How Yardzen Acquired High Value Leads with Angler Leading to a 93% year-over-year increase in ROAS

After a successful pilot, Yardzen has been using Angler events and audiences since September 2023 to identify high value leads while reducing costs. On a year-over-year basis they are seeing a 53% decrease in cost per lead and a 92% year-over-year increase in return on ad spend.

92%

Increase in year-over-year ROAS

53%

Decrease in year-over-year Cost per Lead

55%

Improvement in 28-day Lead Conversion

About the Brand

Starting with just your address and an understanding of the user's  lifestyle, taste and how they want to use their outdoor space, Yardzen designs the perfect yard for every homeowner. Using a rich toolset of technologies, coupled with sheer enthusiasm for the process, they handle the complex pieces like slope, irrigation, drainage, sunlight and existing plantings, freeing the user up to simply choose how they want their  space to look, feel and be used. Furthermore, Yardzen connects the user with trusted, vetted landscapers who can make the outdoor space dreams become a reality. The entire process is made simple by Yardzen's end-to-end platform. 

Goal

Yardzen operates with a longer consideration cycle, where potential customers typically visit the site multiple times and require several touchpoints before signing up for services. Previously, Yardzen optimized their digital channels, such as Meta, around Add-to-Cart events. However, after partnering with Angler, they shifted their strategy to focus on lead capture events and leveraged CRM and outbound sales to convert those leads into paying customers.

Their internal analysis revealed that, on average, it takes 21 days for a lead to convert, with only 3% of leads converting into paid projects within the first seven days. Over a 28-day period, a total of 6.5% of leads typically convert to a paid project.

Yardzen aimed to acquire higher-quality leads through Meta, specifically focusing on leads that would have a higher conversion rate than their usual benchmarks. Additionally, they sought to retarget high-value visitors on Meta, driving incremental revenue through retargeting campaigns.

Solution

Yardzen leveraged Segment, a customer data platform, to capture key consumer journey events, including valuable zero-party data from design survey quiz responses on their website and app. Their engineering team integrated Angler AI within Segment, enabling seamless transmission of all event data to Angler. In addition, Yardzen’s data team provided Angler with a one-time extract of customer, lead, and transaction data from their cloud data warehouse via AWS S3.

This data allowed Angler to build a predictive lead scoring model, assigning a probability of a lead converting within the next 28 days. Angler’s signal restoration capabilities improved Meta’s Event Match Quality (EMQ) scores across Yardzen’s full-funnel events, outperforming the standard Segment implementation.

After establishing a baseline, Yardzen switched all standard events to Angler’s C-API source and began using a custom event—Angler High Value Lead—to optimize acquisition of leads with an above-average conversion probability. Yardzen then set up an A/B test comparing this custom event to the standard Lead event, with the challenger optimizing for high-value leads and the control using the standard approach.

Following a 4-week test, Yardzen’s data science team analyzed lead conversions by campaign, using UTM-based tracking, and observed significant performance improvements. As a result, Yardzen transitioned all conversion-focused campaigns to optimize using Angler’s high-value lead custom event.

Outcome

Meta published a case study in July 2024 on the longitudinal impact of Angler's predictive lead scoring on Yardzen's topline and bottomline. From February to March 2024, Yardzen experienced a 24% improvement in cost per lead, immediately boosting campaign efficiency. Comparing year-over-year data, Yardzen achieved a remarkable reduction of more than 50% in cost per lead, coupled with a significant 92% increase in return on ads spend. These metrics underscored substantial gains in lead generation and overall campaign effectiveness.

  • 55% improvement in lead conversion at the same cost per lead
  • 24% month-over-month decrease in cost per lead
  • 53% year-over-year decrease in cost per lead
  • 92% year-over-year increase in return on ad spend
Leveraging Angler's predictive Conversions API that identified high value leads was a game changer for Yardzen's lead generation efforts across Meta technologies. It allows us to massively increase our scale while also focusing on improving lead quality. We’ve had an exceptional experience working with Angler AI. They came highly recommended from a trusted marketing colleague, and from the beginning, they have not only been kind and incredible helpful, but their solution actually works!

Kendra Poppy

Head of Marketing

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