Pinterest

Overview

Pinterest's advertising tag — the Pinterest Tag — tracks visitor behavior on advertiser websites to measure campaign performance, optimize ad delivery, and build audiences for targeting on the Pinterest platform. It records page views, product interactions, and purchase conversions, enabling retargeting, conversion-based campaign optimization, and lookalike audience creation for Pinterest ad campaigns.

What This Script Does

The Pinterest Tag loads JavaScript from s.pinimg.com and fires tracking events across the visitor journey on an advertiser's website. It supports both standard events (PageVisit, ViewCategory, Search, AddToCart, Checkout, WatchVideo, Lead, SignUp, Custom) and Enhanced Match for cross-device attribution.

Page View Tracking Fires a PageVisit event on every page load. Collects: page URL, page title, referrer, and timestamp. This builds a behavioral profile of which pages each visitor browses.

Product and Commerce Events For e-commerce sites, the tag fires:

• ViewCategory — when a user browses a product category page, including category name and product list
• AddToCart — when a user adds a product to cart, including product ID, product name, price, currency, and quantity
• Checkout — on the order confirmation page, including order value, currency, product IDs, and quantity

Conversion Attribution Conversion events are matched against Pinterest's ad click and impression log to determine which Pinterest campaigns drove on-site actions. This attribution data feeds campaign ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) reporting in the Pinterest Ads Manager.

Enhanced Match When enabled, the tag hashes user-provided email addresses (SHA-256) before sending to Pinterest. This allows Pinterest to match site visitors to Pinterest accounts for cross-device tracking and to extend attribution windows beyond cookie-based matching.

Audience Building The tag builds custom audiences (e.g., "added to cart but did not purchase") and seeds lookalike audience models for Pinterest ad targeting. These audiences are used to serve ads within the Pinterest platform.

Cookies set:

• _pinterest_sess (first-party, session) — Pinterest session identifier for logged-in users
• _pin_unauth (first-party, 1 year) — anonymous visitor identifier for non-logged-in users
• _pinterest_ct_ua (third-party via ct.pinterest.com, 1 year) — Pinterest conversion tracking identifier
• _epik (first-party, 1 year) — Pinterest enhanced conversion identifier for cross-device matching

Domains contacted: s.pinimg.com (script), ct.pinterest.com (conversion events), log.pinterest.com (logging), analytics.pinterest.com (analytics endpoint)

Data collected per event: IP address, User-Agent, page URL, referrer, Pinterest click ID (epik), event type, product data, hashed email (if Enhanced Match enabled), timestamp.

Consent & Compliance

GDPR/ePrivacy: The Pinterest Tag performs cross-site tracking, behavioral profiling, and personal data sharing with Pinterest for advertising purposes — all requiring explicit opt-in consent under GDPR Article 7. The ePrivacy Directive requires consent before setting advertising cookies (_pin_unauth, _pinterest_ct_ua, _epik). Enhanced Match involves processing hashed email addresses, constituting personal data under GDPR.

CCPA/CPRA: The Pinterest Tag shares visitor behavioral data and conversion data with Pinterest for advertising purposes, qualifying as selling or sharing personal information. Sites must honor opt-out requests and disclose Pinterest advertising in their privacy policy.

EU-US Data Transfers: Pinterest Inc. participates in the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF).

IAB TCF: IAB TCF Purposes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 apply to Pinterest advertising and conversion tracking.

Consent category: Marketing.

Should You Block This Without Consent?

Yes. The Pinterest Tag is a marketing pixel used exclusively for advertising conversion tracking, audience building, and retargeting. It has no functional purpose for the site visitor. Block the Pinterest Tag entirely until marketing consent is obtained.