Every time I embark on a home modeling or repair project, I know my journey will start with The Home Depot. It’s my go-to destination for all my household needs. And apparently, I’m not the only one—a survey from Today’s Homeowner revealed that Home Depot is America’s favorite home improvement store.
It’s also the world’s largest home improvement store, with over 2,300 brick-and-mortar locations, 3.6 billion annual visits to homedepot.com, and 1.76 billion customer transactions, with 55% of online orders being fulfilled in stores.
All this to say, there’s a huge value in Home Depot advertising. The outlet has become one of the main sources of sales for a wide chain of suppliers, and your company could be the next to leverage advertising on The Home Depot to boost your product sales and gain consumer trust.
What is Home Depot Retail Media+?
Home Depot Retail Media+ serves as Home Depot’s advertising platform, empowering businesses to showcase their products to a vast audience of DIYers and home improvement enthusiasts. This platform offers unparalleled visibility for your brand, allowing you to advertise on The Home Depot’s website, mobile app, email list, and in-store network.
According to The Home Depot, Retail Media+ partners see the following benefits:
- A return on ad spend over double their initial investment.
- One-and-a-half times the amount of incremental traffic.
- Conversion rates up 26%.
- Sales up 28% per visit.
The Home Depot reported $37.7 billion in sales in the third quarter of 2023. With Retail Media+, you can decide how much of that share you will contribute to in 2024.
Home Depot’s Advertising Objectives
Every customer is different. To effectively reach all types of Home Depot customers, you need to have a diverse advertising strategy that caters to the unique perspectives of each buyer.
Keep in mind that not everyone visiting Home Depot’s website is in a buy-now mindset. (Remember, Home Depot’s website sees 3.6 billion annual visits but 1.76 billion customer transactions). Think about all that a home project needs before its execution. Oftentimes, the actual purchase of a product is one of the last steps taken.
Fortunately, Retail Media+ has different advertising capabilities you can use to engage and position your product and drive diverse buyers to your product pages. Let’s explore the different types of ad placements for each stage of the buyer journey.
Offsite Advertising
When potential customers are in their research phase, they typically depend on a few different sources before making a purchase. More than 80% of U.S. shoppers say they often compare prices before making an online purchase. And 98% of consumers say reviews are a necessary resource when making purchasing decisions.
This is why offiste advertising is important. With offsite ads, you can essentially “follow” potential buyers through their research journey, increasing your chances of staying on their mind. You’ll have the ability to target customers as they visit different websites, including Facebook, Instagram, Google, and more. That way, your products and brand won’t be forgotten as potential buyers sift through competitors.
Onsite Advertising
As we’ve discussed twice now, billions of consumers sift through The Home Depot’s website and mobile app looking for the best products for their hope project. Strategically placed ads on Home Depot’s platforms not only puts your products in brands in front of in-demand buyers, but also allows your product to appear endorsed by the Home Depot brand—one that these consumers likely trust, considering they’re on the platform.
Using any of the different banners available on the Retail Media+ platform, a supplier can reach specific customers by selecting any of the ad types available (more on the ad types in the next section below).
Email Advertising
Home Depot’s advertising platform allows you to place an ad in their weekly promotional emails to their most loyal customers, a way to create a 360 brand and sales strategy within Home Depot’s advertising application.
The retailer also allows you to build emails with customizable messaging and audience targeting, while also allowing the re-marketing of products to specific users who engaged with them but may not have closed the deal.
Product Content & Photography
With all these different ad placements and formats, sellers might be worried about how their products will appear. Fortunately, Retail Media+ can help you create professional, eye-catching ads and photos for each type of advertisement. The Home Depot advertising platforms have a variety of templates to choose from, so you advertisers can focus on selling and not on design.
Benefits of Home Depot Advertising
Home Depot offers many benefits to business owners looking to sell home improvement products, many of which we’ve already discussed. But in my eyes, these are the three biggest benefits:
- Unparalleled reach: Home Depot receives 3.6B website visits a year from customers looking for products like yours. Home Depot advertising allows you to position your brand in front of their billions of loyal customers and offer easy pick-up at any of their 2,300+ locations nationwide.
