Feel like everyone around you has taken on a home project lately? It seems like everywhere you look, someone is redoing a stone wall, painting a dresser, or setting up window boxes to grow tomatoes.
Perhaps it’s due to an increased amount of time at home these days, or perhaps it’s the ever growing popularity of HGTV and at-home life hack videos, but no matter what the impetus behind it is, now is a great time for home & garden marketers to put some elbow grease into advertising.
You will, of course, want to ensure that all of that elbow grease is put into channels that will give you the greatest return. You’ve likely tried search and social, but there are untapped audiences waiting to discover you with native advertising on the open web.
That’s our area of expertise, and we’re here to set you up for success with creative best practices, targeting & bidding techniques, and some examples you can draw inspiration from.
Build Creatives That Align With Home & Garden Consumers
Achieving real performance means enticing consumers with creatives that are proven to resonate with them, and the attention you capture with your ads’ headlines and images is too important to leave to guesswork.
Using the millions of ad creatives that run through our network each week, we surface Taboola Trends that help lay out what visual elements and keywords are increasing CTRs (click-through rates) for advertisers.
Home & garden consumers are responsive to close up, colorful photos containing food. This is in contrast to other verticals where black & white photos see clicks, as well as photos taken from a distance or illustrations.
Your image, of course, doesn’t stand alone. When crafting a headline for your ad, it’s important to consider your keywords carefully. We’re able to analyze which vertical-specific keywords we know are performing currently, those that are hitting a point of creative fatigue, and those that are indicating a high potential for success.
These keywords can help you tailor your headlines to what’s resonating with home & garden consumers right now. Based on these keyword trends, here are a few headlines ideas that would likely garner high click-through rates:
- The Simple Way to Start an Herb Garden Inside
- Decorating Your Bedroom? These Pieces Are Worth The Investment
- 8 Signs You Need to Call a Professional For Your Weeds
- Classy Decor Must-Haves Without The High Price Tag
- The Tile Trends You Need to Know Before Decorating Your Kitchen or Bathroom
As always, A/B testing your headlines is key. Our handy predictive title tool makes it easy to stack your titles up against one another and will rank them depending on which our algorithm thinks will be the top performer in terms of CTR for you. Here’s how the above example headlines stacked up:
Put all of these trends together and you’re bound to wind up with creative that drive clicks among a home & garden audience. Here are a few examples of how these trends could be put into action:
Target Home & Garden Consumers When & Through the Devices on Which They’ll be Most Receptive
Lately, we’ve seen some shifts in how and when home & garden consumers are responding to content from advertisers. This may be attributable to the ways in which the world has changed, with more people spending time at home and potentially having more time than they normally would to focus on home improvement or gardening projects.
As a result, we’ve identified some key new opportunities for marketers in this vertical.
To determine the best opportunities for advertisers when it comes to targeting, we look at two things: click-through-rate (CTR), or demand for content (if someone is clicking on content, we assume that means they want to see it), and spend % across our network, or supply of vertical-specific content available to consumers. Anywhere that there is a low supply of content, and high demand for that content, that’s the biggest opportunity for advertisers.
Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays show up as strong days for home & garden marketers to reach consumers.
9pm, 10pm, and 11pm are all ideal times to reach home & garden consumers.
When it comes to content type, opt for video landing pages.
How about devices to reach home & garden audiences on? All signs point to tablet.
Once you’ve got your targeting strategy down, use relevant data segments like these to find the right audiences:
- Interest > Home and Garden
- Behavior > Shopping > Home and Garden
- Interest > Home and Garden > Bed and Bath > Bedroom
Maximize Your Bid
If you’re just getting started advertising on publisher sites, we recommend bidding as high as you’re comfortable with for the first few days of your campaign to capture as much traffic and data as you can to then determine how to target more effectively.
Across the board, here are our recommendations:
- Pause every ad with low conversions if it has served 300-500 clicks
- If your CPA is high, adjust your bid per site before blocking specific sites altogether
- Only bid down on a site entirely after delivering 500 clicks with no conversions
- Increase bids by 25%-50% for top-performing sites to increase their competitiveness
Our Smart Bid feature automatically bids for you based on your goals, allowing advertisers to rest assured that they’re getting the best rate for every click.
Real Inspiring Home & Garden Campaign Examples
HomeAdvisor
HomeAdvisor speaks to an audience of people looking to work on at-home projects and highlights that it may be best to leave some things to the pros.
Their ad leads to this landing page that makes it easy to start the process of finding the right home professional for any project a consumer has in mind.
Lowe’s
To help clearly lead consumers to a resource on seeding and fertilizing, Lowe’s keeps their ad clear and to the point.
They also ensure that their landing page is educational, and opt for a content marketing approach to provide consumers with as much information as possible.
Pancake Pillow
Pancake Pillow takes a direct, product-focused approach to their ads.
Their landing page dives into content marketing to help build some buzz around their product and tell more of a story.
Keep Your Finger on the Home & Garden Pulse
Marketers in the home & garden space have an opportunity right now to speak to an audience who may be taking on more home projects than they have in the past.
That means it’s important to get it right and focus on creative strategies, targeting techniques, bidding best practices, and what others in the space are finding success with.
With these trends and insights in your toolkit, you’re sure to have your next ad campaign be a home run.