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Goals
The Home Depot has been ahead of the curve in Smart Home products. Low market awareness and insufficient product knowledge are still adoption barriers for the category. 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% and incremental top-line growth of up to 10%, 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.
By launching a full funnel marketing campaign with creative connected to their Customer Data Platform (CDP) they could learn where customers were along their buying journey, understand products they were interested in, and their customers’ needs. Allowing them to offer the most relevant products in the personalized lower-funnel phase to drive sales.
Challenges
This was the first time The Home Depot ran data-linked creatives concurrently (upper and lower phases) in conjunction with their website data. Their CDP’s shopper intelligence engine analyzed successful customer journeys and contextual influence factors (including: location, weather, promotions, and sales trends) from all 3 entities.
Their website and programmatic creative were equipped with True Intent tracking code, which measured how each user interacted with products and features delivering in-depth audience data to their CDP in real-time. This allowed for real-time personalized 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.
This ensured they could display products at scale in ads with the correct local availability and pricing. While machine learning kept improving the recommendations and the return on ad spend as the campaign went on.
Results
Combining their programmatic advertising and their ecommerce site’s data paid off. The campaign’s upper funnel phase delivered exceptional results for The Home Depot’s main awareness and 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 delivered 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.