Automated and Predictable. How ARS Rebuilt Their Customer Acquisition Stack From the Ground Up.
ARS and PX share the same belief: customer acquisition at scale should be measurable, manageable, and repeatable. When the partnership launched in Q4 2024, the first move was to build the infrastructure that makes that belief operational. Automated systems where manual processes had been the norm. Predictable outcomes where there had been guesswork. A program that could grow without adding proportional overhead to manage it.
Introduction
American Residential Services is one of the largest residential home services networks in the United States. HVAC represents the core of its revenue, alongside plumbing and electrical work across 55 branches. ARS is private equity backed, which makes efficiency and predictable unit economics operating requirements rather than ambitions.
HVAC demand moves with the weather, so the business had long carried the assumption that performance could not be forecast. The 2025 program was built to test that assumption: consolidate every lead source and channel onto one platform, price each lead against what it actually produces, and give both the corporate team and individual branches the same view of cost and outcome.
What ARS and PX built together in 2025 set a new standard for what affiliate lead generation can look like at scale.
In their own words
Challenges
The partnership started with a clear opportunity to modernize and scale the affiliate lead generation program, beginning with five constraints:
- Concentrated spend: the marketing budget sat with a small group of 5 publisher partners on fixed CPL agreements.
- Manual budget pacing: affiliate budgets were managed by hand, partner performance lacked consistent visibility, and time went into operational decisions instead of growth.
- 17% duplication rate on leads and calls, which meant paying repeatedly for the same consumers with no cross-channel view of how much budget that wasted.
- Branch-level stop-start cycles: individual branches paused campaigns mid-month to manage local P&L, which undermined campaign optimization.
- No reliable tracking or attribution: adding lead sources and partners meant adding human capital at the same rate.
Goals
Build infrastructure that makes lead volume trustworthy, and capture every possible customer at the right cost.
- One platform for all lead and call flows, other marketing channels, budget management, and feedback loops, with unified attribution and real-time visibility across partners, branches, and channels.
- Diversify the publisher portfolio and add channels: social, email, direct mail, and top 10 comparison websites.
- Eliminate wasted spend by embedding cross-channel deduplication, phone validation, and litigator screening at the point of purchase.
- Centralize budget management using dynamic pricing and quarterly planning to replace branch-level stop-start cycles.
- Automate disposition data flows with projected performance insights at partner, SUB-ID, and branch level.
- Capture incremental revenue by introducing lead sharing across overlapping branch geographies and ZIP codes.
- Build the compliance and data infrastructure needed to deploy AI-powered engagement across all contact channels.
How PX rebuilt the ARS acquisition stack
One platform for every campaign and channel
PX centralized all of ARS' campaigns and channels on a single platform: affiliate leads, calls, paid search, social, and direct mail. Manual tracking was replaced with automated performance reporting and real-time visibility, so the team can see which marketing dollars are working while the money is still in play.
PX's managed services team also built branded, compliant landing pages on ARS' behalf.
The result was something ARS did not have before: one source of truth for where budget went and what it produced.
Customer acquisition that is predictable by design
Source diversification. Dependence on five publisher partners with fixed CPL agreements was the single biggest risk to performance. Expanding the portfolio to 41 live partnerships gave the program the optionality to perform regardless of any one source's volume or quality in a given month.
Dynamic lead pricing. Fixed CPL was replaced with pricing tied to the actual performance of each source. Every lead is priced against what its source produces, so ARS never overpays and ROI stays defensible as volume grows.
Central strategy, local visibility. Campaign strategy moved to the corporate team, while each branch got real-time visibility into its own marketing cost and cost per appointment, with thresholds set to its specific economics. Branches stopped second-guessing lead generation activity, and budget confidence followed.
Budget protected at the point of purchase
A 17% duplication rate meant ARS was routinely paying for leads it had already bought, for consumers it could not reach, and in some cases for contacts that carried legal risk.
PX embedded cross-channel deduplication, phone validation, and litigator screening directly into the purchase flow. Over 32,000 invalid transactions were blocked and 36 known litigators were filtered out before any spend occurred.
$2.24M of recovered budget went straight back into acquiring new, high-quality consumers.
Lead sharing across overlapping branch geographies
Overlapping branch footprints used to mean duplicated spend. Now a single high-intent consumer, acquired once with the right consent in place, becomes an opportunity for every relevant branch in that footprint.
The same budget produced a 45% lift in appointment rates and a 29% lift in sale rates, with 23% of consumers booking with more than one branch. More revenue from spend that was already committed.
Lead sharing test results
| Lead distribution | Total appt rate | Total unique appt rate | Sale rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline 1 | 20% | 20% | 3.9% |
| Baseline 2 | 24% | 24% | 4.5% |
| Lead sharing test | 35% | 27% | 5.8% |
Against the stronger of the two baselines, lead sharing lifted the total appointment rate from 24% to 35% and the sale rate from 4.5% to 5.8%, on the same budget.
An extension of the ARS marketing team
The belief this partnership started from in Q4 2024 has not changed: lead volume ARS can trust, at a cost the business can plan around. Both teams still set those goals together, and both own the result.
Trust shows up in what gets shared. ARS sends real outcome data back, down to individual partners, SUB-IDs and branches, and PX puts it to work on pricing and pacing while the quarter is still live.
Results
Full year 2025, through PX
Hear it from ARS
Watch the full conversation on how ARS rebuilt its lead acquisition program.
Automated. Predictable.
Built to scale.
PX consolidates every lead source, call, and channel on one platform, prices each lead against what its source actually produces, and blocks waste before you pay for it. One system your corporate team and your branches can both act on.
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