Challenge
Expanding reach without fragmenting the customer experience
Homes.com is a leading online real estate marketplace that helps consumers find homes, explore neighborhoods, and connect with real estate professionals. With a strong focus on delivering an engaging and informative home-search experience, Homes.com supports buyers, sellers, renters, and agents throughout the real estate journey.
With its lower-funnel campaigns already delivering strong performance, Homes.com wanted to reach audiences across more of the places where they spend their time and create new opportunities for long-term growth.
However, adding channels alone wasn’t enough. Homes.com needed to maintain a consistent and recognizable brand experience across the open web and social, while continuing to optimize toward measurable performance outcomes.
Solution
Connecting open web and social activation with Criteo
Homes.com expanded its Criteo retargeting strategy beyond the open web to include social inventory across Meta, Instagram, and TikTok.
By activating these environments through Criteo, Homes.com could extend an existing performance strategy into social while creating a more connected cross-channel experience.
Rather than managing each channel as an isolated activation, Criteo helped Homes.com engage audiences across multiple touchpoints and optimize media toward shared performance goals.
Homes.com initially complemented its open web activity with Social Display before launching Social Video campaigns across Meta and TikTok. The combination allowed the brand to benefit from the reach and engagement potential of social video, particularly on TikTok, while maintaining the performance focus of its broader retargeting strategy.
Criteo’s custom creative capabilities were also central to the approach. Homes.com combined dynamic personalization with customized brand elements, ensuring ads remained relevant to each user while maintaining consistent visuals and storytelling across channels and formats.
Results
Turning stronger cross-channel engagement into more leads
Expanding the retargeting strategy to include social inventory delivered meaningful month-over-month performance improvements.
Leads increased by 33%, supported by a 12% increase in click-through rate and a 25% improvement in conversion rate. The results demonstrate how Criteo’s connected approach helped Homes.com drive stronger engagement across social while converting audiences more efficiently.
Building on this performance, Homes.com plans to continue increasing investment across Social Display and Social Video, using Criteo to scale its presence across channels while preserving media efficiency and a cohesive brand experience.
"Consumers move seamlessly across channels, and our strategy needs to do the same.
Working with Criteo enabled us to deliver a more cohesive experience across the open web
and social, personalize messaging at scale, and continue building a strategy that supports
both immediate performance and long-term growth."