- Massive results: Retail Media+ partners see a 2x return on their ad spend on average and customers are 26% more likely to convert for Retail Media+ products.
- Advertising support: Not only will you enjoy real-time reporting with their self-service portal but also a support team that will assist you if any questions arise, reaching them through live chat available from Mon-Fri 9 am to 5 pm EST.
Types of Home Depot Ads
To reach potential customers within the different stages of the buying funnel, Home Depot’s advertising platforms have different ad options for sellers to promote their product or brand.
Banner Ads
Banner ads are strategically placed on general pages to effectively raise brand awareness or promote special offers to the target audience.
Carousel Ads
Carousel ads allow the advertiser to showcase different products, multiple photos of the same product, or various materials that might be used for a specific project.
In-grid Ads
In-grid ads are strategically placed at the top of the product results before the organic results to enhance visibility and impact.
Customized Email Ads
This type of advertising allows you to customize email messages and retarget customers who have engaged with your product or brand.
How to Target Your Audience Through Home Depot Advertising
If you sell gardening equipment, your ads aren’t going to be super relevant on the pages that feature chandeliers. Fortunately, Home Depot’s advertising platform is well aware of this.
The Home Depot website is well-structured by categories, allowing DIYers to easily filter for products they seek. Similarly, Retail Media+ offers a vast category selection so you can match your products to their correct categories. This way, the customer who’s working on a kitchen remodel isn’t going to see your ads for gardening tools, but the one who’s redesigning their backyard likely will.
As a best practice, avoid using two different items from different categories in one campaign. You don’t want your product ads popping up under an irrelevant category.
Always group your campaigns with products belonging to the same category to stay relevant to what the Home Depot user is looking for at the moment. The more specific you can be with your different campaigns, the better results you will obtain.
Getting Started with Home Depot Advertising
It’s easy to get set up with Home Depot advertising. In fact, you can do so in three steps:
- Become an authorized Home Depot seller.
- Fill out the Retail Media+ form
- Wait for a team rep to reach out to you to help set up your advertising account.
Of course, there’s an even easier path to start seeing success on Home Depot.
- Schedule a call with Search Nurture.
Our powerhouse team of eCommerce experts will handle the daily management and optimization of your Home Depot advertising account with a data-driven strategy. We’re the only marketing agency with specialized offerings for Home Depot, so you’re in good hands. We’ll take care of the hard stuff so you can sit back, relax, and enjoy an increase in sales.
Your success is our main goal, and we have a proven track record for helping our clients achieve major results. For example, SKL Home saw a 3500% increase in weekly orders and 350% annual growth in units sold after partnering with Search Nurture.
How can we help you achieve your goals? Let’s talk about it. Schedule a call today to meet the team and get a complimentary advertising analysis.
Home Depot Advertising FAQ
What makes Home Depot’s advertising platform different compared to others?
While most other retail platforms target keywords on a CPC level, Home Depot instead gives brands the ability to target specific categories related to the brand’s unique products, and also gives brands the ability to have their products appear on Home Depot’s main (non-category) pages
What mistakes do other agencies make when it comes to Home Depot advertising?
Many agencies will target all available categories within a campaign, and will fail to optimize bids on the product level. SN will target only the categories that are relevant to the brand’s goals, and ensure our marketing dollars are spent in the most efficient manner. We pay close attention to target and product performance alike.
How does Search Nurture’s experience with Home Depot’s advertising contribute to clients’ success?
We take the time to deeply analyze multiple data points in order to optimize PLA and Banner campaigns and take the guesswork out of bid changes, and our campaign organization allows us to drive traffic to the most relevant category targets. Our account managers are proficient in the Home Depot advertising interface, and we stay on top of any advancements and changes that happen within the platform. Our deep understanding of how it all works gives us the power to make informed decisions and provide expert recommendations on where to focus, or pull back on, ad spend in order to maximize ROI.
