Discover how Notion is using predictive UA to scale growth and reduce CAC

It has been a minute since we’ve shared a case study with you all, so we figured, let’s highlight one of our awesome clients in ✨B2B SaaS!✨

We decided to shine the spotlight on Notion. Notion is a global team collaboration SaaS company, offering tiered subscription plans, ranging from freemium to enterprise, with more than 20 million active users worldwide. Their product is trusted by teams such as Curology, Mixpanel, MatchGroup, and Headspace—so needless to say, Notion is one heck of a data-driven team that is at the top of their game. With that in mind, you might be wondering why they even turned to us. Simply put, it was to keep that momentum going in a more optimal manner, while reducing customer acquisition costs. 

And boy did it work out! Voyantis’ predictive growth platform was able to help them increase their team activation rate by 21 percent, while also reducing the cost per activated team by 32 percent!

Okay okay, I’ll elaborate more on that. 😁

Leading up to predictive UA

We’ll start from the very beginning. 

Due to the fact that Notion has a robust data structure (and a strong growth team that takes on its campaigns like grandmasters in chess), they were looking for a solution to further fuel its growth by scaling user acquisition, while maintaining healthy unit economics. 

To date, the marketing team optimized its campaigns for upper-funnel events, by applying rules of thumb and proxy-metrics. Naturally, they were bound to the native ad networks limitation of short-term conversion windows. Results were okay, but far from optimal, because they are a B2B SaaS company after all. We expanded on how growth is trickier for product-led B2B’s in one of our previous posts.

Now back to Notion 🙂. With a long conversion funnel that includes a freemium option, the conversion to paying customers may range between a few weeks to several months. This is why their main objective was to distribute their marketing capital more effectively by reaching a competitive cost-per-team on their Google Ads search campaigns.

This is where Voyantis came in

After a few insightful tactical discussions, it became clear that what the Notion team needed was the ability to predict which users would eventually convert to paying customers and yield high LTV. This was largely due to the fact that the vast majority of their users convert to paying customers after a period longer than the ad network’s native conversion window.

So we tapped into the power of our signal optimization tool, and collaborated with them in creating a team-level prediction model, forecasting each team’s lifetime value within 180 days. 

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Their BAU campaigns ran, well, as usual. Meanwhile in parallel, the Voyantis-powered campaigns were optimized for high LTV customers. The results rolled in, in a matter of weeks!

The Voyantis campaign, which was backed by our signal optimization solution, increased Notion’s team activation rate by 21 percent, and their six-month predicted ROAS increased by 38 percent.

Compared to a standard campaign optimizing for team signups, the campaign that was optimized with Voyantis’ signal yielded the following results (with all other parameters remaining without change):

• +21% team activation rate
• -32% cost per activated team
• +38% predicted 6-month ROAS 
• +35% acquired teams with 3+ users

Three cheers for predictive UA!

Those amazing numbers were made possible thanks to our signal optimization solution, which is one of our most popular predictive UA tools. 

Voyantis enabled Notion to optimize its campaigns towards the predicted value of its customers, resulting in the reduction in CAC, and the substantial uplift in ad spend ROAS. 

Additionally, this allowed the global SaaS business to successfully activate value-based bidding, which also plays a role in greater cohort retention, and the reduction in UA-related costs over time.

The best thing about this case study is that the results seen by Notion can easily be replicated by any and every other data-driven product-led B2B SaaS company of similar size, simply by tapping into predictive UA. 

Predictive UA is on its way to becoming the standard for growth teams worldwide in this ever-changing market. The companies that are bound to stay ahead of the growth game are those that choose to incorporate this tech into their growth strategy earlier on, much like the team at Notion has.