Daily Marketing News, September 18, 2026: ads inside Pinterest visual search
Pinterest has sold advertisers something that used to be organic only: image search results. Facebook pages without a paid subscription were shown a cap of 2 link posts per month. And a court ordered Google to rewrite the rules of its ad auctions and to seat an antitrust monitor next to it.
Story of the day: Pinterest starts selling ads inside image search
On 17 September 2026, at its annual advertiser conference Pinterest Presents, the platform announced ads in visual search. Pinterest is a visual bookmarking service: people save images, called pins, to themed boards and look for ideas with a picture rather than with words. You photograph a vase or upload someone else's photo, and the platform serves up similar images and products.
Until now paid ads lived in the main feed and in separate ad formats, while visual search results stayed purely organic: whatever matched by similarity is what you saw. Now ads will appear in two new places: inside visual search answers and on the large pin card, which the platform calls the pin close up, that is, the screen where a person studies one specific image and decides whether to save it or follow it further.
Pinterest gave the scale in the same announcement: more than 80 billion searches a month, with the vast majority of them visual. The format is rolling out in beta in select countries over the coming weeks, and the platform did not disclose the country list. Social Media Today covered both the visual search ads and the rest of the conference announcements.
Why this matters to anyone promoting products. Getting into that kind of result set depends not on a text keyword in the description but on how the image looks: how close it is to what the person photographed or saved. And this goes beyond Pinterest. Image search already sits in Google Lens and in marketplaces, and everywhere it works with the picture, not the headline.
Hence one simple job for this week: rebuild your product images. The whole product, one per frame, no collages and no text overlays, a clean background plus a shot in a room setting, different angles of the same model as separate pins. If your listings all use the same photo with a watermark in the corner, you lose in similarity search to whoever shot theirs properly.
More news for 18 September 2026
A Facebook Page is a public account for a brand or creator, separate from a personal profile. A week earlier Meta launched the Meta One for Business paid tiers themselves, where the number of links in posts and in Instagram Reels is capped depending on the plan; Facebook links are not part of the tiers yet, but the cap is already being shown. Meta ran a similar test in December 2025 on a narrow group of pages, with media pages excluded. 2 posts a month works out to 24 link posts a year. And here is the number that explains the logic: per Meta's Widely Viewed Content report for Q1 2026, 98.7% of post views in the US contained no external link, and the share of viewed content with links fell from 9.8% in 2022 to 1.3%. That is 13 out of every 1,000 views going to posts with links. Social Media Today reported the notice. If you drive traffic from Facebook to a site, count from your own analytics how many clicks the platform gives you per month, and decide whether that is worth a subscription.
This is about Google's ad stack: the set of tools publishers use to sell impressions on their sites and advertisers use to buy them, with Google owning the auction itself, the buying tools and the selling tools at the same time. Loosening restrictions for participants means third party systems will be able to enter that auction on terms that did not exist until now. An external monitor in the ruling is a sign that the changes will not be a one off, but supervised and continuing. For anyone buying media there are two direct consequences: the price of an impression is set at auction, and the inventory available for buying changes. Nothing has taken effect yet, so nothing needs changing, but it is worth comparing your cost per thousand impressions before and after in your own reports.
Performance+ is campaigns where audience selection, bidding and creative assembly are handed to automation instead of manual settings. A Priority Products setting appeared: the advertiser specifies which products the automation should push first, a lever that did not exist inside Performance+ at all before. Second: self serve A/B testing, that is, comparing campaign variants without going through a platform rep. Third: a separate objective for promoting mobile apps with optimization toward installs. For regular users Pinterest is releasing a restyle feature: it redraws a photo of a room and shows several decor options with products, launching in the US and Canada over the coming weeks. The platform also announced season 2 of the show "Bring My Pinterest to Life"; season 1 ran on Roku TV. All of it comes from the same conference announcement recapped by Social Media Today.
LinkedIn is the professional social network owned by Microsoft, and Campaign Manager is its ad account. The material walks through the Companies Hub section: it shows how employees of the companies you pick behaved with your page's free posts and with its ads, and lets you build a campaign audience out of that list. Before this, the link between a company's organic attention and paid promotion aimed at it was less obvious in the account: audiences were built by industry, size and job title. Social Media Today recapped the guide. Who it helps: anyone selling services and software to other companies. The approach works and costs less than cold targeting by industry, because you pay for impressions to people at companies that already read you.
Threads is Meta's text social network tied to an Instagram account, a direct competitor to X. Per the announcement recapped by Social Media Today, creators can now surface the podcast logo and show details in the profile, while listeners can save favorite episodes inside the app. Before, a podcast in Threads could only be mentioned in ordinary posts with a link to an external player, with no dedicated spot for the show in the profile. Who needs this: anyone running a podcast, an audio column or audio interviews. The reason to look at your profile this week is simple: platforms almost always boost in recommendations the format they have just built a storefront for.
This is the Meta Holiday Insights Center, a business section on the Facebook Business site with ready made data collections and guides. Per the Social Media Today description, it includes an overview of working with Meta's AI tools and a separate playbook for small business, including how people shop for gifts inside Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. The materials are free and useful as a reference point for Q4 2026 for anyone selling products through those apps. Read them with one correction in mind: platform recommendations are written so that you invest more in the platform's formats, so check any conclusion against your own campaigns from last December.
Reddit is a forum style social network made of themed communities where people ask each other for advice before buying, and its discussions regularly show up both in search results and in chatbot answers. Per the Social Media Today description, the guide covers how users search for and choose products inside the app, and lists the categories that get searched most. The fact itself matters too: the platform is producing dedicated materials for small advertisers ahead of the sales season, meaning it is counting on their budgets in Q4 2026. If your product gets discussed in communities, start by reading those discussions, not by launching a campaign.
What to do with this: for creators, advertisers and site owners
- Rebuild your product photos for image search: the whole product, one per frame, clean background, several angles as separate images. In Pinterest, ads now sit inside visual search answers, and getting there depends on the picture, not on the text in the description.
- Count how many clicks your Facebook page actually brings to the site per month. The cap without a subscription is shown as 2 link posts, and per Meta's Q1 2026 report the share of viewed content with links in the US is already 1.3%. If clicks are few, move the link into the profile bio and a pinned post, and publish feed posts that do not send people off site.
- Open the Companies Hub section in your LinkedIn ad account and build an audience from companies whose employees already read your free posts. That costs less than cold targeting by industry and job title.
- Download the Meta and Reddit holiday materials and compare their conclusions with your own December 2025 numbers before reshuffling your Q4 2026 budget.
- Test one paid placement in visual search as soon as the beta reaches your country, and judge it against your usual feed campaigns rather than against the platform's own case studies.
Advertising is moving to where a person is already looking at a picture and has nearly decided. Meanwhile the link out has gotten cheap enough to sit at 1.3% of views.
Writes about: SMM, paid boosts, ads, traffic, suppliers, the market from the inside, daily news
