How Linjer increased their ROAS by 48% using Y42

Imagine being able to set up and manage an entire data infrastructure by yourself, without the help of a data team, significantly increasing your company’s ROAS (return on ad spend) as a result.

Sounds like an unmissable opportunity, right? Well, that’s the exact story behind Linjer’s data journey.

Linjer is an independent design studio making sustainable jewelry, bags, and watches without the luxury markup. They work directly with the manufacturers and deliver their products straight to the customer. This approach enables them to save costs on middlemen, storefronts, and other charges, meaning they can sell at 25% of the industry price.

Founded by San Francisco entrepreneurs, Jennifer Chong and Roman Khan, the company has generated $10 million after just three years of being in business. It can definitely be considered an ecommerce success story.

Thinking about data early on

Like most ecommerce businesses, Linjer did not have its own data team. What the company did have, however, was Zephyr Chan, their Head of Growth. Zephyr Chan had an appreciation for the importance of data to achieve business success. That is why the company started its analytics journey early on and has worked with various data analytics tools over time.

Linjer started out with Excel for its first analytics setup. After a while, the team noticed that there were limitations to the tool, as they couldn’t slice and dice the data according to their needs. They also realized they couldn’t add all the relevant metrics to the dashboard, such as “new customer CAC by country” and “ROAS by acquisition channel”. What’s more, multichannel attribution was something they couldn’t tackle, because data modeling capabilities were lacking.

"Data is the lifeblood of every modern business. Every decision-maker should have a tight grip on their own data and be empowered to work with it in the most effective way."

Zephyr Chan

Head of Growth at Linjer

That is why the team moved on to try out more sophisticated solutions, such as Funnel.io and QlikView. Each solution they tried had its own strengths and weaknesses, but none of them really hit the mark when it came to ease of use, customizability, and scalability.

That was until they found Y42.

Finding the perfect data tool

Y42 let Zephyr and his team work with data effectively, without limitations in the following ways:

• Full customization: Plug-and-play solutions such as Funnel mostly come with fixed schema definitions of ecommerce metrics; for instance, customer lifetime value (CLV). If the team wanted to change the CLV definition or the way in which a report illustration was segmented, they didn’t typically have the chance to do so. With Y42, the team could use the “model” feature to easily enter their KPI definition or customer segmentation criteria in an intuitive interface and enjoy full flexibility throughout the process.

• Easy to set up and generate insights: Zephyr had tested QlikView, but would have needed to employ a data analyst to own and productively work with the tool over time due to the platform’s limited usability for non-technical users. However, the ecommerce industry rarely employs data analysts and only does so at a rather mature stage. With Y42, Linjer got rid of that dependency and empowered any data-driven and business-minded individual to work productively with their data.

• Reliable and performant: When Linjer worked with Excel and QlikView, the data volume was continuously growing. A point was reached where the dashboard load time became unbearably slow. As Y42 is built on top of a cloud data warehouse — such as Google BigQuery or Snowflake — it can process billions of records in seconds, relieving the team of scalability headaches.

To sum up, it was challenging for Linjer to find a solution that was customizable, scalable, and intuitive to use all at the same time. This is exactly where Y42 started to shine.

Implementing Y42

To get started with Y42, Zephyr set up Google BigQuery as his cloud-based data warehouse and connected it to the tool. It seemed daunting at first, but this entire process only took less than 30 minutes, explains Zephyr.

In order to then establish a comprehensive view of Linjer’s ecommerce operations, Zephyr connected all eight data sources that delivered the relevant data for his objective:

• Shopify

• Google Analytics

• Facebook Ads

• Google Ads

• TikTok Ads

• Pinterest Ads

• Klaviyo

• Google Sheets

On top of these, he used Y42 to normalize, merge, and calculate his target metrics for advanced insights, including:

• Profit contribution, split by 40 geographies

• Marketing spend and CAC (customer acquisition cost) by acquisition channel

• Cohort-based ROAS and multichannel attribution model

• MER (marketing efficiency ratio)

• EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes)

Most importantly, Zephyr did not have to rely on a different stakeholder to achieve his analytics objectives. He was able to set up the entire data infrastructure and access data insights all by himself, empowered by the intuitive Y42 user interface.

Results

After implementing Y42, Linjer achieved three key results:

1. Democratized access to a professional data setup leading to increased returns: As a digitally-minded head of growth, Zephyr managed to build out a comprehensive dashboard all on his own, and managed to support the business by growing its ROAS by 48% year over year.

2. Built advanced reporting for 40 geographic regions: Linjer obtained a granular overview of key ecommerce metrics, such as revenue, marketing spend, refunds, and customer retention cohorts. These were all segmented by acquisition channel and geography, driving up to hourly decisions to enable the effective allocation of marketing spend across all regions and channels.

3. Saved seven hours per week maintaining the dashboard: With Y42’s unified analytics experience, Linjer managed to save enormous amounts of time and effort maintaining their analytics pipeline.

"Y42 has been a game changer for us; it makes it easy for us to make real-time decisions as a D2C ecommerce brand."

Zephyr Chan

Head of Growth at Linjer

Despite not having a data team in place, Linjer managed to set up a scalable end-to-end data infrastructure and leverage the power of data analytics to improve their business performance — all by giving the right tool a chance.