June is here, and if you sell through The Home Depot, Lowe’s or Costco, that means one thing: Half the year is already behind you. Spring Black Friday is done. Lawn-and-garden season has peaked. Your Q1 and Q2 programs have already run. The good news is there is still time to fix what isn’t working. Now is the moment to get honest about where you actually stand before Q3 and Q4 demand arrives and your window to course-correct closes.
At Porchlight, we manage digital advertising, retail media, email, social and organic search for home improvement brands year-round. Every client gets a defined reporting cadence including weekly pulse checks, monthly deep dives and quarterly reviews against annual benchmarks. Here is what that looks like in practice, and what we think every home improvement brand should be measuring right now.
What We Look at Every Week
Weekly reviews are about catching problems before they compound. For paid search and retail media, we track click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), spend pacing against monthly budget and return on ad spend (ROAS) where conversion data is available. On retailer-destination campaigns running through platforms like Orange Apron Media (OAM), where conversion tracking on the retailer site is not possible, we evaluate CTR and click volume as the primary signals. For Meta, we watch cost per result and frequency. When frequency climbs without a corresponding drop in CTR, that’s an early signal the creative needs rotation. And for email, we check deliverability, open rate and click-through rate within 48 hours of a send. A sudden drop in open rate usually points to a list health issue or a subject line problem, not a content problem, and catching it early matters.
What We Dig into Every Month
- Paid Search and Retail Media (Google, Meta, OAM, Criteo): Every month, we evaluate ROAS by campaign and brand, conversion rate trends, impression share and bid strategy performance. We set tiered CTR benchmarks by channel and season, and for retail media, we hold campaigns to a higher standard in Q4 than in Q2. When ROAS falls below target, we review and adjust bids before making any changes to the actual budget. We also look at search term reports to identify wasted spend and new keyword opportunities, and we review Performance Max asset group performance to guide creative decisions for the following month.
- Digital Shelf (PIPs): We track PIP visit volume, conversion rate and content compliance on a monthly cadence. A PIP with strong paid traffic but a flat or declining conversion rate is a content problem, not a media problem, and mixing up the two is one of the most common and expensive mistakes we see. We flag any product page that drops below the retailer’s content score threshold and prioritize it for creative updates before the next media flight. For brands on Home Depot’s OAM, we align PIP performance reviews with the biweekly reporting cadence so bid decisions and page quality are always evaluated together.
- Email: Monthly email reporting covers open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, and revenue or traffic attribution where tracked. We segment performance by audience type (DIY vs. Pro vs. trade professional where applicable) because a 25% open rate on a Pro-targeted send means something different than a 25% open rate on a broad consumer blast. List growth and list churn are also monthly metrics. A list that is not growing and has climbing unsubscribe rates heading into Q4 is a significant problem that takes months to fix.
- Social (Meta and Pinterest): We report on paid and organic performance separately. For paid Meta, cost per result by objective (Prospecting, Retargeting, Conversions) and creative-level engagement tell us what is actually working at the ad level. For Pinterest, total traffic from all sources is the North Star Metric, not just paid. We also track which creative formats are outperforming. For most home improvement brands we work with, carousels tend to outperform video in Prospecting, but that is not universal, and it gets validated monthly.
- Organic Search (SEO): Monthly organic reporting covers impressions, clicks, average position and click-through rate by page from Google Search Console. We also track which queries are driving traffic to product and category pages vs. blog or editorial content. For brands running content programs, we tie blog performance back to target keywords and use that data to prioritize topics for the following quarter.
What the Quarterly Review Covers
Quarterly reviews are where we evaluate performance against the annual plan and make structural decisions: budget reallocation across channels, bid strategy progressions (for example, moving from Max Clicks to Max Conversions once a campaign has hit 30 or more conversions), creative refresh cycles and retailer program adjustments. We also run year-over-year comparisons at the quarterly level. An 8x ROAS in Q2 looks strong in isolation, but if the same campaign was running at 11x in Q2 of last year with a comparable budget, something has changed, and it needs a diagnosis. For home improvement brands with strong seasonality, quarter-over-quarter context matters, too: A dip in Q1 metrics that recovers sharply in Q2 is normal, but a dip that persists into Q2 is not.
The midyear review is effectively a Q2 quarterly review with higher stakes. You are not just evaluating one quarter – you are looking at whether the first half of the year has set you up to hit your annual numbers. If it hasn’t, you have one real opportunity to adjust before the Q4 window opens. That means evaluating which channels are contributing to revenue, and which are consuming budget without attribution; whether your current creative assets are built for Q3 demand or are still running on spring creative; and whether your retailer media programs, like OAM and Criteo, are funded and scheduled ahead of the seasonal push.
What this Means for Your Brand Right Now
If you do not have clean weekly and monthly data already, the first step is establishing a baseline now. You cannot make good decisions about Q3 and Q4 budgets, creative or retailer programs without it. If you do have the data, but nobody is reviewing or optimizing between monthly reports, that is the gap. The brands that end 2026 with strong numbers will be the ones that caught problems in June, not December, because they had a system that surfaced issues in real time and a team that knew what to do with them.
If you want to know how your current programs stack up or want a partner that manages this cadence end to end for home improvement retail brands, reach out to us below.