evolving shopper intent.

Over time, users move from inspiration → consideration → conversion → retention. By mapping your content and promotions to that arc, you can nurture Pinners along the path.

Below is a phased content sequencing framework with tactical ideas and real-world proof across the holiday window:

Phase A: Pre–Black Friday (September – October) — Seed Discovery & Collect Intent

Goal: Establish brand presence, spark early saves, and gather intent data you can activate later.

Tactics:

• Core gift guides: Create Pins categorized by persona or price tier (e.g., “Gifts for teens”, “Under $50”). These act as evergreen assets that get discovered and rediscovered.
• Creator-led Idea Pins: Partner with creators to showcase theme-based gift inspiration. When the content feels genuine and less “selly,” it helps build affinity and saves.
• Curated boards: Build or repurpose boards with a clear, navigable structure (e.g., “Holiday Hosts & Entertaining,” “Cozy Home Gifts,” “Tech Gadgets Under $100”). Keep seasonal boards separate from evergreen boards so users know what’s timely.
• Trend-based keyword insertion: Use Pinterest’s Predicts/Trends tool to surface rising holiday queries and bake them into board titles and Pin titles/descriptions. Heather Farris, a Pinterest educator, emphasizes plugging in fast-growing search phrases (e.g., “holiday gifts for coworkers”) months ahead so your content rides the trend wave. 

You can learn more about what an ideal Pinterest holiday strategy should look like by watching her video:

Why it works: Pins take time to index and build momentum on Pinterest. The earlier you post, the more time they have to amass saves, engage, and surface in feeds when demand peaks. Additionally, by the time November arrives, a board already rich in content appears more authoritative.

As noted in Pinterest’s 2025 Holiday Guide, click-based conversions on the platform are up 51% year over year — meaning early content tends to get traction. 

Phase B: Black Friday / Cyber Monday Week — Maximize Conversion Momentum

Goal: Turn existing engagement into purchase action and capture high-intent demand.

Tactics:

• Price overlays & seasonal tags: Update top-performing Pins to include discount tags (e.g., “20% OFF”), price promotions, or “Black Friday Deal” banners. This updates the visual cue to spur urgency.
• Limited-time calls to action: Use countdown overlays like “Offer ends midnight” or “Last day to buy” to create urgency in creatives.
• Creator cross-posting: If a creator has a successful TikTok or Instagram reel showing a product, convert cuts into Idea Pins on Pinterest with shoppable links. This leverages existing momentum across platforms.
• Shopping Ads & Catalog Pins: Activate or boost a product-level campaign using your catalog feed. Catalog Pins linked to high-engagement products (from earlier phases) help turn intent into purchases efficiently.
• Retarget past engagers: Use the Pinterest Tag data (saves, clicks) to retarget users who engaged with your pre-BF content with discount or reminder offers.

Perfume brand leaned into trend-driven Pins and product shoppability, achieving a 10.7% lift in purchase intent among shoppers during the festive period.

Phase C: December 1–20 — Extend Sales Window & Capture Last-Minute Gifters

Goal: Sustain momentum, catch procrastinators, and drive late-stage conversions.

Tactics:

• Repin winners into “last-minute” boards: Create boards like “Last-minute under $25”, “Order by Dec 15”. Re-pin your proven top Pins so they resurface with urgency.
• Live catalog syncs: Keep product availability and pricing fresh via catalog feed updates so users don’t land on dead links.
• Retarget based on saves: Use the Pinterest Tag to retarget users who saved but didn’t click, or clicked but didn’t purchase, with “reminder” creatives and gift incentives (e.g. free shipping).
• Gift pairing/upsell content: Publish Pins like “Complete the look: add-on gifts” to boost average order value.
• Creative refresh: Rotate backgrounds, holiday visuals, and overlays so content doesn’t feel stale. Also re-run trend-checks and swap in rising keywords.

This strategy worked wonders for ABC Fine Wine & Spirits.

Phase D: Post-Cutoff to Dec 31 — Maintain Engagement & Drive Digital Gifting

Goal: Leverage residual interest, shift focus to e-gifts, and sustain brand engagement.

Tactics:

• E-gift & BOPIS content: Publish Pins about “How to send e-gift cards”, “Print-at-home vouchers”, or “In-store pickup gift ideas”.
• How-to/gift wrapping content: Share creative wrappers, DIY gift boxes, or presentation hacks to keep users engaging even after shipping deadlines.
• Archive & re-share seasonal boards: Archive or rename them (e.g., “2025 Holiday Gifts”) after the season ends to maintain your Pinterest profile hygiene.
• Tease New Year / post-holiday promotions: Use boards or Pins that transition into post-holiday sales, new collections, or clearance items.

