Pinterest reported Q2 2026 results on August 4. According to Pinterest's official earnings release, revenue hit $1.18 billion, up 18% year-over-year. Monthly active users reached a record 640 million, up 11%. U.S. and Canada revenue grew 18% to $880 million — a five-point acceleration from Q1 that Pinterest attributed directly to AI-driven ad improvements.
CEO Bill Ready called AI a "clear accelerant." That's the kind of language you expect on an earnings call. What's less expected is the advertiser data underneath it.
Per Pinterest's Q2 earnings disclosures, Performance+ campaigns delivered 28% better ROAS for small and mid-sized advertisers who adopted ROAS bidding during the quarter. That's a Q2 result, not a projection.
What Performance+ actually does
Performance+ is Pinterest's AI campaign suite. It automates bidding, creative optimization, audience targeting, and measurement inside a single campaign type — roughly equivalent to what Meta Advantage+ or Google PMax do on their respective platforms.
Per Pinterest's earnings disclosures, as of Q1 2026 about 30% of Pinterest's lower-funnel ad revenue ran through Performance+ campaigns. Advertisers using it were growing their lower-funnel spend more than twice as fast as those who hadn't adopted it.
The 28% ROAS improvement is specific to accounts running ROAS bidding within Performance+, not a platform-wide average. The distinction matters: Pinterest is saying the algorithm improves when you give it a purchase-value signal rather than a click or engagement goal. That's the same dynamic you see on Meta and Google — the smarter the goal signal, the better the algorithm performs.
Pinterest plans to expand AI bidding access to more advertisers in Q3 2026, beyond the current pilot group.
Smart Assembly: lower setup barrier
A common reason brands skip Pinterest is catalog setup. Building and maintaining a product catalog on a fourth or fifth platform is friction most teams won't absorb without a clear payoff.
Pinterest launched Smart Assembly to remove that barrier. It lets advertisers upload multiple product images without a full catalog, and then Pinterest's AI assembles and tests combinations to serve the best-performing ad. According to Pinterest's Q2 earnings disclosures, early testing showed a 6% average improvement in click-through rate versus manually built static ads. Pinterest is broadening Smart Assembly access in Q3.
A 6% CTR lift isn't dramatic. The value is the entry point — brands that were previously skipping Pinterest because of setup overhead now have a lower-friction way to test.
The platform's actual scale
640 million monthly active users is a record. The audience skews toward purchase-driven intent: people saving products they plan to buy, planning home projects, building gift lists. It's not browsing the way Instagram or TikTok work. That intent profile translates to a shorter path from ad exposure to purchase consideration for the right product categories.
Per Pinterest's Q2 earnings, U.S. and Canada average revenue per user hit $8.30, up 14% year-over-year. That ARPU is still well below Meta's — which means Pinterest's inventory is priced below what the intent signal arguably deserves. The gap between intent quality and CPM is where performance-focused brands have historically found margin.
Pinterest raised its full-year 2026 adjusted EBITDA margin guidance to approximately 30%, up from 29%, per its Q2 earnings release. That's a company that's tightening its cost structure while revenue accelerates — which usually means ad pricing catches up eventually.
What this means for your channel mix
Most DTC brands treat Pinterest as a footnote. They run a few standard campaigns, see middling results, and put the real budget into Meta and Google. The Q2 data doesn't change the platform hierarchy — Pinterest is not going to out-scale Meta for most brands this year.
But the logic for a performance pilot shifts when you have a 28% ROAS benchmark from a Q2 that already happened, and when your Meta and Google CPMs are heading up through Q4. The question is whether your Pinterest spend — if you have any — is actually running through Performance+ or sitting on standard campaigns that predate the AI suite.
Given that only 30% of Pinterest's lower-funnel revenue was on Performance+ as of Q1 (per Pinterest's Q2 earnings), there's a reasonable chance you're in the majority that hasn't switched yet.
The brands most likely to find value: apparel, home goods, beauty, food, fitness, and anything with a strong visual product. If your average order value is high enough that a 28% ROAS improvement on a secondary channel materially changes your blended return, the math is worth running.
If you want to see how Pinterest fits against your current channel spend — and where your budget is actually working — the free account audit at Gromerce pulls the picture together in a few minutes.
Waiting until Performance+ is the default to test it means you'll pay more for the same results later.
Sources: Pinterest, Social Media Today, Yahoo Finance, MediaPost, August 2026
