How Pinterest's New Media Planner Fits into a Cross-Platform Ad Workflow

Pinterest added a built-in Media Planner to Ads Manager in January 2026, and it changes how social media teams can plan upper-funnel campaigns without switching between spreadsheets and platform dashboards.

Key facts at a glance

• Media Planner lives inside Pinterest Ads Manager and covers audience discovery, impression estimates, and cost forecasting in one view
• The tool supports both awareness campaigns (impressions, reach, CPM) and consideration campaigns (clicks, CPC)
• Scenario modeling lets advertisers compare budgets, flight dates, and audience segments side by side
• Plans can be shared via direct link or exported as files for team review
• Media Planner is accessed through the Manage campaigns menu in Ads Manager

What Pinterest Media Planner Does Inside Ads Manager

Media Planner has three main functions. Explore Audiences lets you discover and size audience segments based on demographics, interests, and keyword affinities drawn from Pinterest's own data. Estimate Opportunities generates projections for awareness metrics like impressions, reach, frequency, and CPM, along with consideration metrics such as clicks and CPC. Model Scenarios is where you compare different campaign setups across budgets, audience selections, flight dates, and creative formats, which means you can test variations without committing ad spend.

To access it, log into Ads Manager, click the menu in the top left, go to Manage campaigns, and select Media Planner. Pinterest introduced the tool to consolidate what previously required external spreadsheets and manual calculations into a single planning view.

How Media Planner Replaces External Spreadsheets for Ad Planning

Before Media Planner, most teams running Pinterest campaigns would pull audience data from Pinterest analytics, estimate impressions based on past performance, and forecast costs in a separate spreadsheet. That workflow had two problems. The data was always slightly stale by the time it reached the spreadsheet, and every new scenario meant rebuilding formulas manually.

Media Planner pulls live data from Pinterest, so your audience sizes and cost projections reflect current conditions rather than last month's export. The scenario modeling feature also removes the need to duplicate spreadsheet tabs when you want to compare a two-week flight against a four-week flight, or test how narrowing your audience from broad interests to specific keyword affinities affects projected CPM.

That said, this is not a full media planning replacement for teams running campaigns across five or more platforms. Media Planner only covers Pinterest, so if your workflow already relies on a cross-platform tool like Mediaocean or Basis, Pinterest's planner fills in one channel's data more accurately but does not replace the aggregation layer. For teams whose paid social budget is split primarily between Pinterest and one or two other platforms, though, it removes a real friction point.

Where Pinterest Media Planner Fits Next to Instagram Story Scheduling

If your team runs paid campaigns on Pinterest alongside organic Instagram Stories, the planning and publishing sides of your workflow sit in different tools, and that is fine. Trying to force everything into one dashboard usually means sacrificing depth on each platform.

Media Planner handles the forecasting side for Pinterest campaigns, while Storrito handles the publishing side for Instagram Stories, including scheduling, interactive stickers like polls and quizzes, and link stickers. These two tools do not overlap, which is the point. Your Pinterest ad budget planning does not need to live in the same tool as your Instagram Story calendar.

Where teams get stuck is when planning happens in isolation. A campaign manager sets Pinterest budgets in Media Planner without knowing what the Instagram Story calendar looks like for the same week. The fix is a shared calendar or project board, something as simple as a Notion page or Google Sheet, where both the Pinterest campaign flight dates and the Storrito publishing schedule are visible together.

Combining Pinterest Ad Forecasts with Storrito's Story Calendar

A practical weekly workflow for a team running both channels could look like this:

• Use Media Planner to set Pinterest campaign budgets and flight dates for the week, saving the plan with a shared link.
• Build the Instagram Story sequence in Storrito for the same period, scheduling slides with relevant stickers.
• Drop both the Media Planner link and the Storrito schedule into a shared project doc so everyone on the team sees the full picture.
• After the campaign flight ends, compare Pinterest's actual performance against Media Planner projections and check Instagram Story engagement in Storrito analytics to spot patterns across channels.

This is lightweight on purpose. Teams with bigger budgets and more platforms will want a proper cross-platform reporting tool, but for a two or three person team managing Pinterest ads and Instagram Stories, this setup covers the core planning needs without adding another paid subscription.

What This Means in Practice

Media Planner is most useful for teams that spend meaningful budget on Pinterest and previously cobbled together forecasts in spreadsheets. If your Pinterest ad spend is under a few hundred dollars a month, the manual approach probably works well enough. The scenario modeling becomes valuable once you are comparing multiple audience segments or testing different budget allocations, which usually happens at higher spend levels.

For Storrito users, nothing changes about how you schedule or publish Instagram Stories. The value is in having better data on the Pinterest side so that cross-platform planning conversations are grounded in real projections rather than rough guesses. If you are already running both channels, try building one shared planning doc that pulls from Media Planner exports and your Storrito calendar.