When a Head of Ecommerce or Digital Marketing Director in the home and garden space wants to benchmark what “good” looks like in paid search, they're not short of noise. Everyone has a hot take. Fewer people have the data.
We've been working in this space for over a decade now. And one thing we see consistently is that the brands getting the most from paid search aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones who've resisted the temptation to let the platform make the decisions for them.
That matters more now than it ever has. Performance Max (PMax), AI Max, automated bidding, Smart campaigns - Google is very good at spending your money. It's considerably less interested in whether that spend maps to your actual margin structure, your regional priorities, or your longer-term growth objectives. Unpicking that gap is where the real work happens.
We also couldn’t write an article on Paid Search and not address how the shape of paid search itself is changing. Dramatically. LLMs like ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode are shifting how people discover products, particularly in a category like home and garden where research and consideration are a big part of the journey.
Last year, we pulled together Home Goals - our showcase of the best digital marketing in the home and garden industry. What follows are four brands that stood out for doing something genuinely smart with their search and performance strategy.
Why Paid Search Strategy Matters in Home & Garden
The home and garden vertical presents a unique set of hurdles. Consideration periods are long, the competitive landscape is aggressive, and the customer journey typically winds through a complex web of touchpoints. In such a high-stakes environment, paid search is far more than a blunt instrument for traffic; it must function as a precision-engineered lever for scalable growth.
While a purely tactical execution might secure immediate clicks, it frequently sacrifices long-term efficiency and structural value. The industry leaders are the brands treating performance marketing as a foundational pillar of their business logic. By aligning search activity with internal product margins and robust retention frameworks, they ensure that no click is ever wasted.
We’ve dissected the strategic shifts and high-level thinking that differentiate the elite from the average. We’re moving beyond the technical basics to demonstrate how rigorous strategy can evolve paid search into a primary engine for both revenue and brand equity.
Hughes: Geographic Segmentation That Actually Works
Let’s be honest: nobody goes looking for a new fridge until theirs breaks. Appliance purchases are reactive, fast, and often driven by next-day delivery requirements - which makes the category brutal for brands trying to compete on anything other than price.
Hughes, the electricals retailer with a strong high street presence in East Anglia, found a smarter way in.
Rather than running a single national PPC strategy and hoping for the best, they restructured their search account around three geographic segments: on-patch (East Anglia, where their brand recognition and delivery network are strong), off-patch (Birmingham and the A14 corridor), and nationwide (everywhere else). Each segment had different objectives, different bid logic, and different success metrics.
From there, they rebuilt their Google Shopping campaigns using PMax, segmenting by product margin bands. Custom labels built from price and cost-of-goods data tied bidding directly to profitability, not just revenue volume. This is exactly the kind of structural work that gets skipped when PMax is treated as a black box - and exactly why it made such a difference here.
What makes the Hughes approach particularly worth noting is what came next. Rather than treating paid search separate to any other channels, they extended the same logic to their paid social strategy, creating a unified approach that treated all Hughes customers as one audience across both channels. It’s something we see a lot of brands trip up on: paid search and paid social managed as if they’re competing for the same budget in two separate siloes. For Hughes, connecting the dots meant cross-selling opportunities between their retail and rental offer weren’t falling through the gap. The audience logic built for search was put straight to work on social, with the same commercial thinking applied consistently across both.
This kind of cross-channel thinking is our idea of what dreams are made of.
Toolstation: Getting Ahead of the Cookieless Shift
Most brands greeted Google's announcement about third-party cookie deprecation in 2025 with a mixture of confusion and low-level dread. Toolstation got on with it.
In partnership with The Specialist Works and Quantcast, they trialled a cookieless advertising strategy designed to increase brand consideration and drive sign-ups to their Toolstation Club among in-market trade professionals - a notoriously hard-to-reach audience with high intent but low tolerance for irrelevant ads.
The campaign used Quantcast's on-site pixels for real-time data collection, then applied predictive modelling to build high-potential lookalike audiences across the open web. No third-party cookies. No legacy targeting crutch.
The results: a 44% increase in brand consideration, with their video wrap unit delivering a 53% uplift compared to 29% for standard video formats. Incremental site visits also climbed significantly.
The point here isn't just that it worked. It's that Toolstation ran this test before they had to. In a category where competitors were still hoping the cookie situation would resolve itself, Toolstation was already building infrastructure for what comes next.
