Pinterest Outlines Relevance Improvements to its Pin Recommendations

Pinterest has outlined its latest timeline ranking model update, which it says has increased user engagement and time spent significantly over the previous system.

Pinterest’s latest advance on this front is a new version of its “TransAct” ranking process, which now factors in a broader history of user interactions, in order to better understand each person’s likely interest shifts over time.

The key update here is input. Pinterest’s original TransAct ranking model measured each users’ last 100 actions, as a means to predict their likely interest and engagement patterns.

But TransActV2 measures 160x more interactive inputs per user to better understand their behaviors, and thus, interests, over time.

For example:

“Someone who looks for gardening tips each spring, and Halloween ideas each fall, may not display those behaviors in their recent 100 actions.”

Yet, those shifts would have a big impact on the user experience, if Pinterest could measure your engagement over a longer time window.

TransActV2 solves for this, modelling its predictions on 16k actions instead.

As per Pinterest:

“TransActV2 introduces the Next Action Loss (NAL) as an auxiliary task. This challenges the model not just to predict probability of engagement, but — given today’s context and history — what will the user do next?”

The result is a more engaging, immersive Pin timeline, which Pinterest says has driven double-digit improvements in several areas.

“By leveraging lifelong sequences and Next Action Loss with impression-based negatives, TransActV2 achieves the largest jumps in offline metrics ever recorded in our production pipeline.”

Specifically, Pinterest says that the updated TransAct prediction model has driven:

• A more than 2x increase in top re-pin actions (6.35% overall re-pin increase)
• A +1.41% increase in overall time spent
• A 12.8% decrease in Pin hides (indicating more relevant experience)
• “Increased diversity within Pin timelines, improving serendipitous discovery.

These may not seem like massive increases, but when you’re assessing a volume of actions across 570 million active users, that’s a lot of activity, and a lot more engagement within the Pin stream.

Add to this Pinterest’s discovery function updates, including more diverse search tools, and your Pin feed is definitely getting a lot smarter, a lot more personalized, and a lot better at showing more people what they’re most interested in.

It might be worth revisiting Pinterest to see whether it’s a fit for your brand.

You can read Pinterest’s overview of TransActV2 here.