Shoppable Setup: Technical Foundations for Holiday Success

To turn Pinterest engagement into revenue during the holiday season, your technical backbone must be rock solid. Without proper configuration, your shoppable Pins, tags, and catalog feeds can fail, causing lost conversions or disapproved listings.

Below are the critical components and best practices to get right — especially for Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

Pinterest Tag & Conversion Events: Track What Matters

At the heart of measuring and optimizing shopping performance is the Pinterest Tag. This is a piece of JavaScript you place on your site (or via a tag manager) that reports key events back to Pinterest. Without it, Pinterest can’t reliably attribute add-to-cart, checkout, or purchase activity to your Pins and ads.

• You must configure standard events like PageView, AddToCart, Checkout, and Purchase. These allow Pinterest to optimize and report on conversion behavior.
• For example, on the order confirmation page, you’d include something like:

(This is how merchants manually insert the checkout event code on platforms like Squarespace. )

• Ensure that product IDs (SKUs) are included in add-to-cart and purchase events, so you can tie back which items are converting. 
• Use your tag data for retargeting audiences (people who clicked, added to cart, or browsed) during the holiday phases.

Without these events firing properly, your ability to optimize and retarget is severely hampered — especially during short, high-volume windows like Cyber Monday.

Catalog Uploads & Product Feed Hygiene

Your product catalog is the backbone for shoppable Pins and Shopping Ads. Every detail matters.

• Feed setup & ingestion
  • Pinterest supports ingestion via CSV, XML, or TSV formats. 
  • Feeds must include required fields: id, title, description, link, image_link, price, availability, and (for variants) item_group_id. 
  • You can host the feed on a server (FTP, HTTP, WebDAV) or update manually, but Pinterest expects a daily refresh to keep pricing and availability live. 
  • Pinterest enforces strict validation rules — errors can lead to full feed rejection.
• Catalog → Product Pins → Dynamic Ads
  • Once your catalog is live and error-free, Pinterest will auto-create product Pins from your feed entries, making them shoppable across search results, related Pins, and user home feeds. 
  • Moreover, Shopping Ads (Catalog Sales campaigns) rely on that catalog — any change (price, availability) is reflected dynamically.
• Product groups & holiday SKU segmentation
• Use product groups to segment your catalog into sub-sets (e.g., “holiday bundle”, “bestsellers under $50”, “clearance gifts”) that align with campaign structure. 
• During holiday promotions, make sure holiday SKUs are clearly grouped so you can target them uniquely (e.g. different bids, budgets).
• Map your creators’ content (see next subheading) to those groups for clearer retargeting.

Feed quality and segmentation are not optional — poorly formatted or outdated product data is one of the leading reasons catalogs get disapproved or suppressed.

Product Tagging & Creator Mapping

To bridge content and commerce, you’ll want to tag products in individual Pins (static or video). This helps deliver contextual shopping opportunities without requiring every Pin to be a pure product spotlight.

• You can tag up to 24 related products on a single Pin. These won’t necessarily show visually in the Pin, but Pinterest surfaces them in a shopping carousel or as “Product ideas.”
• Choose products that closely tie to the content. For example, a lifestyle image showing a coffee table scene might tag three décor items and a seasonal candle.
• This tagging enables Collections Ads (hero + secondary creatives) where those products show beneath or beside the hero image. 
• Critically, you can map creator content to product groups so that users who engage with a creator’s Pin can be retargeted via Shopping Ads for those exact SKUs. Pinterest’s guidance explicitly suggests combining creator content & product groups for retargeting. 

When your tagged Pins and catalog groups are aligned, you create a seamless path from inspiration to checkout that’s traceable and optimizable.

Ad Strategy & Optimization Levers

With tag, catalog, and tagging infrastructure in place, your holiday ad campaigns can wield more power.

• Launch Catalog Sales/Shopping Ads via Ads Manager. Your product groups will form the basis of targeting and creative. 
• Use formats like static shopping, video shopping ads, Collections ads, or Carousel shopping ads to vary your appeal.
• For Collections Ads, designate a hero image (static or video) and secondary goods drawn from your product groups. If a product goes out of stock, it’s removed automatically. 
• Because your catalog updates dynamically, you don’t have to manually pause or adjust many creatives — Pinterest will pull the updated version. 
• Monitor performance metrics (CTR, ROAS, conversions per product group) and reallocate budget to winners during the holiday window.

Setting up your shoppable architecture well before October gives you a buffer to troubleshoot feed errors, tag misconfigurations, ad delivery issues, and creative-product alignment. Once Black Friday hits, there’s no time to fix structural problems — only to capitalize on momentum.

