Yes. Most e-commerce attribution tools connect to Pinterest Ads, pull in spend and campaign data, and attribute orders to Pinterest using their own pixel and UTMs rather than Pinterest’s reporting. Triple Whale, Klar, TrueROAS, and ThoughtMetric, which sponsors this blog, all list Pinterest as an integration. The integration is the easy part. The harder part is that Pinterest tends to influence purchases early and quietly, which is exactly the kind of touch attribution models handle worst.
What does a Pinterest integration actually do?
Usually two things. It pulls spend, impressions, and clicks from Pinterest at the campaign and ad level, so the tool can calculate ROAS and CAC for Pinterest alongside everything else. And it matches orders to Pinterest touchpoints the pixel recorded, usually through the click and its UTMs. Some tools also send conversion data back to Pinterest through its conversions API, so Pinterest’s own optimization gets a better signal. Ask any vendor which of these they do, because “integrates with Pinterest” can mean only the first one.
Why does Pinterest look worse in an attribution tool than in Pinterest?
Pinterest’s own reporting counts conversions it can link to its ads inside its attribution windows, including some after a view or a save. An independent tool usually needs a click it can see, and then has to decide how much credit that click gets against everything that came after it. People often use Pinterest for planning, so the gap between first seeing a product and buying it can be long, and the final click often comes through search or email. On a last-click model, Pinterest gets very little. On first-touch or multi-touch, it usually gets more. Neither number is the truth, but the gap between them is useful. I am generally skeptical of view credit, as I wrote in view-through conversions are mostly noise, and Pinterest is one of the few channels where I loosen that a little.
Which attribution model should you use for Pinterest?
Look at it on at least two. Last click tells you how often Pinterest closes a sale. First touch tells you how often it starts one. If Pinterest shows up meaningfully on first touch and barely at all on last click, it is working as an awareness channel, and judging it on last-click ROAS will lead you to cut something that feeds the rest of the funnel. Lookback windows matter here too, since a 7-day window will miss the product someone pinned and bought three weeks later. More on that in choosing attribution windows without overthinking it.
How do you check whether Pinterest is actually working?
Add Pinterest as an explicit option in your post-purchase survey, then compare the survey share with the attributed share. If customers name Pinterest far more often than your tool credits it, the tool is undercounting. For a firmer answer, pause or cut Pinterest in a set of regions for a few weeks and compare total sales there with the rest of the country. That is the only way to know whether it is incremental and not just present. The simple version is in running a cheap geo holdout to sanity-check a channel.
What setup do you need?
Consistent UTMs on every Pinterest ad, with campaign and ad identifiers in them. A pixel that loads on every page, ideally with server-side tracking so ad blockers and browser limits do not drop the session. The ad account connected to your attribution tool so spend comes in automatically. And a survey question that names Pinterest. In ThoughtMetric (sponsor), for example, Pinterest is a native ad integration alongside Meta, Google, Bing, and TikTok, and survey answers sit next to the pixel data so you can compare the two directly. The same questions come up for TikTok ads and Snapchat ads.
Setting it up
- Connect Pinterest to your attribution tool and confirm it pulls spend at the ad level.
- Put UTMs with campaign and ad identifiers on every Pinterest ad.
- Judge Pinterest on both first touch and last click, with a lookback of at least 30 days.
- Ask about Pinterest by name in your post-purchase survey.
- Run a regional holdout before cutting the budget.
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