Home improvement is one of the most valuable consumer spending categories, with U.S. homeowners spending about $405 billion on home improvement projects in 2023, according to a Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies’ Improving America’s Housing 2025 report.
It’s no surprise that home improvement media is among the most consumed content. HGTV says it attracts more than 33 million viewers each month, while Property Brothers franchises have drawn audiences in the tens of millions.
But it is also one of the most difficult categories for advertisers to reach at the right moment. Consumers do not wake up one day and decide to renovate a kitchen, replace a roof, upgrade flooring, or hire a contractor on a whim.
Home improvement spending is triggered by life events: a move into a new home, a growing family that needs more space, an empty nester downsizing for resale, or a relocation that prompts a renovation. The research, inspiration, and comparison shopping that follows can stretch across weeks or months.
By the time someone requests a quote or walks into a store, the decision is likely already made.
Standard audience targeting is too broad to catch these moments. Search captures only part of the journey. And open-web buying often leads to inefficiency, too little transparency, and limited control over the quality of the environments where ads may appear.
Curating supply at the bid level creates a better way to activate the right combination of lifestage, financial, and intent signals.
Why Static Targeting Falls Short
Most home improvement targeting still relies on static personas: homeowner, household income above a threshold, age range, etc. Those filters do not tell advertisers the full story – like when a household is actually in a spending window.
Consider this: a 45-year-old homeowner who relocated last month, has measurable financial capacity, and is reading kitchen remodel content is a different prospect than a 45-year-old homeowner who recently separated and is downsizing their house to an apartment.
Three signals separate the two:
Lifestage triggers. Deterministic lifestage events provide moving, household formation, homeownership transitions, and downsizing, all prompt home improvement spending. These are time-bound windows, not permanent traits.
Financial capacity. High-ticket projects require ability-to-act. Direct-measured wealth combined with ability to pay signals (such as those built from Equifax IXI data) queue advertisers whether a household can fund the project they are researching.
Content intent. A consumer reading deck replacement costs, comparing countertop materials, or researching energy-efficient windows is signaling category-level interest, not just general home improvement activity.
Traditional wealth signals are also a problem on their own. Most are survey-based or modeled, drawn from samples that represent less than 1% of US households and refreshed on cycles that can run years out of date. Direct-measured wealth and ability-to-pay data, rather than self-reported surveys, give advertisers a sharper read on which households can actually fund a renovation and to what scale.
The opportunity is to activate against all three at once, before choices are locked in and competitors have won the category.
How Supply-Side Curation Improves Home Improvement Targeting
Supply-side curation allows advertisers to identify and package premium inventory enriched with lifestage, wealth, and content signals before bids reach the DSP.
Instead of buying broadly and optimizing after the fact, curation helps advertisers activate against premium supply aligned to relevant contextual signals, audience insights, and quality media environments.
For home improvement marketers, that means reaching consumers in places where project intent is already taking shape and where the household has both a triggering life event and the financial capacity to act on it.
Curation helps brands move beyond broad homeowner targeting and toward more precise, performance-oriented strategies. Advertisers can build curated deals around content environments that over-index for renovation and repair activity, including home design, DIY, real estate, local service research, and category-specific planning content.
This approach gives marketers more control over where impressions run, improves efficiency, and reduces spend on low-value placements that do not reflect true in-market behavior. Because audience data and inventory are bundled on the supply side and pre-filtered before bids reach the DSP, advertisers also avoid stacked data fees and stop paying for impressions that would have been filtered out anyway.
Using 33Across’ curated PMP approach, campaigns saw CPAs drop from 44% to 82% lower costs versus the open web baseline cost, with viewability and video completion rates climbing well above open exchange averages. Match rates ran 30% to 40% higher than the open exchange, meaning more of the targeted audience was actually reached.
Where Home Improvement Intent Shows Up
Helping advertisers find signals before the final transaction stage is one of the biggest advantages of curation.
A homeowner does not have to fill out a lead form to demonstrate intent. The signal may already be visible in the content they are consuming.
