For many businesses, narrowing the time between when a customer conducts online research and makes a purchase offline has long been a challenge. Consumers can spend weeks browsing, comparing, and researching before they ever pick up the phone or walk into a store. The question isn't whether or not they're interested. It's how to identify them at the right moment and deliver a message that moves them from research to action.
Intent signals offer a compelling answer to this longstanding question. By capturing and analyzing real-time online behaviors—searches, page visits, and content engagement—marketers can more quickly understand who is actively in-market for specific products or services. Combined with precision targeting across both digital and physical channels, and these signals become the secret sauce for campaigns that inspire action and measurable results.
A recent campaign with an independently-owned network of window and door installation franchisees illustrates how this approach works in practice.
Reaching Homeowners at the Right Moment
Window replacement isn’t a decision most homeowners make lightly. It’s often driven by necessity, and deferred until homeowners feel ready to make the financial commitment. This makes the decision cycle long, and broad-reach advertising can struggle to separate serious prospects from more casual browsers.
The goal for the window and door installation franchisees was to identify homeowners actively researching window replacement and reach them with while their interest was fresh. Rather than casting a wide net, the marketing campaign needed to focus on households demonstrating genuine purchase intent.
How Intent Signals Work
The campaign began by collecting online activity across relevant search and browsing categories over a 30-day window. This included searches for specific brands, product categories like "windows and doors replacement," and related installation services. The key was capturing signals that indicated active research.
From an initial pool of nearly 60,000 households showing intent signals, the audience was refined using third-party data enhancements. Filters were applied to ensure targets were homeowners living in single-family dwellings within certain property age parameters —critical criteria for window replacement prospects. Additionally, existing customers, active leads, and do-not-contact records were removed.
This refinement process is essential. Raw intent data is valuable, but it needs the right demographic and behavioral overlays to avoid wasting effort on prospects that fall outside the ideal target audience. In this case, approximately 53% of the original intent audience met the final targeting criteria, resulting in a focused campaign universe of just over 26,000 households across ten markets.
Orchestrating an Omnichannel Experience
With the audience defined, the campaign was deployed across two key channels: IP-targeted display ads and direct mail. The display program ran for 30 days, delivering nearly 800,000 impressions to the targeted households. Midway through the digital campaign, a physical direct mail piece landed in mailboxes, creating a second touchpoint designed for maximum reinforcement.
This sequencing was designed intentionally. Display ads build awareness and establish brand presence. Direct mail provides a tangible, physical reminder that arrives when the household is already being reached digitally. The combination creates multiple exposures across different contexts, increasing the likelihood of engagement.
The campaign also tracked downstream activity. Click-through rates, landing page sessions, and form fills provided early indicators of interest. But the real measure of success came through a match-back analysis that connected campaign exposure to actual sales opportunities generated within a 90-day window.
Results That Matter
The campaign generated 425 clicks and more than 750 landing page sessions, with top-performing markets showing click-through rates above the campaign average.
More importantly, match-back analysis was able to identify specific opportunities generated by the marketing campaign within 45 and 90 days of the direct mail drop. A significant number of opportunities converted to closed sales, generating six figures in revenue. The average for each transaction was more than $15,000.
These aren't vanity metrics. These are business outcomes directly tied to marketing activity, demonstrating a clear return on investment that has been historically very difficult.
Lessons for Marketers
This campaign offers several lessons, particularly for businesses that deal with longer decision-making cycles.
Intent signals offer marketers the opportunity to act based on demonstrated interest, and not broad assumptions. It provides a clear path forward in an often-fragmented digital world. Identify prospects when they're actively researching, deliver coordinated messaging across channels, and measure results that matter to your business. Intent signals turn online activity into actionable marketing intelligence, and when executed well, that intelligence can drive revenue. If you’d like to find out which consumers are showing the real intent that matters for your business, reach out to learn how you can start leveraging intent signals!