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It’s spring! ‘Hit refresh’ in your Home & Garden campaigns

Two kids outdoors photograph a butterfly with their tablet.

The spring season is historically the time for people to invest in their homes and gardens. They replace their sofas, paint the living room, and buy new outdoor furniture to enjoy the sun after the long winter months.

Microsoft Advertising has a wealth of insights, product opportunities, and best practices to share for the Home & Garden sector in our Spring into Retail Action virtual event, available to view on-demand now for the UK and Germany.

Last year we saw a surge in search volume on our network as countries were in lockdown and people invested in their living spaces. We’re seeing searches below last years’ volumes this year, but still crucially up versus 2020 (pre-pandemic). Clicks are following a similar trend.

Source: Microsoft internal data, February 2022.

So while things are returning to normal in most regions as we come out of the pandemic, there is a continued desire to invest in home and garden products. Consumers have made new habits over the last two years, browsing and buying these products online rather than in-store, and those habits persist even as the high street opens up again.

One of the other trends we’ve seen is the emergence of a new consumer persona, the workday consumer. As the boundaries between work and life have blurred, more people are regularly researching and buying products on their PCs during work hours. In fact, 56% of people in our study with Forrester said that researching products was their favourite personal activity to do during work hours, more so than browsing social media (45%). Microsoft Advertising’s audience provides a great opportunity to target the workday consumer.

A higher intent to buy

One of the other interesting audience trends from the Global Web Index showcased consumer intentions to purchase products. The Global Web Index can provide us with this data, and what we see is that searchers on the Microsoft Network are more likely to buy the following products (in comparison to the average internet user):

Source: Global Web Index - Wave: Q4 2021 - UK ‘Which of these things are you/your household thinking about purchasing in the next 3-6 months?’

Discover more

To help you capture these opportunities, Microsoft Advertising hosted the Spring into Retail Action virtual event on March 10, with breakout sessions for the UK and Germany. During this event, attendees could learn about these opportunities in more detail and how to capture them through new products and features, the Microsoft Audience Network, and Microsoft Shopping.


 Watch now to discover more

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