How Storia Cut CPL By 44% With GoAudience

“GoAudience gave us the audience quality we were missing—our cost per lead dropped to the lowest we’ve ever seen, and engagement rates improved right away.” – Tanaz Makkar, Account Strategist at Storia Agency

About

Storia is a performance marketing agency that drives paid growth across Meta, Google, and Amazon platforms on a transparent, flat monthly fee. Using creative testing and forecasting, they report an average 50% lift in ROAS across their client base.

Challenge

Low Engagement From Leads Put CPL And Client Retention At Risk

When a nonprofit hired Storia Agency to help spread positive stories about their city, the agency was excited to drive meaningful engagement through emails, guide downloads, and yearly giveaways.

Tanaz Makkar, Storia’s Account Strategist, delivered exactly what was promised: Meta and Google campaigns that ran like clockwork, and thousands of monthly leads that consistently hit her client’s volume targets. While everything looked great on paper, email metrics eventually told a different story.

Tanaz knew Storia was winning fresh leads, but the team saw an opportunity to strengthen email deliverability and engagement—making lead quality the priority. With inbox filtering more stringent than ever, Storia set a sharper bar for subscriber relevance.

At the same time, Storia had a tight rope to walk. As Tanaz puts it, “We need to keep a close eye on performance and control our CPL. We also have our own benchmarks like specific lead volume goals that we have to reach by end of year.”

To meet these commitments, Storia’s targeting approach leaned on demographic assumptions and broad retargeting pools. While this method worked well for volume, lead quality was difficult to predict.

The hunt for better audiences also ate up Tanaz’s time. As she worked to balance cost and lead quality, she constantly tested new interest segments, tweaked demographics, analyzed reports, and adjusted campaigns. Each test cycle took days to show results, and most didn’t show significant improvements.

That’s when Storia discovered GoAudience. While Tanaz test-drove other platforms that kept her hanging, GoAudience was different. Their team answered all of Storia’s questions upfront, explaining exactly how the platform could improve lead quality.

“We wanted to strengthen lead quality and engagement before it started affecting performance targets—so finding a more intent-driven audience became a top priority.”

Solution

GoAudience’s Traffic Scoring Identifies High-Intent Visitors and Reduces CPL

Once Storia implemented GoAudience’s Traffic Scoring, the platform added a small tracking code—referred to as a pixel—on their client’s website. This pixel collects rich visitor data, including email addresses, names, and incomes. Then, GoAudience automatically scores each visitor based on their behavior and fit with the client’s target audience.

The real breakthrough came when Storia exported these visitor lists to Meta. “We use all of the emails from GoAudience to build seed audiences for lookalike campaigns,” Tanaz explains. Instead of Meta‘s generic interest targeting, they now have a foundation of verified high-intent visitors.

While traffic scoring campaigns have lower reach and impressions than standard targeting, these campaigns generate more leads—and at a significantly lower cost. “With GoAudience, we have the lowest cost per lead we’ve seen with that audience,” Tanaz explains.

Eager to test engagement for herself, Tanaz ran a field experiment, splitting their clients’ email lists between GoAudience visitors and Meta leads. When she did, she noticed that GoAudience visitors opened emails and clicked consistently.

And the operational benefits extend far beyond metrics. Because constant testing and optimization are no longer necessary, Tanaz’s workload has reduced significantly, allowing her to focus on high-level tasks, like scaling successful campaigns.

The best part is how easy it is to launch these seemingly complicated campaigns. “It took me five minutes to understand everything,” Tanaz says.

“GoAudience helps us keep our CPL low while minimizing our manual workload. We’ve consistently seen better email open rates and clicks versus non-GoAudience leads.”

Results

Storia Achieves A Record-Low CPL And 25x Better Email Engagement

After implementing GoAudience, Storia delivered immediate wins across several key performance metrics:

• 44% lower CPL within the same campaign (record low for this audience)
• 1,340 Meta leads generated at lowest-ever cost
• 25x improvement in email open rate

Storia’s next goal is to rapidly expand their clients’ contact list roughly 7x so they can build a strong foundation for lookalike audiences and testing.

Going forward, Tanaz aims to use these high-intent visitors for sophisticated retargeting across email, Instagram, and Facebook—campaigns that would have been impossible with their previous targeting approach.

“GoAudience has helped reduce my workload in areas like cost and campaign optimizations, allowing me to focus on bigger creative and audience-growth goals.”