Someone reading articles about deck replacement costs, best paint finishes for kitchens, or how to choose between hardwood and luxury vinyl plank flooring is showing category-level interest. Pair that with a recent move, a new family member, or a measured wealth tier, and the targeting case sharpens considerably.
Consumers researching insulation upgrades may be entering the market for energy efficiency products and services. They may not realize there are other ways to improve efficiency, including air sealing, window replacement, smart thermostats, weatherization improvements, and HVAC upgrades.
A person spending time with local contractor directories, remodeling guides, or design galleries may be much closer to action than a generic audience segment would suggest, particularly when their household profile shows a recent lifestage change.
Supply-side curation makes those environments more actionable by organizing and activating around them at scale.
Use Cases for Home Improvement Advertisers
Home improvement includes a wide range of categories, timelines, and budgets. That is why curated strategies are especially useful.
Retailers can use curation to reach consumers researching active projects across categories such as paint, appliances, flooring, lighting, lawn and garden, and seasonal upgrades, prioritizing households in active lifestage transitions where project spend is highest.
Manufacturers can align campaigns to category-specific intent. A window company can activate around energy-efficiency and replacement research paired with recent-mover signals. A roofing company can target consumers reading about whether to repair versus replace in regions with high homeownership turnover. A flooring brand can focus on design and durability content tied to remodeling decisions, layered with measured household wealth tiers.
Local service providers can benefit from geographically relevant curation that combines home improvement context with local market reach. Contractors, installers, electricians, plumbers, and remodelers all need to connect with consumers in a specific service area at the moment demand begins to emerge, often coinciding with new household formation or a recent move into the area.
Adjacent categories can benefit as well. Insurance providers, financing partners, smart home brands, and utility companies all have an interest in reaching consumers who are actively investing in their homes.
The Cross-Device Home Improvement Journey
The home improvement path is not linear and rarely confined to one device.
A consumer might browse inspiration on mobile, stream renovation content on CTV, compare products on desktop, and search for local providers later on a tablet or phone.
These moments may look disconnected in isolation, but together they reflect a single journey.
Curation helps advertisers maintain continuity across that journey using privacy-first identifiers rather than third-party cookies.
By building around stronger supply paths and more intentional packaging of inventory, advertisers can improve sequencing, manage frequency, and align messaging to the stage of consideration. That matters in a category where decisions may unfold over weeks or months and where relevance can directly influence conversion.
The Bottom Line
Home improvement purchases begin with a triggering life event, the financial capacity to act, and a research journey that follows.
That is where intent lives, and that is where advertisers have the greatest opportunity to influence outcomes. Having access to fresh mover data allows brands to make a good first impression when intent begins.
Supply-side curation gives brands a more effective way to find and engage these consumers across the open web. By focusing on the lifestage transitions, wealth signals, and content environments that matter, advertisers can improve efficiency, protect quality, and connect with homeowners while decisions are still in motion.
Glossary’s supply-side curation activates lifestage, wealth, and contextual signals across CTV, mobile, app, and display through curated PMPs built for campaign outcomes. Whether you are reaching a recent mover renovating a kitchen or an empty nester upgrading for resale, Glossary helps you connect with the right household at the right moment. With exclusive access to Valpak’s mover audiences that reach 41 million households on the supply side, brands can activate a prebuilt or customized audience to reach home improvement consumers from project idea to finishing touches.
About 33Across
We help marketers connect data to media activation, simplifying programmatic targeting across digital channels to drive more efficiency and higher campaign performance.
Why It Matters to Marketers Targeting Renovation and Home Improvement Audiences
To reach home improvement and renovations, timing is everything to reach audiences. Using contextual intelligence and lifestage audience data, brands can align campaigns with household preferences and behaviors to impact consumers during this critical buying window. Glossary targets and packages inventory in brand-safe, premium environments across CTV, mobile web, in-app, and desktop.
Find out how to apply rich data signals and activate your campaign across digital channels using supply-side curation.
