Build Your Smart Home Today
Click on the creative below to interact with the ad unit
Insights & Ideas
The Home Depot has been ahead of the curve in Smart Home products. With a projected compound annual revenue growth rate of 10.7% (Source: Statista), and household penetration expected to hit 34% by 2023 (Source: Global Consumer Survey), The Home Depot looked to maintain their hold on the category.
According to Parks Associates, low market awareness and insufficient product knowledge are still adoption barriers for the smart home category. The Home Depot knew that if they wanted to stand out from the competition and make smarter investments, they needed to understand audience interest and intent, so they could leverage those insights and move prospects down the purchase funnel.
With this in mind The Home Depot needed a campaign to both educate consumers and drive sales. Data-driven full funnel campaigns have been shown to provide marketing efficiency gains of up to 30 percent and incremental top-line growth of up to 10 percent, all without increasing the marketing budget (Source: McKinsey & Company). In addition, research by Econsultancy shows that marketers see on average, a 20% increase in sales by personalizing audience experiences. Seeing the opportunity The Home Depot knew it was time to focus a full funnel marketing campaign for their Smart Home suite.
By launching a single campaign connected by their Customer Data Platform (CDP) they could learn where their customers were along their buying journey, what products they were interested in, and understand their customers’ needs to offer the most relevant products in the lower-funnel phase to drive sales.
Media Execution
Although the programmatic campaign was divided into two phases they were run concurrently. As part of their campaign’s upper funnel phase, The Home Depot cast a wide net, using their deep 1st party consumer intent and purchasing data, to target lookalike audiences and customers new and old. This was augmented with a mix of 3rd party in-market and contextual targeting, with the goal of building consumer awareness and consideration for their suite of Smart Home products.
Their interactive display creative was broken into two main messages, ‘Build your smart home today’ and ‘stay connected with the brands you love’. The Smart Home Today prospecting creative invited audiences to explore an immersive house room-by-room, filled with the latest Smart Home Technology. While the ‘Stay connected’ messaging explored top products by several Smart Home brands.
Audience interest and intent data collected from the upper funnel campaign fueled the performance portion, automating the unit’s carousel with personalized in-ad product recommendations. This real-time creative data was connected to The Home Depot’s eCommerce API, dynamically serving up-to-date pricing, promos, and ratings alongside every product. A simple product carousel was used to highlight multiple products that auto rotated (or could be controlled by the user) – increasing the odds that a relevant product would catch the consumer’s eye. Data from the lower funnel phase was fed back into the upper funnel phase through the CDP, meaning as each phase ran the data they generated made the other phase stronger.
Innovation
This was the first time The Home Depot ran data linked creatives concurrently (upper and lower phase) in conjunction with their website data. Their CDP’s shopper intelligence engine analyzed successful customer journeys and contextual influence factors (including: location, time, weather, events and promotions, and sales trends) from all 3 entities.
The creative was also built with True Intent tracking code, which measured how each user interacted with products and features in the ad, and on The Home Depot’s website, delivering in-depth audience data to their CDP in real-time. This allowed for real-time product recommendations in the lower-funnel units with dynamic creative connected to Home Depot’s eCommerce API, so they could dynamically serve up-to-date pricing, promos, and ratings alongside every product. While Machine learning kept improving the recommendations and the return on ad spend as the campaign went on.
Results
The campaign’s upper funnel phase delivered exceptional results for The Home Depot’s main awareness/consideration KPIs. The interactive units delivered an engagement rate of 1.99% (206% higher than the retail benchmark) and had users spending 33 seconds of voluntary time in-unit (106% higher than the retail benchmark). In addition, this phase of the campaign did deliver a return on ad spend 13% higher than The Home Depot’s average.
The Lower funnel phase's personalized product recommendations delivered an incredible clickthrough rate 25 times higher than the retail average. Ultimately, the campaign’s personalized product recommendations delivered a 315% increase in return on ad spend over The Home Depot’s benchmarks. Proving that connecting audiences with Smart Home technologies was a smart strategy.
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