In this continuing series for specific industries, I’m covering Google Ads for home decor sellers in this post.
This analysis focuses primarily on e-commerce companies engaged in direct-to-consumer sales of online products. As with the other niches I’m writing about, we have substantial PPC experience in this market segment.
Before going any further, here are a few words about the scope and constraints of this post.
Scope & Constraints
The strategies and tactics outlined broadly apply to most advertisers selling home decor & furnishings online. However, every business is unique, so every Google Ads implementation needs to be as well. This article alone shouldn’t be the basis for building and optimizing your Google Ads campaigns. You should always work with an experienced Google Ads expert or take comprehensive training before making this type of investment.
Industry Description
The home decor industry is massive, sitting at almost $1 trillion in the US alone. However, this article relates to companies that sell home furnishings, accessories, and decorations. It excludes service providers such as design & decorating services, painters, and upholsterers.
Google Ads Eccentricities
In this section, I’ll cover some specific things you need to be aware of when running Google Ads for home decor.
Manufacturers/Resellers/Dealers
There are broadly 3 different types of home decor sellers.
Manufacturers make and sell their products direct to the end customer. They have the advantage of offering unique products, setting their own price point, and keeping all of the margin/profits. They compete with sellers that offer similar but not identical products. However, it’s very difficult to design and manufacture products that are perceived to deliver more value for the money than everybody else in the market. And as a manufacturer it’s hard to pivot when market conditions change. You may not only get “stuck” with a large inventory of unsellable products, but have to retool to manufacture new items as fashions change. The best example of a direct to consumer decor manufacturer is Ikea, which of course has a large brick and mortar presence as well as their online store.
Resellers typically offer a range of different brands through their store. They have the advantage of being flexible to some extent, in terms of what products they carry. They can adjust quickly as the demand for products change and tend not to hold much inventory. But they also tend not to have much control over costs or resale prices which may be fixed by their suppliers or by the market (collective competition). They tend to have to compete with other resellers with the same goods and thus have to compete based on the merits of their own strength of brand, i.e. consumer trust, convenience, breadth of product range, return policies, etc. In addition, they still face competition from other brands offering similar products. A great example of a reseller is Wayfair; they sell a wide range of different brands that compete with each other.
Dealers are similar to resellers but tend to have exclusivity for certain brands or product ranges in their region. Regions can include a local geography, however it’s more typical for them to get the national rights when selling online. Due to their exclusive they do not have to compete head to head with others for the same product. But they also tend to have a smaller product range and be locked in with manufacturers having less control over what they stock and sell.
Amazon
One thing to be painfully aware of is the omni-presence of Amazon. Not only does Amazon carry a wide array of home decor but with free next day delivery and prices that tend to undercut everybody else, it’s often the most important competitor to consider.
Performance-Max Campaigns
P-Max will almost certainly be your most important campaign type. Generally, you should be spending north of 90% of your total budget on P-Max Shopping Ads.
As with any shopping campaign effort, first, ensure that your product feed is clean and complete. This includes product titles, descriptions, GTINs, Google product category (taxonomy), segmentation by product_type, brand, use of custom labels as appropriate for sale items, top sellers, and so on.
Note that titles should include the brand, product type, features, color, material, and size information.
Use of Merchant Center promotion and product review features is mandatory here to gain an edge over your competition.
In terms of asset groups, consider running one for each of your main product lines. But don’t go nuts here, just split them up enough to justify running different search/display/video ads for each group. Feel free to break up P-Max into separate campaigns if your profit margins are substantially different for various product categories. Try to minimize the number of campaigns, though, by grouping similar profit margin items into the same campaign with an appropriate tROAS.
Most importantly, consider the big picture, i.e. client lifetime value. If you expect a lot of repeat business you should include the cost of initial client acquisition when calculating your tROAS. Failure to do so will result in restrictive spending and an inability to scale.
Here are other articles I’ve written with detailed best practices for Performance-Max and Merchant Center build and optimization.
