Digiday Technology Awards – CDP – The Home Depot Canada

Company Overview

The Home Depot Canada is the largest retailer in Canada for do-it-yourselfers, as well as home improvement, construction and building maintenance professionals. They stock as many as 300,000 home improvement products, tailored to the communities they serve. 

Contobox’s Engagement Management Platform helps advertisers launch interactive display and video campaigns that track, score and unify audience data for retargeting. The platform boasts numerous features including: a Customer Data Platform, True Intent Retargeting, Shoppable ads and more.

Goals

The Home Depot Canada’s flyer strategy has helped get customers in the door for decades. But the strategy needed an upgrade to get visitors purchasing online. While Home Depot had a powerful onsite eCommerce experience digital display had lagged behind. 

The full-funnel strategy was to create content rich interactive display ads that would become an extension of their eCommerce store. First upper-funnel ads would create awareness and collect as much data as possible which would then be used in simpler lower-funnel units for retargeting.    

The data from the interactive display and Home Depot’s website was collected and scored in Contobox’s CDP. The CDP’s custom machine-learning logic with The Home Depot’s 1st and 3rd party data created unified consumer profiles with high, medium and low interest segments.

Challenges

The strategy needed to grab attention and deliver maximum audience data to develop and evolve. The Contobox platform provided scalable, shoppable interactive creative that captured critical interaction data to model audience interest and intent. To achieve this they created dynamic templates and connected their product API into the Contobox platform. This meant that their inventory was available in real-time with localized pricing and availability. 

All of The Home Depot’s display ad engagement and site data helped train the Contobox CDP’s custom machine-learning logic. Allowing them to unify customer data profiles and segment high, medium and low interest audiences for easy anonymization and retargeting. 

Knowing what products interest a potential customer makes all the difference when retargeting. The high-to-low interest audience profiles helped deliver predictive retargeting. The Home Depot’s eCommerce API dynamically delivered what audiences wanted, and what stores had in inventory to deliver.

Results

The mixture of interactive digital display, data collection, audience modelling and retargeting has been paying off.  

Users who engaged with the upper funnel interactive ad units spent an average of 23 seconds in the ad, 64 percent longer than those who engaged with the previous year’s campaigns. Thanks to all that extra time users spent in the ad unit, the upper funnel portion of the campaign saw a 200 percent increase in the number of products clicked in ad, which had a real impact on their bottom line. 

The dynamic retargeting saw the average cart size increase 22% over previous campaigns, and delivered a 27% increase in Return on Ad Spend over previous retargeting campaigns.

Their 2020 campaign increased their YOY sales by 45 percent and lowered their cost-per-acquisition by 65 percent, resulting in a return on ad spend 6X higher than the previous year.

Creative