Driving Sustainable Ecommerce Growth for a U.S. Home Improvement Brand
How Adflow Digital built the brand, Shopify experience and performance marketing engine for a leading U.S. home improvement company, using continuous audience, trust and conversion optimisation to drive sustained month-on-month growth.
Adflow Digital began working with a leading U.S. DIY home improvement brand at an early stage of its growth, initially helping establish both its digital presence and overall brand identity.
The company’s core product was a range of 3D peel-and-stick stone wall tiles designed to give homeowners a faster and more accessible way to transform interior walls without the complexity of traditional stone installation.
Adflow Digital developed the company’s Shopify website, created its visual identity including the logo, colour system and broader brand language and established the digital infrastructure required to take the product to market.
What began as a branding and ecommerce project quickly evolved into a broader performance marketing engagement. As campaign data accumulated, Adflow continuously refined the audience, proposition, customer journey and conversion experience based on how real customers were responding to the product.
The Challenge
The initial challenge was understanding who the product was genuinely suited to.
At first, the potential market appeared broad. The tiles offered a relatively simple DIY way to create real-stone feature walls, suggesting potential appeal across homeowners, renters and people interested in interior improvement.
Customer behaviour soon revealed an important limitation.
The product used a strong industrial-strength adhesive designed to create a durable installation. While this was a major advantage for permanent applications, it made the tiles considerably less suitable for renters because removing them could damage the underlying wall.
This fundamentally changed the addressable audience. The campaigns needed to focus primarily on homeowners rather than the wider home décor market.
Further campaign analysis revealed that a substantial proportion of the homeowners responding most strongly to the product were within the 45–65+ age range.
Another assumption also changed as the campaigns matured. Early advertising had focused predominantly on men because of the product’s DIY and construction characteristics. Performance data demonstrated that women were also highly responsive to the product, significantly expanding the viable customer base.
Audience discovery therefore became an ongoing process rather than a one-time targeting decision.
The Strategy
Adflow Digital built the growth strategy around continuously reducing friction between product discovery and purchase.
Paid social campaigns were progressively refined around homeownership, age, product interest and observed buying behaviour, while creative was broadened to appeal to both men and women interested in improving their homes.
As traffic increased, another major obstacle became clear: trust.
Customers were interested in the visual transformation the tiles could deliver, but many wanted reassurance that the product was genuine, durable and capable of producing the results shown in the advertising.
Adflow Digital introduced Judge.me reviews on the Shopify store and developed customer outreach processes encouraging existing buyers to share their experiences. The same approach was extended to Google reviews, building independent social proof across multiple stages of the customer journey.
Reviews became an important conversion asset, particularly for customers encountering an unfamiliar product category for the first time.
The strategy increasingly moved beyond media optimisation alone. Advertising, audience development, social proof, website experience and customer education were treated as parts of a single acquisition system.
Building the Campaign
One of the most important lessons came from customer demand for product samples.
Prospective buyers frequently wanted to physically inspect the stone before committing to a full order, so the company introduced low-cost samples at a fraction of the price of a full purchase.
Initially, this appeared to be an effective way of reducing hesitation.
Campaign and revenue data revealed a different outcome.
The sample journey significantly extended the time between initial interest and a full purchase. Some customers did not return after ordering a sample while others used the sample to evaluate the material before purchasing a similar product from physical retail stores.
This created additional advertising and fulfilment costs without a corresponding increase in attributable revenue, placing substantial pressure on ROAS.
Adflow Digital therefore recommended discontinuing the sample programme and concentrating the customer journey around full-product purchases.
Placement performance produced another important insight. Facebook consistently generated stronger commercial results than Instagram, allowing media investment to be increasingly concentrated on the better-performing Facebook placements rather than spreading budget evenly across Meta.
Video advertising was also tested extensively. While video helped demonstrate the product visually, paid video campaigns produced comparatively high CPMs.
Rather than relying on paid video distribution alone, Adflow shifted more attention towards improving the landing-page experience itself.
A professionally produced instructional video was added to show customers how the peel-and-stick stone tiles could be installed, giving prospective buyers a much clearer understanding of the process before purchasing.
Customer enquiries then revealed another recurring objection:
How should the tiles be installed around corners and edges?
A second instructional video was produced specifically to address corners, sides and finishing details. By answering these questions directly on the landing page, the website could remove friction before customers needed to contact the business.
The Impact
Adflow Digital’s involvement extended considerably beyond running advertising campaigns.
The engagement began with the creation of the company’s brand identity and Shopify ecommerce experience and developed into an ongoing growth programme spanning audience discovery, paid media, customer reviews, conversion optimisation, product education and commercial decision-making.
Several of the most important improvements came from challenging assumptions rather than simply increasing media spend.
Renters were removed from the primary audience once product characteristics demonstrated that homeowners represented the stronger market. Female audiences were expanded after campaign behaviour challenged the original male-led targeting strategy. The sample programme was discontinued when its effect on purchase behaviour and ROAS became clear. Media investment was concentrated around the placements producing stronger commercial results while landing pages were progressively improved to answer the questions preventing customers from purchasing.
The result is a mature ecommerce acquisition system producing more than USD $200,000 in monthly revenue at approximately 4.5–5x ROAS, with continued month-on-month growth driven by stronger targeting, greater trust and a continuously improving customer journey.
Key Results
The combined strategy now generates monthly revenues exceeding USD $200,000, with revenue continuing to grow month on month. Paid acquisition consistently operates at approximately 4.5–5x ROAS, supported by progressively refined homeowner targeting, stronger customer reviews, improved landing pages and a more efficient purchase journey.
The programme also evolved from broad demographic assumptions into a significantly more precise acquisition model focused on homeowners, particularly within the 45–65+ segment, across both male and female audiences.
