Pinterest Tag explained: conversion tracking for Pinterest
7 min read
What the Pinterest Tag does, what its numeric tag ID identifies, why its event names are all lower case, and how to tell it apart from claiming your website or Rich Pins.
If Tag Explorer has shown you a card labelled Pinterest Tag with a long number as its title, that is the code reporting website activity back to Pinterest advertising. It is what lets a Promoted Pin be credited with an order, and what builds the audiences your campaigns retarget. Paste your page into Tag Explorer to see this tag on your own site.
Pinterest’s version has a few habits of its own, and every one of them trips somebody up eventually: lower case event names, an enhanced match setting that lives in the wrong place to be noticed, and two completely different Pinterest features that people confuse it with.
What it actually does
The tag loads a script from s.pinimg.com and creates a function called pintrk(). The base code identifies the advertising account and fires a page visit. Anything beyond that is an event you add.
Pinterest uses the result as you would expect: attributing conversions to the Pins that earned them, optimising delivery towards people who convert rather than people who merely click, and building audiences seeded from your converters.
One behaviour is worth planning for. Pinterest is a browsing and planning surface, so a good deal of activity is somebody saving an idea now and acting on it considerably later. Your attribution window in Ads Manager therefore matters more here than on platforms where the decision is immediate, and a window set too tight makes a working campaign look like a failing one.
What the tag ID means
The tag ID is a plain number, commonly thirteen digits, with no letters or prefix. It identifies one Pinterest advertising account, and in the page code it is the value passed to the pintrk load call.
Find yours in Pinterest Ads Manager, in the conversions area where the tag is created, and compare it with what a scan reports. A mismatch usually means an old tag left behind after a trial of Pinterest ads that nobody removed.
It is another bare numeric ID, so in a list it looks much like a Microsoft UET tag ID or a LinkedIn partner ID. Read the card subtitle rather than the digits.
Lower case events, and the one that catches people out
Pinterest’s standard events are written in lower case: pagevisit, viewcategory, search, addtocart, checkout, signup, lead and watchvideo.
The important one is checkout. On almost every other platform a completed sale is a purchase or a payment, so a developer moving a working setup across writes what they know, sends Purchase, and Pinterest quietly files it as a custom event. No error appears anywhere. It simply never shows up where a standard event is expected, and the campaign optimising towards checkouts receives nothing.
Events also carry parameters worth setting: order value, currency, quantity and the line items involved. Without a value on the checkout event, Pinterest can tell you a sale happened but not whether it was worth having, which makes return on ad spend impossible to judge.
Two Pinterest things that are not the tag
Claiming your website is a separate exercise. It attributes Pins linking to your domain back to your account and unlocks analytics for them, and it is done with a verification meta tag in your page head or a DNS record. It is not tracking and it reports no conversions. A scan may show that verification meta tag under SEO / structured data, which is not the same card as the Pinterest Tag.
Rich Pins are also unrelated. They pull product details such as price and availability from the structured data already on your product pages so your Pins stay accurate. Useful, and again nothing to do with conversion tracking. To check whether that structured data is present and valid, our SEO Analyzer reads it.
Enhanced match and the Conversions API
Enhanced match passes a securely hashed email address along with the visitor’s activity, so Pinterest can match a conversion to an account when no Pinterest cookie is available. The hashing happens before anything leaves the page, so the raw address is never sent. The reason it is so often missing is where it lives: it is configured on the tag load call rather than on the events, so anybody who installs by pasting the base code and then adding events never touches it.
The Pinterest Conversions API is the server-side companion, reporting conversions from your systems rather than the browser. It survives ad blockers and the browser tracking restrictions that keep tightening, and it can report sales completed away from the website. Where both routes report one order, each event needs a shared event ID so Pinterest counts it once.
What this looks like in Tag Explorer
Tag Explorer draws the page as a tree. Each Tag Manager container is a branch, its tags are leaves beneath it, and anything hard coded into the page HTML sits under DIRECT ON PAGE.
Pinterest appears as an Advertising card with the tag ID as the title and the tag type as the subtitle, plus a copy button for the ID. Pinterest publishes an official template in the Tag Manager gallery, so a current installation surfaces its ID cleanly. Installed from a pasted snippet it usually appears as a Custom HTML tag instead, showing the tag type as the title with no ID and no copy button, which is normal rather than a fault.
Worth reading: where each copy sits, since one under a container and one under DIRECT ON PAGE is the ecommerce app collision described above; the duplicate banner and red attention badge when the same tag ID is found twice; the info icon that opens a short definition and the Learn more link that brought you here; and Copy tree, if you need to send the whole result to whoever maintains the site.
The tool reads the published container only, and that file carries the tag type and tracking ID but never the human names you gave your tags. It proves the tag is installed, not that it fired: Preview mode in Tag Manager, Pinterest’s own tag health reporting, and the Network tab in your browser developer tools prove that.
What to do if it is missing, duplicated or dead
Missing. No Pinterest card while Pinterest ads are running means no conversion data and no audience accumulating, and audiences only build forwards. Install through the official Tag Manager template, trigger the base tag on all pages, add checkout with a value on your order confirmation page, and publish. Then scan that confirmation page specifically, because a tag present on the homepage and absent at the finish line is the most common version of this fault.
Duplicated. Two cards with the same tag ID means every page visit and every sale is counted twice. Keep the copy you can maintain: if the ecommerce platform integration is doing the job properly, values included, disable the Tag Manager tag rather than the other way around. Two different tag IDs means two accounts are being fed, so confirm which one is billing you before removing anything.
Dead or stale. The Pinterest Tag has no retired version, so it does not go dead by age. The stale case is a tag from an ad account nobody can open, still loading for every visitor and still building audiences you cannot use. Replace it with one from an account you control, and remove the old tag so your pages stop paying for it.
Related guides
- TikTok Pixel explained
- Meta Pixel explained
- Structured data explained
- Custom HTML tags explained
- GTM containers explained
Scan your order confirmation page with Tag Explorer, not just your homepage, and you will learn more about your Pinterest setup in thirty seconds than a month of reports will tell you. If the tag is doubled, or sending checkouts with no value attached, the numbers your campaigns are being judged on are wrong, and untangling that is exactly the work that sits underneath the ChatGPT Ads campaigns we run.
Frequently asked questions
What does a Pinterest tag ID look like?
It is a plain number with no prefix, commonly thirteen digits, and it belongs to one Pinterest advertising account. You will find yours in Pinterest Ads Manager in the conversions area, where the tag is created and managed. In the page code it is the value passed to the pintrk load call.
Why do my Pinterest events have to be lower case?
Because that is how Pinterest defines them. The standard events are written as pagevisit, addtocart, checkout, signup, lead, search, viewcategory and watchvideo, all in lower case, and a completed sale is checkout rather than purchase. An event sent with different capitalisation or a different word is accepted and filed as a custom event, so it will not appear where you expect to select a standard one.
Is claiming my website the same as installing the tag?
No, they are two separate things that both involve adding something to your site. Claiming attributes Pins that link to your domain back to your account and unlocks analytics for them, and it is usually done with a verification meta tag or a DNS record. The Pinterest Tag is a tracking script for advertising. Having one does not give you the other.
What does enhanced match do?
Enhanced match sends a securely hashed email address along with the visitor's activity, so Pinterest can match a conversion to an account even when no Pinterest cookie is available. The address is hashed before it leaves the page, so the raw value is never sent. It is configured on the tag load call rather than on individual events, which is why it is often missed when a tag is installed by copying a snippet.