Pinterest Introduces Priority Products for Performance+ Shopping Ads

On September 17, 2026, Pinterest announced Priority Products at its Pinterest Presents event. This new feature for Pinterest Performance+ advertising campaigns allows online retailers to choose which products the algorithm should prioritize.

Previously, automated campaigns primarily distributed ad impressions among products based on predicted performance. Advertisers can now also incorporate their own commercial priorities, including promoting new collections, seasonal offers, clearance sales, or specific product categories.

This is particularly useful for clothing, furniture, cosmetics, and jewelry retailers, where advertising objectives do not always come down to maximizing short-term ROAS. Sometimes a business needs to promote a new collection, support sales in a particular category, or clear excess inventory.

How Pinterest Performance+ Works and Why Priority Products Was Needed

Pinterest Performance+ is an advertising campaign automation system that uses machine learning to manage ad delivery and bidding.

For online retailers, one of its key capabilities is promoting products directly from a catalog. Advertisers upload their assortment with photos, descriptions, prices, and links to product pages, while Pinterest automatically selects which offers to show potential customers.

The algorithm analyzes user behavior, interest in different products, and the likelihood of conversion, aiming to generate as many results as possible within the specified budget.

However, this approach does not always align with an online retailer's commercial objectives.

Suppose a clothing brand sells several hundred dress styles. Historically, three popular styles have generated the strongest sales, so an automated campaign directs a substantial share of impressions toward them.

But at the beginning of a new season, the brand launches a collection of 40 dresses that need to be introduced to shoppers. These new arrivals do not yet have sufficient sales history, so the algorithm may give them less attention than proven bestsellers.

Previously, advertisers could address this challenge by creating separate campaigns, changing the structure of product groups, or manually reallocating budgets.

Priority Products makes it possible to address this within an automated campaign without abandoning promotion of the rest of the assortment.

What Changed With the Introduction of Pinterest Priority Products?

The new feature allows advertisers to select product groups that should receive higher priority when ad impressions are distributed.

At the same time, the system continues to use the store's entire catalog. Priority products do not become the only products eligible for advertising.

The main capabilities of Priority Products include:

• Advertisers can select up to five priority product groups.
• Pinterest applies higher bids to selected products, increasing their opportunities to participate in advertising auctions.
• Other catalog products continue to be advertised within the same campaign.
• Performance+ automated bidding and optimization remain in place.

Priority Products therefore serves as an additional assortment management tool within automated advertising.

It is not a separate bidding strategy and does not guarantee a specific number of impressions or sales.

Advertisers indicate which products are particularly important to their business at a given time, and Pinterest takes that priority into account when distributing advertising traffic.

How Priority Products Differs From Standard Product Groups

Product groups have long been available in Pinterest Ads.

Retailers can organize products by category, brand, price, availability, custom catalog labels, and other attributes.

For example, they can create groups such as "Linen Dresses," "New Collection," "Gold Jewelry," or "Discounted Products."

However, standard product groups primarily help organize the assortment and determine which products participate in particular advertising placements.

In standard catalog campaigns, advertisers can independently select the groups they want to promote.

Pinterest Performance+ has historically taken a more automated approach: the system worked with the All Products group and independently distributed impressions among products.

Priority Products adds the ability to influence that distribution while preserving automation.

The key difference is that advertisers do not exclude the rest of the catalog in favor of a few selected products. Instead, they increase the priority of a particular portion of the assortment within the overall campaign.

How to Set Up Priority Products in Pinterest Ads Manager

Priority Products is part of Pinterest Performance+ and is configured when creating a campaign in Ads Manager.

To work with a product assortment, an online retailer needs a Pinterest Business Account with a connected product catalog. For accurate performance measurement, it is also advisable to configure Pinterest Tag and Conversions API.

The general setup process is as follows:

1. Sign in to Pinterest Ads Manager and open Business Hub → Create campaign.
2. Select Custom create campaign.
3. Choose the Sales advertising objective and enable Pinterest Performance+.
4. Select Product catalog as the source of advertising assets.
5. Specify the campaign name, budget, and schedule.
6. In the Campaign prioritization section, select Priority products if the feature is available in the advertising account.
7. Configure the priority product groups and review the catalog source and campaign settings.
8. Select the conversion event for optimization and publish the campaign.

Pinterest also mentions the availability of Priority Products within Performance+ prioritization settings for certain other advertising objectives. However, the primary use case for online retailers remains promoting catalog products with a sales objective.

Feature availability and the exact configuration options may depend on the advertising account and the rollout stage.

How to Prepare Product Groups

Product groups can be managed in Pinterest through Catalogs and product groups → Product groups.

Advertisers can create them manually or use filters based on product attributes.

For example, a clothing retailer can create a separate group for a new fall collection using the Product type field or a Custom label.

Pinterest also supports automatically generated groups, including:

• Top Sellers: Products with the highest conversion performance.
• New Arrivals: Recently added products.
• Best Deals: Products with the most significant price reductions.
• Back In Stock: Products that have become available again.
• Most Popular: Products generating high user engagement on Pinterest.

These groups help organize the assortment, but they do not automatically activate Priority Products.

To use the feature, priority must be explicitly assigned through supported Performance+ settings.

