Pinterest Audiences allow you to target people who have already interacted with your website, your Pinterest content, or your customer data. For Shopify stores, Pinterest audiences are the foundation of retargeting campaigns and are essential for reaching warm audiences who have already expressed interest in your products.
Types of Pinterest Audiences
1. Website Visitor Audiences
Built from Pinterest Tag events on your Shopify store. You can create audiences from all website visitors, or specific visitor segments (product page visitors, cart abandoners, past purchasers).
2. Customer List Audiences
Built by uploading a list of email addresses from your Shopify customer export. Pinterest hashes the emails and matches them against Pinterest user accounts.
3. Engagement Audiences
Built from people who engaged with your Pinterest content — saved your pins, clicked your pins, or followed your account.
4. Actalike Audiences
Pinterest’s equivalent of Lookalike Audiences. Built from any of the above audience types. Pinterest finds users who behave similarly to your seed audience.
How to Create Website Visitor Audiences
Go to Pinterest Ads Manager → Audiences → Create Audience → Website visitors.
Set up these core audiences for a Shopify store:
All website visitors (30 days)
Your broadest retargeting audience. Use with awareness-level retargeting content (testimonials, product benefits).
Product page visitors (14 days)
Users who viewed products but did not purchase. Use with product-specific retargeting ads showing the exact products they viewed, if you have dynamic ads set up.
Add to cart no purchase (7 days)
Rules: triggered Add to Cart AND did NOT trigger Purchase in the last 7 days. Your highest-intent retargeting audience. Use with discount offers or urgency messaging.
Past purchasers (90 days)
Users who triggered the Purchase event. Use for cross-sell campaigns introducing complementary products, or restock reminders.
Pinterest requires at least 100 matched users for audience delivery to begin. Smaller audiences will sit in “populating” status until they reach this threshold. For audience building to work correctly, your Pinterest Tag must be capturing all the relevant events (ProductPageVisit, AddToCart, Purchase).
How to Create Customer List Audiences
In Shopify Admin, go to Customers and export your customer list as a CSV with email addresses. In Pinterest Ads Manager, go to Audiences → Create Audience → Customer list. Upload your CSV (column header must be “email”). Pinterest will hash and match the emails.
Pinterest typically matches 30–50% of email addresses to Pinterest accounts. Consumer product brands with female-skewing customer bases tend to see higher match rates, as Pinterest’s user base skews female and heavily engaged in home, fashion, and food categories.
Actalike Audiences: Expand Your Best Audiences
After you have created your website visitor or customer list audiences, create Actalike audiences from them:
- Go to Audiences → Create Audience → Actalike
- Select your seed audience (e.g. Past Purchasers)
- Set the size (1% = most similar to your seed, 5% = larger but less precise)
- Select your target country
Actalike audiences from past purchasers are one of the most effective prospecting targeting options on Pinterest, because they identify new users who behave like people who have already bought from you.
Why Audience Building Depends on Tracking Quality
All Pinterest audience types that use website data require the Pinterest Tag to be capturing events correctly. If your Tag is not firing AddToCart events or not capturing Purchase events on the thank-you page, those audience segments will not build. An audience that should contain thousands of cart abandoners might have only a few hundred because most cart events are not being tracked.
Build Better Pinterest Audiences Starting with Accurate Tracking
Your Pinterest audiences are only as large and accurate as the events feeding them. Before investing heavily in Pinterest retargeting campaigns, verify that your Tag is capturing all the events your audience strategy depends on.
Book your free Shopify tracking audit here and we will verify your Pinterest Tag setup and identify any audience-building gaps.