Harbour Lifestyle: Product Feed as a New Customer Acquisition Engine
Most home brands treat their Google Shopping product feed as an admin task. Harbour Lifestyle treat it as a commercial strategy. And the difference in results is significant.
The UK outdoor and garden furniture brand used a CSS (Comparison Shopping Service) partnership (operated via our sister brand, Genie Shopping) to extend the reach of their Shopping campaigns cost-efficiently. But the real differentiator wasn’t the channel itself; it was how obsessively they optimised their feed to make it work.
The insight driving their approach is simple: home and garden shoppers rarely search with broad terms. Someone doesn’t just search “outdoor pergola”. They search for “black outdoor wooden pergola 3m x 4m”. Every additional detail in that query is a qualifier, and a brand whose feed doesn’t include that data will struggle to appear in those results.
Rather than settling for the standard minimum (product name, price, image), Harbour Lifestyle ensured their feed included material, dimensions, weight, colour variants, and granular product descriptors across their entire search catalogue. This meant appearing in precisely the high-intent, long-tail searches that convert.
It’s also worth noting what this kind of feed depth means in an AI search environment. As LLMs and Google’s AI Mode increasingly surface product recommendations in response to specific, descriptive queries, the brands with the most detailed, well-structured feed data are those that are most likely to appear. Feed quality isn’t just Shopping optimisation - it’s increasingly a visibility question across the whole discovery landscape.
(Psst… want to read more about how to get your product to feature in AI-powered search? We’ve written a whole blog on it. Check it out here.)
As a result for Harbour Lifestyle, new customer rates grew over 60% - a pretty impressive figure for a brand in a considered, high-ticket category where most growth tends to come from repeat purchases.
The Range: Solving Seasonal Complexity
Whilst Harbour Lifestyle’s CSS story is about feed depth and new customer acquisition, The Range used Google Shopping to handle the operational complexity of a vast, constantly-changing catalogue at peak seasonal demand.
The Range sells everything from candles to furniture, and their seasonal items are a core part of why customers love them. Halloween décor, Christmas lights, Easter products: categories that go from zero to hundreds of new SKUs in a matter of weeks, and need to be discoverable by high-intent shoppers at exactly the right moment.
For a large brand, adopting a new affiliate type that operates within the Google Shopping environment can be a significant operational undertaking. The Range didn’t treat it as a bolt-on. They went in fully, working closely with their CSS partner to build a product feed that was as specific and product-granular as possible, making deliberate decisions about how to handle the seasonal influx of new SKUs without letting feed quality slip.
The payoff was the ability to surface the right products in front of high-intent shoppers precisely when seasonal search volume peaks, the window when conversion rates are highest and competition for visibility is most intense.
What These Brands Have in Common
While their tactics vary, a clear strategic thread connects these industry leaders: their paid search strategies are a high-precision lever for growth rather than a simple source of traffic. From rigorous geographic and margin-based segmentation to a deep investment in technical fundamentals and post-purchase revenue streams, these brands focus on proactive structural advantages over reactive execution. None of these brands let the platforms make strategic decisions for them. Rather, they come with clear commercial objectives, build their campaigns around them, and resist the temptation of the path of least resistance that automated tools make very easy to take.
The true differentiator is a willingness to dismantle internal silos and challenge legacy thinking. Performance marketing is never treated as an isolated function; it is fundamentally woven into their data infrastructure, user experience, other channel strategies, and overarching brand logic. This integrated perspective reveals efficiencies and long-term value that more tactical competitors consistently overlook.
This is what we spend most of our time on with home and garden brands. Not just managing campaigns, but making sure the campaigns are asking the right questions in the first place. That means first-party data that's actually clean and connected, feed structures that reflect real margin, PMax configurations that don't just default to whatever Google recommends, and an honest view of where paid search fits in the wider acquisition picture as discovery shifts towards AI-powered tools.
The takeaway for ecommerce leaders is definitive: excelling in paid search isn’t about ticking technical boxes. It’s about engineering a strategy and feeding the systems the right data that is aligned with your unit economics, your audience’s journey, and the shifting realities of the home and garden market.
The Strategic Playbook: Elevating Your Paid Search Approach
The brands in this article are doing different things, but they're all starting from the same place: giving the machine good data to work with, and making sure the strategy is theirs, not the platform's default.
A few things worth pressure-testing in your own account.