Lastly, if you’re brand new to Google Advertising, you should consider starting with Standard Shopping. Run this for 3-4 months until you are able to achieve a healthy return and clean up most of the irrelevant search queries with negatives. With that done you can migrate to P-Max and add all those negative keywords to that campaign using this tool. While you can also add negatives globally to your account, there is a 1,000 keyword limit which isn’t that many in the grand scheme of things.
Search Campaigns
For an online store search ads shouldn’t represent a huge part of your Google ad spend. Focus on running branded search and consider testing your best sellers as well as popular competitor brands once you’re making a good return with P-Max. As an aside on “branded” I do recommend using the new brand lists for targeting and exclusions. This can work for your company brand, brands you sell, as well as competitor brands. It’s a simpler implementation that requires less tweaking and generally no negative keywords strategy.
Ensure that as soon as you can, you are running conversion value-based automated bidding. This will ensure you’re optimizing bidding for return.
Creatives
As with any campaign, ensure you fully utilize your ad copy slots, images, vidoes, and so on depending on the ad type. In addition, add all applicable assets (formally called ad extensions). If you are a reseller with many competitors ensure that you use differentiators for your store, since product features and benefits will be identical for the product. Perhaps you’re the only store offering a full money-back guarantee or free international shipping… these things can make a big difference when the product and price are the same.
One other thing to do to stand out in this situation is to use slightly different language to describe similar features. When there are 4-5 almost identical ads and your’s is a bit different you are more likely to get the click.
Lastly, you need to constantly work on optimizing creatives to eek out every ounce of potential performance. This includes tweaking individual ads as well as testing at scale using ad variations.
Remarketing Campaigns
In this niche, you have to think carefully about your remarketing strategy. If you have a large range of products you might want run an evergreen remarketing strategy. This can include remarketing to existing customers and long lifetime visitors, up to the 540-day max allowed by GA4 audiences. If you are a one trick pony, say you sell fancy bed pillows… nix the remarketing after 90-days and only focus on non-buyers.
With this in mind you should segment your remarketing audiences into different groups based on date range and test them to see what works best. From there you can refine targeting, eliminating audiences that aren’t cost effective.
If you’re running traditional remarketing ads I would opt for Demand Gen instead of standard display ads. The combination of higher quality Google inventory placements and ability to include video ads will set you up for success.
If you are running P-Max shopping ads you should lean heavily on dynamic remarketing. This is, of course, fully automated.. you simply have to activate the program in Merchant Center and ensure that your website is properly tagged with product IDs. If you’re not sure whether this is working correctly you can check “your data sources” under the audience manager tool.
One other obvious thing is that email marketing is the “one” in your “one-two” remarketing punch here.
Other Campaign Types
If you have a large enough account budget (around $50K/month+) you may want to run video, discovery, and display inventory separately from P-Max. Just keep in mind that while you will gain better insights and more campaign control, you might find that overall performance dips. These campaigns should be geared more towards pure branding and influencing decision-making goals, don’t measure success by your ROAS!
Campaign Optimization Notes
The decor niche tends to be more sensitive to seasonality and sales like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But it’ll depend a lot on what types of products you sell. If you’re a patio furniture company, enough said! Consider using countdown insertion for your sales along with promotions and budgetary adjustments. If you need to make large adjustments I recommend leveraging the seasonality tool.
Also ensure that you’ve uploaded your customer list to enable customer match – and use this in your P-Max audience signals. This can inform Google what your ideal customers look like and boost overall campaign performance.
Tools and Other Tips
In my experience, most successful e-comms run highly optimized stores that address up and cross-selling, cart abandonment, and have amazing email/text remarketing programs. For new or growing businesses, I highly recommend Shopify as a robust and scalable e-commerce platform. As for other tools it can be worthwhile to invest in Klaviyo to manage email/text channels.
In addition, using a P-Max script to gain more specific campaign insights can really boost optimization. We use Mike Rhodes’ P-Max script at my agency and have seen it really move the needle.
Summary
Home decor sellers face tough competition on Google Ads, even with unique products and pricing control. It’s especially challenging when you can’t compete on price or offer a truly differential product.
Success often hinges on finding the best compromise between healthy profit margins and new client acquisition. Maximize your campaign performance by fully leveraging all available Google Ads features and other optimization tools.
