Digiday Technology Awards eCommerce – 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.

To truly replace their print flyers with a digital alternative they needed a mix of technology and creativity. They worked with Contobox to bring their digital display to the next level with interactivity and advanced data collection and segmentation capabilities. 

The strategy was to create content rich interactive display that would become an extension of their eCommerce store. The units would showcase a wide range of products while collecting data on what products were sparking the most interest across the country.  

Machine learning through Contobox’s CDP would build unified consumer profiles segmented by interest and intent. The Home Depot could then activate this data by retargeting audiences with personalized display.

Challenges

The first challenge was being able to produce a weekly flyer rapidly for the digital ecosystem. 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 ensuring their ads are accurate and can be produced in a fraction of the time.

Contobox helped develop scalable, shoppable interactive creative to capture critical interaction data to model audience interest and intent. Their True Intent tracking and CDP provided the right mix of 1st party data collection, storage, segmentation and profiling. Audiences could then be easily anonymized for 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 using The Home Depot’s eCommerce API to dynamically deliver what audiences wanted.

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