When Pinterest first introduced rich pins in May, PinLeague CEO, Danny Maloney, saw them as Pinterest’s first billion dollar revenue feature. This feature gives companies ability to display price, availability, their logo, show price changes and much more, all within the pin. Although only a few companies had access to these pins at first, Pinterest has since provided the coding to allow any company the chance of having rich pins on their own site.
To create rich product pins, Pinterest requires you to either use oEmbed or semantic markups (Open Graph or Schema.org). While a knowledge of HTML coding does make the task a little easier, below we’ve outlined, defined and even created a cheat sheet outlining the main points to keep in mind when adding rich product pins to your site.
oEmbed is Pinterest’s preferred method of generating rich pins since they only have to look at a single canonical URL to find all the information needed to produce the pin. Because of this, Pinterest can be confident that the pin will always have the right information.
An oEmbed formula will look like this:
{
“provider_name”: “PinLeague”,
“url”: “https://www.tailwindapp.com/pricing-plans”,
“title”: “Pin League Professional Analytics Suite”,
“description”: “Gain insights and take strategic action on Pinterest with PinLeague’s Professional Analytics Suite.”,
“product_id”: “PL12345”,
“price”: 99.00,
“currency_code”: “USD”,
“brand”: “PinLeague Analytics”
“availability”: “in stock”
“quantity”: “100000”
}
To set up a single rich product pin, use these required fields (color coded to match formula):
While the above are the only fields technically required, it’s a good idea to also include:
To create a rich pin connected to a page with multiple products or offerings, the set up looks a little different:
{
“provider_name”: “PinLeague”,
“url”: “https://www.tailwindapp.com/pricing-plans”,
“products”:
[{
“title”: “PinLeague Analytics Suites”
“brand”: “PinLeague Analytics”
“product_id”: “PL12345”,
“offers”:
[{
“title”: “PinLeague Lite Analytics”
“description”: “Gain insights and take strategic action on Pinterest with PinLeague’s Lite Analytics Suite.”
“price”: 29.00
“currency_code”: “USD”
“offer_id”: “123”
“availability”: “in stock”
“quantity”: “100000”
},{
“title”: “PinLeague Professional Analytics”
“description”: “Gain insights and take strategic action on Pinterest with PinLeague’s Professional Analytics Suite.”
“price”: 99.00
“currency_code”: “USD”
“availability”: “in stock”
“quantity”: “100000”
}]
}]
}
While many of these fields are the same (and their descriptions are found above), there are some key differences, particularly under the ‘products’ and ‘offers’ fields:
Open Graph, originally developed by Facebook, requires that you put information about the products in the HTML header of your site. However, this method doesn’t allow for multiple product descriptions on one page.
The Open Graph tags will look like this:
<head>
<meta >”og:title” content=”PinLeague Professional Analytics Suite” />
<meta >”og:description” content=”Gain insights and take strategic action on Pinterest with PinLeague’s Professional Analytics Suite.” />
<meta >”og:type” content=”product” />
<meta >”og:url” content=”https://www.tailwindapp.com/pricing-plans” />
<meta >”og:site_name” content=”PinLeague” />
<meta >”og:price:amount” content=”99.00″ />
<meta >”og:price:currency” content=”USD” />
<meta >”og:brand” content=”PinLeague Analytics Suite”
<meta >”og:upc” content=”PL12345″ />
<meta >”og:availability” content=”instock” />
…
</head>
The meanings are similar to the oEmbed script, but there are a few quirks. One of the biggest things to remember is keeping the “meta >
Schema.org markups are the third and final markup you can use when creating rich product pins. One of the pluses of using Schema.org markup is that they are supported by Google and other search engines, so it could help your Pinterset SEO value. However, this markup is more complex than just using Open Graph header markups because the tags must be in the HTML body.
Schema.org body tags will look like this:
<meta >
<div itemtype=”https://schema.org/Product”>
<meta itemprop=“name” content=”PinLeague Professional Analytics Suite” />
<meta itemprop=“brand” content=”PinLeague Analytics” />
<meta itemprop=“productId” content=”PL12345″ />
<meta itemprop=“url” content=”https://www.tailwindapp.com/pricing-plans” />
<span itemprop=“description”>Gain insights and take strategic action on Pinterest with PinLeague’s Professional Analytics Suite”. </span>
</div>
<div itemprop=”offers” itemtype=”https://schema.org/Offer”>
<span itemprop=“price”>99.00</span>
<meta itemprop=“name” content=”Free 14 day trial” />
<meta itemprop=“description” content=”Try PinLeague’s Professional Analytics FREE for 14 days!” />
<meta itemprop=“sku” content=”345″ />
<meta itemprop=“priceCurrency” content=”USD” />
<meta itemprop=“availability” itemtype=”https://schema.org/ItemAvailability”
content=”https://schema.org/InStock” />
</div>
If you notice, the first field actually is written in Open Graph form (og:site_name). The reason for this is due to the fact Schema.org markups do not offer a site name field.
There are only two required fields for Schema.org product markups, after stating the item type:
Before sending your rich pins off to be approved by Pinterest, you must first validate them. To do so go to developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/validator and enter the URL for your product. After validation, you are then ready apply and take advantage of all rich pins have to offer!
This post was originally featured on PinLeague blog as How To Make Rich Pins For Your Own Products.
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View Comments
You forgot to say how you add any of this to your site. Oops! There's no point providing all that oEmbed code etc. without saying what to do with it.
@ Ralph- The detailed "How" may vary depending on how your site is built and the volume of content you're promoting. It could be as simple as copying/pasting these tags into the section of your pages. If you use a 3rd party CMS, you may need certain access rights or to directly edit certain files. If you promote many products, your developers many need to build a dynamic insertion mechanism for the code. My suggestion would be to pass this information onto your development team and they should be able to implement it quickly.
Thanks Daniel. My gripe is really that each post, and the docs themselves, give examples of oembed code, but don't give any practical examples of how to use it. I appreciate that different environments and systems will present different needs, but at least a basic example—such as on a static page—would give us a fighting chance. In my case, i *am* the development team, and it's a bit embarrassing not to be able to get any kind of a handle on how oembed works—either from blog posts or from the oembed site itself. Very frustrating. :(
What happens after you validate and Apply for rich pins. I've done all of this and still nothing is showing?
You'll be added to a queue for review by folks at Pinterest. Once your site has been reviewed and approved, you'll receive a confirmation email from them. I'm sure wait times will vary, but recently I've been told by a some Tailwind members that it took ~7-14 days for their application to be reviewed and approved.
Thanks for a great post Melissa! I'm just wondering something about using the oEmbed method: What do you mean by the 'product id' and how do I get it? I have an Amazon affiliate site so would the product id be the product's ASIN on Amazon's site?