Why Do Our Pinterest Marketing Efforts (promoter 2 prog.) result in 65 products via other Designers?

[CreativeLeahG]

Some time ago, I noticed that several of my Pins (not all) shared via the Promoter 2 Program, which enables me to earn a 35% affiliate fee if my item sells, do not direct customers to my product page as intended through the link I've shared. Instead, they lead to a landing page featuring my product (albeit with key details missing) along with no less than 65 products by other designers.

Example Pin: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/123215739803223742/

This offers customers numerous alternative choices to consider, in contrast to the 5+ chances they have when viewing the other designers' carousel on our product pages.

This redirection has been deeply frustrating, as it hinders the effectiveness of our marketing efforts in promoting our products. When customers end up purchasing something else, we miss out on the benefits we intended to gain from the Promoter 2 program.

To provide some context, I send approximately 20,000 customer referrals to Zazzle each month,

Total linkovers 1,360,194

which is no small effort. I've also observed that my self-referrals have dwindled from around 5+ per day to approximately 2-3 every other day.

This leads me to wonder if the redirection issue is a contributing factor, with the 65 alternative choices possibly diverting customers away from the products I've worked hard to promote and refer.

As a result, I find myself facing a dilemma. Should I consider removing all my Promoter 2 pins to prevent potential sales from being directed to other designers? Denting significantly the number of customers I send to Zazzle (linkover history). It's disheartening to put in considerable effort to showcase 65 other products without reaping any rewards in return.

Could you please shed light on whether this redirection issue is an aspect of Zazzle's or Pinterest's policy, and if it's the latter, how we might engage with Pinterest to rectify the matter? The fact that the Pins do not direct customers to the intended pages raises concerns, potentially running counter to Pinterest's terms.

Thank you for your time and consideration as I consider leaving the Promoter 2 program due to this development.

[SkullPilot]

Is the URL for the "landing page" different from the link you put in the pin on Pinterest? Because I'm not even sure Pinterest would be happy if redirects are happening. I think that's why they got rid of the ability to go back into Zazzle pins (to add trackers and associate links) a few years back. Of course, changing the link destination here still roughly goes to your product (but alongside a bunch of other creators' products) rather than redirecting to some dodgy cryptocurrency site or something unrelated. But potentially, it's a bit of a thin line.

[CreativeLeahG]

I am sharing the links from my product pages, so this landing page is a redirect. It shows the same url but it isn't the same page.

[ColsCreations]

 I have no idea what algorithm they're using to pick the other products shown on the landing page, but they're rarely similar enough to the main product to be a threat. I posted an example of this w/ screenshots back in March but here's another example from today.

Did some checking and seems it's still the way it was back in March: the other products shown on the landing page are the same shown if you navigate to a product category and leave it on the default sort of Popular. I tested it with a clock, throw pillow and pair of leggings. The "other designs from this category" under them and the products on those main category pages were pretty much identical, even in the same order on the pages, with just an odd product or two that was different or just in a different spot on the page. I tested with a wedding invite (picked from the top 20 results if you navigate to that category), a holiday card and a mug as well. For those items there was a lot of overlap but also many differences. Maybe because those products are products with lots of style types/sizes etc.

So, maybe don't know technically what algorithm is at work but it's clear the "other designs from this category" on the interim product page are just a re-showing of the most popular products for that product type as shown on the main category page. They're not being pulled because they are visually similar or have same tags ...

[CreativeLeahG]

ps re the traditional 15% method, I still promote a LOT of my own products and those of other Designers using the rf code method and since joining the Promoter 2 program noted a massive decline in the 15% referral fees. As such I think with regards to Pinterest it may be the case we need to create new pins ongoingly for the same items as I do think Pinterest is a little unreliable re their links. I am seeing more 15% referrals now, so attribute this for now to my 'new pins' (rightly or wrongly) so that's something to bear in mind re affiliate Pinterest Pins.

Meanwhile I haven't earned ANY referrals in the last 4 days so it is also possible things are just slowing down generally and people are shopping less.

[Fiorenzo]

I would not mix the two methods in the same place. You may end up hurting yourself. Better to separate self-promotions and generic affiliate-promotion (which can contain also own products, of course) to avoid accidental 0% referrals.

[CreativeLeahG]

I don't follow?

Everything referral is a separate referral, only the links differ and I do get self-referrals at 15% and 35%.

[Fiorenzo]

Let's assume you have a page with 3 product promotions, 1 own product with clean promo link and 2 third-party products with rf-link:

1. Product 1: your product, clean link (35/0%)
2. Product 2: third-party product, affiliate link (15%)
3. Product 3: third-party product, affiliate link (15%)

If your visitor uses FIRST link 1:

Your 35/0% self-promotor cookie is set; you lose 15% on third-party products.

