Performance+ · Hew Suber

01The stakes

Dec 2022

Advantage+ and Performance Max, rival automation tools, had a multi-year head start.

Year one beat the $7M bar by 57%; $600M+ is the run rate at full availability.

Automated campaign types were capturing billions in advertiser spending on competing platforms. Pinterest's answer didn't exist yet.

Creating a campaign still took 30+ manual decisions, and there was no shared framework for what automation should look like. The first-year revenue target was $7M.

Standard setup · 30+ decisions

Choose targeting criteria
Set bid strategy manually
Configure demographics
Select interest categories
Define where ads appear
Manage creative rotation
Set frequency caps
+ 23 more…

Performance+ · 3 inputs

01What's your goal?

02What's your budget?

03Upload your creative (the images).

The system handles the rest.

Leadership wanted “simple.” Simplicity is a byproduct of removing what doesn't yield value, not a goal in itself.

The reframe that set the design agenda

02The standard

Aug 2023 onward

Vision work began August 2023, before the P+ mandate existed. When the org committed, it became the foundation.

A weekly cross-team review became the operating rhythm for four previously siloed workstreams.

Eng wanted incremental migration; Sales wanted both flows. The line held: half-automation erodes trust faster than full commitment.

Performance+ wasn't one product on one team. It touched every surface in Ads Manager, so the work was the standard four teams shipped against.

Frameworks

The Optimal Setup Framework, mapping advertiser intent to downstream defaults, became the shared mental model across PM, Eng, and PMM. It's still used to onboard new designers.

Team

Led five designers and two researchers. Grew a junior into owning the core creation flow; coached the designer who went on to lead the Value Expression line.

Research

Directed the studies that de-risked the biggest bets, answering the hard questions first: does the number of conversions matter more, or their value? What are the real tradeoffs between bid signals and constraints?

Adoption

Designed the adoption engine: upsell modals, account banners, journey-stage messaging. Active automated campaigns grew 15× in three weeks.

Optimal Setup Framework diagram: advertiser intent mapped to downstream configuration. — **Fig. 01 · Optimal Setup Framework.** Advertiser intent, meaning objective, budget, and creative type, informs every downstream configuration. Adopted across four teams as the shared design standard.

Range of Automation framework: full auto to manual. — **Fig. 02 · Range of Automation.** Full auto, fine-tuned, recommendations, manual. Defined which advertisers belong at each level and why; used to align product, design, and engineering on scope.

Vision concept slide 1 of 11 — **Fig. 03 · Vision concepts, August 2023.** Advertisers describe their goal in plain language; the system captures intent, configures optimal defaults, and preserves control for those who want it.Eleven slides. Use the arrows or swipe the strip.

Vision concept slide 2 of 11 — **Fig. 03 · Vision concepts, August 2023.** Advertisers describe their goal in plain language; the system captures intent, configures optimal defaults, and preserves control for those who want it.Eleven slides. Use the arrows or swipe the strip.

03Shipped

Oct 2024

Learning Phase shipped in reporting: the system tells advertisers when its data is still calibrating.

Seven features across campaign creation, reporting, and account configuration.

Automation requires trust. Trust requires transparency. Transparency requires explaining what the machine is doing.

From 30+ decisions to three inputs: roughly 60% fewer clicks and less time to a live campaign.

Benchmarked with keystroke-level modeling against Pinterest's standard flow and competing automated products. Every decision point that survived had to earn its keep. The trust came from the system being optimal by default, flexible when needed, and honest about when it was still learning.

Campaign creation before and after: multiple panels reduced to one flow. — **Fig. 04 · Campaign creation.** From multiple panels and 30+ manual decisions to one flow: objective, budget, creative. The system configures the rest.

Pinterest's external Performance+ positioning organized by the Range of Automation framework. — **Fig. 05 · Product positioning.** Pinterest's external framing of Performance+ adopted the Range of Automation framework, organizing the product family across bidding, creative, and targeting.

Learning Phase state in Pinterest ads reporting. — **Fig. 06 · Learning Phase in reporting.** The system says when campaign data is reliable and when the machine is still calibrating. Trust is a reporting feature, and this is where it shipped.

$600M+

Annual revenue at GA

57%

Over year-one target

15×

Campaign growth, 3 wks

7

Features across 4 teams

“Our ad innovations, like Performance+, have a compounding effect over time… We've seen a 20% CPA improvement for advertisers using Performance+ for shopping campaigns.”

Bill Ready CEO, Pinterest · Q4 2024 earnings call

04What it seeded

2025 → 2026

Bid Multiplier shipped first; the broader value expression vision cleared product and design leadership review.

The 2023 vision kept shipping after GA. Product lines are still rolling out through 2026.

Value Expression · “When is performance not enough?” became a product family, $104M in Q4. 2026 roadmap

AI-forward creation · plain-language intent capture; the system builds the campaign around it. 2026 roadmap

Campaign Optimization Score · the feedback loop for detecting suboptimal setups. In experiment

Priority Products · bid prioritization by product group: margin, inventory, seasonality. 2026 roadmap

CTV + offsite extension · Performance+ beyond Pinterest, with AI-powered creative transformation. In progress

The frameworks scaled because they were built to be adopted by others.

The standard four teams shipped against.