The Home Depot Reimagines Retail Analytics

Customer expectations continue to evolve, and the retail shopping experience has changed along with it. Advances in mobile technology have enabled people to purchase whenever, wherever and however they want, and the recent growth of click-and-collect has alleviated concerns around package theft or delivery hiccups. Retail brands have stepped up their innovation cycle to make the shopping experience easier for customers, leveraging data to create a more accurate view of interactions and behaviors. This approach requires a new level of sophistication with analytics, tapping into insights to make decisions around a robust interconnected strategy.

The Home Depot is leading their industry, thanks in part to its early adoption of omnichannel offerings such as “buy online, pick up in store” and award-winning digital experiences including their mobile app. As an Adobe Experience Platform customer, the company drives smart decisions and builds great experiences through stitching together real-time customer profiles and using data insights as a way to enhance personalization.

Bridging online and offline

The Home Depot has more than 2,200 stores across the United States, Mexico and Canada, and physical retail continues to be the central hub of their operations. Yet with nearly 2 billion visits to homedepot.com in 2018, more and more consumers are incorporating the digital experience into their shopping journey; out of a total $108 billion of sales in 2018, nearly 8% were attributed to online. To further highlight the blend of physical and digital, nearly 50% of The Home Depot’s online sales were fulfilled in store, with 20% of these shoppers making an additional purchase in the same trip.

As Ranjeet Bhosale, director of online analytics and business intelligence, puts it: “Instead of separating metrics from online and offline channels, we focus our attention on capturing everything including website activity, in-store sales, call center volume, return volume, order cancellations and much more, thus enabling us to make the best decisions to improve the shopper experience across all touchpoints. Our work with the Adobe Experience Platform puts us on the path to build customer profiles that are more comprehensive and real-time in nature, giving us a foundation to make critical decisions when it counts.”

Optimizing marketing spend

Marketing attribution – giving credit to specific activities for driving purchase events – is crucial for brands in today’s data-driven environment. Attribution drives spending decisions and resource allocation amongst teams yet is often made with incomplete data. The Home Depot ties marketing clicks back to customer profiles, enabling them to measure and identify the impact of investments by channel.

The Home Depot had a lightbulb moment as the team refined their attribution model. New insights revealed the unexpected positive impact of SEO and earned/owned channels, which enabled the team to re-align resources and marketing investments. They could more accurately map changing consumer behaviors and increase their focus on owned and earned content to deliver a great experience wherever, whenever and however the customer chose to shop.

Retail head winds

Within the past decade, retail has gone through a massive transformation as consumers embrace new ways to shop in an industry greatly impacted by technology. The tools to address this complex landscape have matured, and brands with the strongest grasp on these new tools will be the ones best positioned to succeed and become category leaders in a world where the quality of experience is just as important as the product being purchased.

The Home Depot uses Adobe Experience Cloud and the Adobe Experience Platform, as well as its analytics, personalization and audience management solutions to become a true Customer Experience Management company. Learn more here.