Creative Strategy: Pins That Convert Holiday Browsers

Once your catalog and tagging infrastructure are in place, the next differentiator is creative execution; how your Pins look, feel, and guide users toward action. On Pinterest, aesthetic context and relevance drive conversion more than loud discounts.

Holiday shoppers come to the platform to visualize ideas, not just find deals. That means your creative must bridge inspiration and intent: seasonal visuals that still feel shoppable, mobile-first design, and storytelling that turns discovery into checkout.

Design for Context: Giftable, Seasonal, and Scroll-Stopping

Pinterest’s 2025 Holiday Marketing Guide emphasizes that Pins with contextual cues (like “for mom” or “for coworkers”) see 3× higher engagement than generic product shots.

That’s because users are typically in solution mode — browsing by occasion or recipient — not by SKU.

• Visual cues: Incorporate subtle seasonal backgrounds (wrapping paper, twinkling lights, snow textures) to anchor your product in a festive scene.
• Readable text overlays: Pinterest recommends no more than 10% of the visual space for text, ensuring mobile readability.
• Gift context framing: Adding “For Him,” “For the Host,” or “Under $50” helps users connect emotionally and practically — these modifiers align with top Pinterest searches in Q4.

Etsy leaned into this approach by producing a series of creator-driven Idea Pins around “Personalized gifts for every type of person.” Their Pins combined emotional context with shoppable tags linking directly to small-business listings.

The campaign achieved a 6.5% lift in purchase intent and drove a 2× higher CTR vs. static catalog Pins.

Motion and Storytelling: Video & Idea Pins That Inspire Action

Video consumption on Pinterest continues to surge — viewing time has grown 80% year-over-year, according to Pinterest’s internal analytics. Short-form video Pins and Idea Pins now function as mini gift guides or how-to tutorials that pull shoppers down the funnel.

• Keep duration under 15 seconds for awareness Pins, or use 30–45 seconds for how-to/demo-style Idea Pins.
• Add text callouts early in the frame (within the first 3 seconds) for best retention.
• Show products in use — e.g., wrapping, styling, unboxing — to provide sensory cues.

Beauty retailer Dermstore cut through peak-season clutter by pairing creator partnerships with Pinterest Performance+, the platform’s AI optimization suite. Partnering with Aspire, Dermstore produced authentic, routine-based videos featuring real customers naturally using its premium skincare and makeup products.

Pinterest’s automation then targeted high-intent beauty shoppers most likely to convert, combining authentic storytelling with precise audience delivery.

The results spoke volumes: Creator video content drove a 50% higher outbound CTR and an 8% stronger 7-day ROAS versus non-creator assets, proving that trusted voices plus AI targeting outperform traditional ads in the holiday rush.

Data-Driven Creativity: Iterate Weekly on Trends

Pinterest’s Trends Tool and Pinterest Predicts database reveal surging search themes each week — from “gingerbread aesthetic” to “boho tree décor.” Assign a team member to refresh keyword alignment and adjust Pin titles weekly through December.

• Updating titles with rising keywords can lift visibility by 30–40 percent in search results (help.pinterest.com).
• Schedule a recurring “trend sync” meeting to spot surges and re-label boards accordingly.

Creative Cohesion Across Pins, Boards, and Ads

Maintain a unified look across all creatives — consistent color palettes, typography, and tone across organic Pins, Shopping Ads, and Idea Pins.

Pinterest data shows that brands using cohesive creative elements achieve 20-25% higher conversion rates.

How Pinterest Powers the Holiday Purchase Path

Pinterest has evolved from a mood-board platform into a full-funnel shopping engine — especially during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Its value lies in timing: Pinners plan early, save ideas intentionally, and buy confidently once peak season hits. For brands, this means the window of influence opens long before discounts drop.

By combining shoppable Pins, creator-led storytelling, and AI-driven targeting, marketers can reach high-intent audiences when they’re still open to discovery — and guide them seamlessly from inspiration to checkout. Success hinges on getting October-ready, syncing catalogs and tags, aligning creators to product groups, and maintaining a steady creative rhythm across November and December.

The brands that win on Pinterest don’t just advertise; they curate experiences that feel native to the platform’s search-meets-shop mindset. When every Pin connects emotional relevance with real product accessibility, Pinterest becomes more than a branding tool — it becomes a measurable revenue driver for the holiday season and beyond.

About the Author

Kalin Anastasov

Writer

Kalin Anastasov plays a pivotal role as an content manager and editor at Influencer Marketing Hub. He expertly applies his SEO and content writing experience to enhance each piece, ensuring it aligns with our guidelines and delivers unmatched quality to our readers.