• The visitor buys product 1: you get 35%
• The visitor buys product 2: you get 0% (you lose 15%)
• The visitor buys product 3: you get 0% (you lose 15%)

If your visitor uses FIRST link 2 or 3:

Your 15% affiliate referral cookie is set; you lose 20% on your products.

• The visitor buys product 1: you get 15% (you lose 20%)
• The visitor buys product 2: you get 15%
• The visitor buys product 3: you get 15%

By separating your self-referrals from third-party referrals you can avoid "accidentally" selling your products at the lower affiliate rate and/or getting no affiliate share for purchases of third-party products. In the end, it depends on what you focus.

[CreativeLeahG]

I don't mix referral links on my site pages

[igiftcenter]

I don't have anything useful to add to all this.... it just confirms why I never get referrals
1. I don't have the time of day to figure all this out in my current situation
2.I don't have the patience to take time away from my design and promotion routine to learn more things 😞

[ColsCreations]

A follow-up to my post last night as I feel it wasn't clear and maybe sounded dismissive. When I said the fear is over-blown, I was talking specifically about the concern that all the other 'products in this category' being shown will have a major negative effect on Promoter referrals by leading shoppers away from your own product that you were promoting. I honestly don't believe that's much of a threat, and it was always a possibility anyway even without the "view product details" page.

If we're instead talking about a tech issue where the 'landing page' is not properly handling clean links & ref IDs and therefore referrals are being lost, then that IS a major concern.
The FAQs above say that one needs to BEGIN their Zazzle session on one of your pages. The landing page is one of your pages. If a shopper browses around looking at other stuff after clicking in, they are not going to pick up another referral cookie from Zazzle or otherwise as they are already in Zazzle at that point. So their looking at other stuff wouldn't matter, as long as they end up buying something of yours you'd get the 35% on that. If there's some tech issue where this landing page isn't being recognized as one of our pages, then yes, that's a huge problem.

[CreativeLeahG]

The customer having a choice of 66 products of which mine is only 1 is a problem (re Promoter 2). The example you used might not create an easily visible problem BUT then all the examples shown are also of the same 'event' theme so they could. Customers rarely have a specific 'design' in mind when shopping for events.

The customer may have followed my link due to a sale I was promoting and not based on liking the design. But had they gone to my product page, may have decided to 'change' my template (some changes are pretty radical) while still benefitting from the sale OR they could choose one of the other 65 options because they are not on my product page they've been redirected to this 66 choice page instead. There are many reasons why this page is a problem not least that it simply shouldn't exist regarding referred links.

[sm]

It's also bad business practice to show 65 irrelevant products because it just confuses the customer. We want to convert that click to a sale ASAP. They are buying a Zazzle product, not a house. If I see something I like on Pinterest and click through, 65 other items will just make me put off buying because I may not have the time to think about all the other items at that moment. So I'll put it off and go about my business. The next day, I may think of buying something again, go back to Pinterest and this end up seeing and buying something on Etsy because I clicked on it and there was nothing other than that product along with a bunch of good reviews.

[Fiorenzo]

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@ColsCreations wrote:

If we're instead talking about a tech issue where the 'landing page' is not properly handling clean links & ref IDs and therefore referrals are being lost, then that IS a major concern.
The FAQs above say that one needs to BEGIN their Zazzle session on one of your pages. The landing page is one of your pages. If a shopper browses around looking at other stuff after clicking in, they are not going to pick up another referral cookie from Zazzle or otherwise as they are already in Zazzle at that point. So their looking at other stuff wouldn't matter, as long as they end up buying something of yours you'd get the 35% on that. If there's some tech issue where this landing page isn't being recognized as one of our pages, then yes, that's a huge problem.

---

You may be right in regard of the landing page being treated as your own page. In this case, self-referrals from within the promoter program are "safe" and the only issue is customers buying something else and the lack of having all product information showing at first sight without having to click again for the details.

Zazzle: can someone please jump in and confirm or tell us how this is handled? Please? So we can relax and mark this (for us important) question as "solved"? Thank you!

[CreativeLeahG]

After having referrals every other day, I now haven't had a referral since starting this thread. It's worrying when you've had them almost daily for a number of years.  

I have realized meanwhile there's no point cancelling Promoter 2 program as I can just add my referral code hence forth to new shares, and my old clean Promoter 2 links (if the God of referrals sees fit for me to gain some again) will be protected.

The last time I had a dry spell referral wise - 18th to 29th Aug 23.  

My referrals prior to August were very healthy as shown here:

Hence you can see why this 'sudden' decline is worrying.

