Overview
The Pinterest Tag is a JavaScript tracking snippet that measures user actions on a website and sends conversion data to Pinterest's advertising platform. It enables advertisers to track events such as page visits, sign-ups, and purchases, which are used for campaign optimisation, retargeting, and audience creation. Pinterest also offers the Conversions API for server-side event delivery. The Pinterest Tag is less commonly deployed than Meta or Google advertising tags but is frequently found on e-commerce and lifestyle brand websites, where it can be overlooked during governance audits due to its lower profile.
Detection Capabilities
- Signature count
- 4
- Detection methods
- network
Performance Impact
Performance Impact
- Script size
- 25 KB
- Requests per page
- 4
Common Mistakes
- 1 Overlooking the Pinterest Tag during consent audits because it is less prominent than Meta or Google tags, resulting in it firing without valid consent
- 2 Enabling Enhanced Match without assessing the privacy impact - it sends hashed email addresses to Pinterest for cross-device attribution
- 3 Not implementing the Conversions API alongside the browser tag, leading to incomplete conversion data and redundant client-side tracking
- 4 Failing to restrict event tracking to relevant conversion pages, causing unnecessary data collection across the entire site
- 5 Not including Pinterest in the advertising consent category within the CMP, allowing it to fall through as an uncategorised tag
Compliance Considerations
The Pinterest Tag sets first-party cookies (_pin_unauth, _pinterest_ct_ua) and transmits browsing and conversion data to Pinterest servers in the United States. Under GDPR, this requires explicit advertising consent before the tag fires. Pinterest is self-certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, providing a transfer mechanism for EU-to-US data flows, but organisations should verify the current certification status. Enhanced Match functionality transmits hashed personal data and should be disclosed in the privacy notice. Organisations should ensure the Pinterest Tag is categorised under advertising consent in their CMP and blocked until explicit consent is granted.
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