Is your account architecture doing any real work? Geographic segmentation, margin-based bidding, audience signals - these aren't advanced tactics, they're the difference between a campaign that's optimising for your business and one that's optimising for Google's. If your PMax setup looks largely the way it did when you first launched it, it probably needs a look.
Is your feed a strategic asset or a data export? In a category where shoppers search with specificity - materials, dimensions, colour variants, precise product descriptors - feed depth directly determines where you show up. That's true in standard Shopping, and it's increasingly true in AI-powered search, where LLMs are surfacing product recommendations in response to detailed, descriptive queries. The brands with the most complete, well-structured feed data are the ones most likely to appear.
Is your first-party data actually connected? Clean, connected first-party data is the foundation that everything else runs on - cookieless audience modelling, smarter bidding signals, accurate attribution. If that infrastructure isn't in place, automated tools are making decisions based on an incomplete picture.
Are you thinking about the full journey? Paid search drives the click. What happens after it? Site speed, on-page experience, post-purchase determines whether that spend was worth it.
Final Perspective & Strategic Support
Paid search in home and garden is only getting harder to navigate - more automation, more platform complexity, more noise about what actually moves the needle. By being more deliberate about how you spend, what data you feed the machine, and how your paid search activity connects to everything else, your brand could turn paid search from a cost you manage into a competitive advantage you own.
That's the conversation we have with ambitious home and garden brands every day. If you're benchmarking your current strategy, building a case for a different approach, or just want a straight view of where your account has room to improve, we'd love to take a look.
No flattery or jargon. Just an honest assessment from a team that knows this vertical.
FAQs: Decoding Performance Strategy in Home & Garden
Why isn't our paid search spend translating into profitable growth?
In home and garden, the consideration cycle is long and the category is competitive. Shoppers are comparing multiple options before they commit, CPCs are high, and margins on big-ticket items are often tight. That combination means account architecture matters more here than in almost any other vertical. If your campaigns are running on platform defaults (no margin-based segmentation, no geographic logic, no proper audience signals) Google will optimise for volume, not profitability. The gap between a well-structured account and a default one is significant in this category.
What does good Performance Max management look like for a home and garden brand?
PMax is only as good as what you put into it. In home and garden specifically, that means feed data detailed enough to capture the way people actually search - materials, dimensions, colour variants, specific product descriptors. It means margin-based segmentation so a high-ticket garden furniture set isn't being treated the same as a low-margin accessory. And it means brand exclusions, proper audience signals, and full visibility into what's driving results across channels. Most accounts we look at are missing at least two of those things. Treating PMax as a black box is one of the most expensive habits in this vertical.
How specific does our product feed need to be?
Much more specific than most home and garden brands currently have it. Someone searching for outdoor furniture isn't searching "garden chair" - they're searching "grey rattan corner sofa set 4 seater with cushions". Every descriptor in that query is a qualifier, and if your feed doesn't include that data, you won't appear (garbage in, garbage out, as we like to say). The same logic applies as AI-powered search surfaces more product recommendations in response to detailed queries. Feed depth is no longer just a Shopping optimisation; it's increasingly determining where home and garden brands show up across the whole discovery landscape.
We're still relying on third-party cookies for audience targeting. How urgent is that problem?
For home and garden brands, where purchase journeys are long and customers often research across multiple sessions before buying, this is particularly pressing. Third-party cookies were never great at tracking journeys with multiple touchpoints and that infrastructure is degrading further. The brands building first-party data collection now, clean pixel setup, proper CRM connectivity, cookieless audience modelling, are creating a structural advantage in a category where understanding your customer's journey is everything.
Should paid search and paid social be managed as separate channels?
Not if you want them to work efficiently. In home and garden, where customers might discover a brand on social, research on search, and convert weeks later, disconnected channel management creates gaps that are expensive to close. When paid search and paid social share the same audience logic and commercial objectives, you stop paying to convert audiences that aren't warm enough, and stop building awareness that your performance campaigns aren't set up to catch.
How do we know if our paid search reporting is actually telling us the truth?
In a category with high average order values and long consideration cycles, platform ROAS is a particularly unreliable headline metric. It will always find a way to take credit - including for customers who were already going to buy. The more useful question for a home and garden brand is whether paid search is driving new customers profitably, and whether those customers return. That means connecting ad data to what you actually know about customer lifetime value, and being honest about whether the numbers you're reporting map back to what the business actually cares about.