[OrchardBerry]

Is there a way to see the 0% referrals that we were seeing in our stats before? I’d like to know how many customers I’m referring to Zazzle but are buying products other than mine (I’m in the promoter 2.0 program).

[CreativeLeahG]

There's an app https://apps.apple.com/us/app/earnings-by-zazzle/id1241135549   but you need an apple iPhone

[OrchardBerry]

Thanks, I just downloaded it and YIKES, I’m not sure I wanted to know how many $0 referrals I had 😞 

[CreativeLeahG]

I have asked them to let me know but no word ( I don't have an iPhone to check myself) ... was it high? I did very well with the P2 ( as the screenshots show) but it's dying off and I need to know why. Have you seen a decline?

[OrchardBerry]

So far it seems I have a bigger proportion of 35% referrals than 0% referrals in the last 2 months but I’ll look closer at the numbers tomorrow. It’s hard to say though because you don’t know what the referral $ would have been on the 0% ones. 

[CreativeLeahG]

That sounds like positive news as we'd ideally hope that the 35% outnumbered the zero. 

[Deb]

i downloaded it on my ipad.. where are you seeing the $0 referrals ?  nevermind  i see them now .. 😞  AND  after clicking on the product that  it was.. I see a definite correlation  of what I have pinned that they most likely clicked on and what else would have been on that landing page  to defer my referral to $0

[CreativeLeahG]

Here's some potentially good news! Too early to tell yet and I'll monitor the situation closely .... but it would appear that the result of my deleting 77,000 may have resulted in a 3k jump in views (over a period of 2-3 days) and a significant jump in linkovers to Zazzle! AND I am selling items, never previously sold as a result of sharing collections (not products)

No referrals for those items, but definite first-time sales for 'older' products coinciding with recent shares of those product collections.

So, it could be worth doing some housekeeping with your Pins, if like me you had a lot! I am currently down to around 22,000 pins and I am still going through them to see what I can get rid of. 

As noted, it is early days but I regularly monitor my pin views and they have jumped BUT it could be coincidental as could the linkover jump and I guess if others saw similar jumps re Pinterest activity, that would confirm it! But I shall be keeping an eye on it.

EDIT: typically since posting this, Pinterest is now experiencing a malfunction in that it is showing zero views for 100% of pins! If I didn't know better I'd think I was jinxing stuff!

[SBS]

I haven't changed anything, but I also had an uptick in linkovers in the last 2 days.

 

[CreativeLeahG]

Thank you for sharing that, a coincidental rise then! I shall keep an eye out 🙂

[Deb]

Maybe time for me to clean up my pinterest as well.. what is your suggestion as to what to delete? 

[CreativeLeahG]

An alternative could be to 'hide' them temporarily while you evaluate if there are any gains. I'd start with any low-performing pins like we do with our low-performing products on Zazzle.

[CreativeLeahG]

Linkovers still on the up! Are others seeing this increase?

No word meanwhile from Zazzle re any of this, so I am just going to 'adapt' to the landing page situation and carry on refining referrals that are coming in again after a slow patch. 

[PAZP]

Mine have risen over the last couple of days. Yesterday I hit a four digit linkover count which is a FIRST for me. 

[CreativeLeahG]

I think this must be something Pinterest does as we do seem to see these surges across the board. It's very curious!

[WHS_Designs]

@CreativeLeahG 

I had 4 consecutive days in October 2023 with 4-digit linkovers:

October 21 - 1,670 linkovers
October 20 - 2,039 linkovers
October 19 - 1,572 linkovers
October 18 - 1,078 linkovers

Also of note:

October 31  - 2,229 linkovers
November 1 - 2,886 linkovers (new personal high)
November 3 - 2,387 linkovers

no 35% referrals on those 3 most recent days, and slow sales to boot since October 17th.
in fact, I see poor sales more often when I get the 4-digit linkovers!

[xzendor7]

I don't think slow sales on Zazzle is an isolated condition.  I've seen my sales drop on every platform that I am on, even though I'm sending more traffic than ever to these print on demand platforms. On top of that, to stimulate sales the platforms are offering constant sales now that have huge discounts.  Platforms are now switching to paid tier subscription services; for some info you stay above an certain earnings level you are not impacted on having to pay to be on the platform, on others you now have to pay to sell your designs on the platform.

Much of this has to do with the deplorable state of the economy and the rising cost of storage and and bandwidth that is used in hosting the artwork; either in house or using a cloud based hosting services like Cloudflare or AWS, which are big in this space.

Also realize as the economy gets worst more and more people will be turning to the internet to make money, especially on POD platforms increasing competition on a limited number of available eyeballs.

