Industry Deep Dive: Home & Garden

The Home and Garden category reaches 31 million people a month – but how do we unlock the value of such a large audience? Using Ipsos iris we’ve split the Home and Garden category into two parts – retail visitors (like B&Q, IKEA, etc.) and lifestyle visitors (like BBC Gardeners’ World, Ideal Home, etc.) – and dug into the weeds of the data to unearth some key insights.

Retail

For retailers, it is about understanding their audience and how they can differentiate themselves in a crowded category to grow market share.

In terms of understanding this audience, we can look at the time spent with Home and Garden retailers by week and see that engagement tends to peak during Bank Holidays – namely May and August – and around key sales days like Black Friday and Boxing Day.

Generally, these Home and Garden shoppers tend to skew older and female compared to the average internet user, but there are exceptions. For example, Wickes and Screwfix visitors skew more male, while IKEA has a noticeably younger audience compared to the rest of the top 10 Home and Garden retailers.

IKEA also has the largest exclusive audience among the top 10 retailers in the category, suggesting it has done the best job of differentiating itself from its competitors.

Lifestyle

Home and Garden lifestyle sites have a similar profile to their retail counterparts, with an older female audience.

There is also a strong synergy between the two audiences: Home and Garden lifestyle visitors are 42% more likely to visit Home and Garden retail sites when compared to the average internet user, and more likely to visit each of the top ten retailers in the category.

There is less differentiation between the profiles of the top ten Home and Garden lifestyle brands compared to retail, with most sites appealing to a similar demographic. However, there is still an opportunity for cut through, with specialised content from brands like ‘Homebuilding & Renovating’ delivering high engagement and a sizeable exclusive audience.