Understanding Purchase Intent with Intent-To-Home

We have discussed the importance of purchase intent in a past blog. Intent signals let your business know that a buyer has some likelihood to purchase whatever it is you are selling, be it homes, cars, or insurance, it's all the same. Not understanding buyer/purchase intent can lead to your business wasting a lot of its advertising budget. But in digital advertising, it's hard to understand buyer intent. Mercedes might be sending you ads for their newest sedan because you've been window shopping all over their website. But that car costs $120,000, and you are just looking for fun, aren't you? In this example, Mercedes is wasting its advertising budget on you.

It might not seem like much, a couple of cents per impression, but it adds up when you are targeting thousands of people or more. And we haven't even discussed ad fraud, which is wasting even more of your (and Mercedes') budget. What if your business could reach households with a proven higher purchase intent while reducing the risk of ad fraud to nearly zero? That is Intent-To-Home, El Toro's newest product.

How It Works

El Toro ingests millions of data points, and we use large language models to categorize the activity based on interest-based topics, which we call "Intent-To-Home." Intent-To-Home allows us to find specific households who likely have purchase intent with respect to over 21,000 custom topics we have identified. This data can be overlayed with additional data sets and filters to refine the audience even more and curate a segment that is right for you.

On its own, this data is a great source for curating an audience, however, we understand that just because someone in a household visits a site, it doesn't necessarily mean they are in the market for that specific product. Going back to our earlier example, someone might be interested in exotic cars, so they visit sites related to Ferrari, Lamborghini, or McLaren, but they don't have the financial means to afford a car like that. To better curate an audience for this use case, we overlay additional filters like household income, intent for other luxury products, and devices seen at relevant locations like luxury car dealerships or jewelry stores.

By combining this data, we are able to narrow down the candidates who are likely to purchase from a sea of millions looking online for Ferrari's. And this doesn't just apply to luxury goods. By layering multiple intent topics and other El Toro 1st-Party data, you can identify potential customers easily and weed out households with low intent until you are left with a group of likely customers.

Intent-To-Home Use Cases

With over 20,000 intent topics, almost any industry or business can make use of Intent-To-Home. Here are a few recommendations from our Intent-To-Home product team. As a quick note, all italicized topics are actual examples of usable Intent-To-Home topics.

Home Services

As with our other technologies, HVAC, Roofing, Plumbing, and other home services can benefit greatly from Intent-To-Home. These industries benefit from highly accurate targeting, as many people aren't in positions to afford expensive home services like a new HVAC system or new windows. Because of this, layering other El Toro data, like our new mover data, can greatly improve the likelihood of conversions from people targeted off of home service intent topics.

If you plan on running an Intent-To-Home home services campaign, it is important to understand your industry's sales cycle. Since the sales cycles are typically staggered depending on the specific topic, relevant time frames must be selected carefully. Roofing might have a longer sales cycle, whereas plumbing has a shorter one. Carefully constructing these audiences based on the sales cycle for the specific industry is imperative.

Roofing

While Intent-To-Home excels in many industries, we have highlighted roofing and home services for this example. For our roofing analytical model, El Toro can gather a list of houses likely to need roofing services, either roof repair or a new roof altogether. We do this by analyzing what homes are searching for our roofing-related intent topics over multiple days, which we call an Intent Journey. These intent topics are then layered with our data on home value and home age to determine which homes are the best possible fit for roofing ads. We pull this data nationwide and zoom in to specific regions, cities, and neighborhoods to fit the scale of your business.

Some examples of roofing intent topics include: Roofing, Roof Cleaning, Roofing Consultants, Solar Panels, Solar Maintenance.

Education

For colleges and universities looking for undergrad or grad students, El Toro has several relevant intent topics. These topics include; Graduate School, Bachelors Degree, Continuing Education, Trade & Vocational, Online Schools, Financial Aid, etc.

For added flexibility, your institution can adjust the scope of your campaign to whatever geographic area suits your needs. Large universities might want nationwide households, but smaller colleges might want people in their home state or region. Additionally, a large (or small) school might want to increase enrollment from a particular city or state. By layering additional intent topics and geolocation data, it is possible to reach candidates anywhere in the country.

El Toro can apply filters from other datasets to filter households based on education level, age, etc. to find the optimal group for targeting.

Financial Services

Banks, wealth management institutions, and financial advisors of any size are well suited to Intent-To-Home. Topics for this include: Checking Account, Savings Account, Debit Card, Co-branded Card, High-Wealth Financial Services, Financial Planning and Advisory Services, etc.

Local banks and institutions can overlay these topics with a defined radius around your locations to narrow your audience to the people who most likely be familiar with your locations, know your name, and are showing online interest in your services. Similar to our college example, larger institutions can also set statewide/nationwide parameters.If you are looking to identify high-net-worth individuals, relevant topics may include: Customized Financial Planning for High Net Worth Individuals, Business Exit, Wealth Transfer Planning, Wealth Transfer and Preservation, Tax Efficient Investing, etc.

Sports and Sporting Goods

Sports venues, team merchandise, sporting goods, or any other sports/gametime-adjacent business (think of football & wings) can leverage Intent-To-Home to reach fans of a team, people interested in playing sports, people interested in going to games, and more.

Golf is one of the biggest sports in the United States, both for watching and playing. The golf equipment industry is projected to bring in over $25B in 2024 according to Statista. Topics for specific golf clubs, carts, and brands can be used to reach golf fanatics. Additionally, there are topics for PGA fans. These can be combined and used to reach households with avid golfers or golf fans who want to visit an event.

Using football equipment as another example, we can examine the overlap between topics for football pads, football helmets, and football cleats, and find the households that are looking for all of those topics over a certain time frame. For the households that match, we can reasonably attribute those households to being in the market for this gear.

A Purchase Intent Game Changer

Intent-To-Home is shaking things up in the digital advertising space. By leveraging El Toro's data capabilities, your business can target high-intent audiences precisely, reducing wasted ad spend and improving ROI. Whatever industry you are in, this tool offers tailored solutions to reach the right customers at the right time. Intent-To-Home brings data-driven insights that elevate your campaign effectiveness and drive meaningful engagement. To learn more about Intent-To-Home please contact us.