Retailers using Shopify can also synchronize Shopify collections with Pinterest product groups.

When Online Retailers Should Use Priority Products

Launching New Clothing Collections

Consider a women's clothing brand preparing for the fall season.

Its catalog includes summer dresses, basic styles, outerwear, and a new knitwear collection.

A standard automated campaign may continue heavily promoting products that sold well during the summer.

However, the business needs to shift shoppers' attention toward the new collection.

With Priority Products, the brand can increase the advertising priority of its fall assortment while keeping other products in the campaign.

This makes it possible to support a collection launch without completely restructuring the advertising account.

Promoting Furniture and Seasonal Categories

Furniture retailers frequently experience seasonal shifts in demand.

In spring, shoppers become more interested in outdoor furniture and patio products, while fall brings increased interest in lighting, textiles, and home interior accessories.

Priority Products allows retailers to increase the priority of relevant categories during specific periods.

For example, when launching a new outdoor furniture collection, a retailer can strengthen its promotion without excluding sofas, beds, and other core assortment items.

Clearance Sales and Inventory Management

Sometimes a retailer needs to sell particular products not because they deliver the highest advertising efficiency, but because they occupy warehouse space or are approaching the end of their seasonal relevance.

This is especially common among fashion brands and sellers of footwear, accessories, and seasonal home decor.

Priority Products allows retailers to direct more advertising attention toward selected product groups.

However, higher priority does not guarantee that inventory will sell out. If the products do not align with demand, increased advertising activity may generate additional costs without a corresponding increase in sales.

Promoting High-Margin Products

For retailers with large assortments, not every sale is equally profitable.

Two products with the same selling price may have significantly different costs and profit margins.

An advertiser can create a group of high-margin products and increase its priority within Performance+.

However, it is important to understand that Priority Products manages the algorithm's attention to particular products; it does not replace comprehensive profit-based optimization. To evaluate results, retailers must independently analyze margins, advertising expenses, and actual profit from sales.

What Did the First Pinterest Priority Products Tests Show?

Pinterest published preliminary results from alpha testing of the new feature.

According to the company, in campaigns using Priority Products, priority product groups accounted for an average of 80% of advertising revenue compared with the All Products group.

This result indicates that the new mechanism can substantially redistribute advertising activity and sales toward selected products.

However, this figure should not be interpreted as an 80% increase in the store's total revenue or an 80% improvement in ROAS.

Pinterest is reporting the distribution of advertising revenue among product groups, not a proven increase in sales relative to control campaigns.

Furthermore, as of October 2026, there is insufficient independent public research to establish the typical impact of Priority Products on CPC, CPA, ROAS, or the overall profitability of online retailers.

It would therefore be incorrect to use the alpha-testing results as a universal performance forecast.

How to Evaluate Priority Products Performance

Before launching a campaign, advertisers should define the specific business objective that increasing product priority is intended to achieve.

For a new collection, this might mean increasing sales of new styles and attracting customers.

For a seasonal clearance sale, it could mean accelerating inventory sell-through.

For a high-margin category, the objective could be increasing gross profit after advertising expenses.

At the same time, it is important to evaluate the performance of both priority product groups and the entire catalog.

For example, if sales of the new collection increase by 40%, but sales of other products decline by a comparable amount, the overall impact on the business may be insignificant.

An additional risk comes from increasing bids for products that sell less effectively than the campaign average.

The algorithm may direct more traffic toward these products, but average advertising efficiency may decline if the additional spending is not offset by sales.

Therefore, Priority Products performance should be evaluated using several metrics: revenue from selected categories, overall campaign ROAS, order volume, the share of new customers, and, where possible, profit after advertising expenses.

For a more reliable assessment, advertisers can use A/B testing to compare campaigns with and without Priority Products under comparable conditions.

Affect's Takeaway: More Control Over Product Assortment Without Giving Up Automation

Pinterest Priority Products addresses one of the common challenges of automated advertising for online retailers: the algorithm does not always know which products are most important to the business at a particular moment.

The system may successfully optimize campaigns for sales while remaining unaware of plans to launch a new collection, the need to clear warehouse inventory, or the commercial value of specific product categories.

Priority Products allows advertisers to communicate these priorities directly to Performance+ while retaining the benefits of automated advertising management.

For clothing, furniture, jewelry, and other retailers with extensive assortments, this is particularly useful during seasonal transitions and new product launches.

Affect recommends treating Priority Products as an assortment management tool rather than a way to automatically improve advertising profitability.

The most reasonable approach is to use the new mechanism for specific commercial objectives, track changes in sales across the entire catalog, and evaluate results not only through advertising ROAS but also through actual business profitability.

Sources

1. Pinterest Newsroom, September 17, 2026: Pinterest Unveils Visual Search Ads and New Performance Tools. Pinterest Newsroom
2. Pinterest Business: Pinterest Performance+, Priority Products, and Alpha-Testing Results. Pinterest Business
3. Pinterest Help Center: Pinterest Performance+ and Campaign Prioritization Settings. Pinterest Help Center
4. Pinterest Help Center: Create Product Groups. Pinterest Help Center
5. Pinterest Developers: Pinterest Performance+ Setup. Pinterest Developers