Understanding how shoppers decide on Pinterest by simulating the entire purchase journey
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The challenge
Platforms sell their influence to advertisers with self-reported metrics, and advertisers have learned to discount them. Pinterest wanted proof from actual decision behavior: which platform-specific factors drive confident shopping decisions, measured, not claimed.
The solution
We first mapped the shopping journey as it actually unfolds: a week-long diary study, nine live shop-alongs observing real purchases across platforms, and a decision quality diagnostic with 500 shoppers to isolate the strongest hypotheses. A MaxDiff study with advertisers, the audience the evidence had to convince, prioritized which questions to test.
We then built high-fidelity working replicas of Pinterest, Instagram, and Google Search, composed from a pool of roughly 7,000 images with native features like pinning, saving, and bookmarking, and content personalized to each participant's shopping category and style. Across 2,400 simulated shopping sessions we ran five behavioral experiments, tracking save rates, revisit frequency, image-view duration, time-to-purchase, and a wider set of decision variables, to isolate Pinterest's specific influence on shopper confidence.
The impact
The experiments produced 29 quantifiable, evidence-backed Pinterest strengths, each grounded in observed behavior rather than what shoppers say about themselves. We built the findings into a strategic narrative now used with Pinterest's advertiser base as proof of the platform's influence on shopping decisions, and the same evidence supports the company's internal strategic choices.