This makes things even more difficult with the many Text 2 Image AI sites that are constantly popping up making it easy for anyone, with or without artistic talent to pump out a whole trove of images; regardless if the quality is good or not and selling these pieces on the cheap.

You can already see this on multiple platforms, as people are putting stuff out there that is of extremely poor quality is especially when it comes to the human form; while others are grabbing public domain images or images they took on their own and feeding through all sorts of distortion filters and posting this for sale as artwork.

It's going to be incumbent on those that want to be serious players on the POD platforms to step up our game.  Search online for tools that provide information on what is trending on POD platforms, see what is trending in general on Social Networks and in the public arena at large, and start creating content that will attract buyers to your shops; because it will only going to get tougher.

[CreativeLeahG]

Thank you for sharing that, knowing how things are across the Podiverse does help!

[CreativeLeahG]

Great results, like your figures,  mine were high 18th to 21st but not high re 31st to now, so you're doing great!! Meanwhile, I am no longer focusing efforts on sending Zazzle traffic as it doesn't seem a good use of my time and time is money! 

[JimCarnicelli]

A small point related to all of this. The landing pages don't allow users to like your product. They have to click a second time to get to that. Which is not the least bit obvious. I see no benefit to Zazzle or designers. This appears to be an oversight.

[CreativeLeahG]

@Heather 

We still have not had an acknowledgment to this very serious issue.

I am concerned that redirecting our affiliate links to pages that are NOT where we as affiliates intended our links to go constitutes a breach of contract. I had thought it was a technical issue but in the absence of any response at all, I have no option but to assume it is intentional. Please shed some light on this issue.

[klstock]

I started looking into this today. I spend a lot of time and effort making my own pins and promoting on Pinterest. I see these are now going to this landing page.

Most of what I have been doing lately is promoting Christmas cards and invitations so those are my Pinterest pins that I am clicking on to get to this landing page. I notice that when I click on my Pinterest pin for a Christmas card, on this landing page it brings up all the same other card suggestions. Same stores, same cards. No matter which of my Christmas card pins that I click through to get to this landing page – it is showing the same stores and same cards over and over.

Same thing for when I click through to this landing page from one of my Christmas invitation pins – underneath, in the ‘other designs in this category’ rows it shows all the same stores, same invitations over and over – no matter which of my Christmas invitation pins I click through on.

Almost none of these have anything related to my style, which mostly is beach & tropical themed stuff. So it isn’t a situation where these ‘other designs in this category’ are triggered by some similar keyword and randomly populate these rows. It seems only to populate these rows with the same stores and same cards and invitations. Over and over.

I went to a couple other designers’ Pinterest pages and tried it on their cards and invitations – and got the same result. It leads to the landing page, and shows the same selections that I get when I click through on one of my pins. Same store names, same card and invitation selections.

I haven’t tried this on other products – so far just cards and invitations.

The ‘other designs in this category’ rows show all the same designers/stores in those rows. No matter the occasion as best I can tell. For example, if I click through on one of my baby shower invitation pins or a wedding invitation pin– this landing page shows me all the same designers and invitations.

Can some of you try this on your pins? Start with cards and invitations if you do them, and see if you see what I mean.

I am trying to get at why the same designers and products come up over and over in the ‘other designs in this category’ section and how that is arrived at. If it is not just something on my end, then would it mean everyone’s pins (in the cards and invites categories at least) are leading to a landing page that advertises the same stores and choices over and over?

[CreativeLeahG]

They are certainly doing a great job of promoting those same designers.

[klstock]

So have we apparently 🙁

[klstock]

I have looked into this a little further. It isn't just something on my end, because I can see the same in the screen capture on Leah's original post. 

Of the 60 options listed under the 'other designs in this category' rows, those are not 60 different stores/designers - sometimes one designer will be shown multiple times - sometimes 10 times out of the 60.

It does not appear to rotate these to give any others the same exposure. I have had 2 different people check using their own account and they get the same results that I get (same designers and products showing in the cards and invitations categories). 

So each pin I am taking significant time and effort to make in order to advertise my own product is leading to a landing page that gives free advertising to a group of other designers – often the same designers over and over, across many different categories (cards, invitations, pillows, ornaments).

It is my original artwork, my work making cover photos, my work on creating the pin for my product – and that is being used to get eyes onto these other designers’ products and I am not compensated for that.

Multiply that by everyone else who is making pins, because it appears they are all going to this landing page thing. Thousands of us making pins that all lead to the same 60 options in the ‘other designs in this category’ rows. And of those 60 options, many are the same designers over and over across different categories. 

[CreativeLeahG]

Yes, we appear to be devoting all our time to selflessly promoting Editors Picks.