Gym ad tracking glossary

Metrics

• ROAS ROAS, return on ad spend, is the revenue a campaign produced divided by what it cost.
• Customer acquisition cost Customer acquisition cost, CAC, is what you spend to win one new paying customer: ad spend divided by the new members it produced.
• Lifetime value Lifetime value, LTV, is the total revenue one member pays you over the time they stay.
• Cost per lead Cost per lead, CPL, is ad spend divided by the number of enquiries it produced.
• Cost per appointment Cost per appointment is ad spend divided by the number of consults, tours or intro sessions those ads got booked.
• Cost per show Cost per show is ad spend divided by the number of people who booked and walked in: the point in a gym’s funnel where a lead becomes a person in the building, and the last stage before anyone pays.
• Show rate Show rate is the share of booked appointments where the person turned up: showed divided by booked.
• Tracked revenue Tracked revenue is the member revenue Adsu verified and credited to a click or call in a calendar month: cleared payments matched to a real person, renewals included.
• Marketing ROI Marketing ROI is the profit your marketing produced divided by what it cost: revenue minus marketing cost, then divided by marketing cost.
• Conversion value Conversion value is the amount of money attached to a conversion when it is sent to an ad platform, so the platform can weigh one conversion against another.
• Match rate A match rate is the share of conversions you send to an ad platform that it can tie to a click or a person, through click IDs, hashed emails and phone numbers.
• Lead-to-member conversion rate Lead-to-member conversion rate is the share of leads who became paying members: members divided by leads, for the same period and location.
• Trial-to-member conversion rate Trial-to-member conversion rate is the share of people who started a trial and then paid for a membership: paying members divided by trials started.
• Ad spend Ad spend is what the ad platforms charged you for a period at a location: the money that went to Google, Meta and the rest.
• Cost per member Ad spend divided by new paying members: the gym version of customer acquisition cost.
• Cost per sale Ad spend divided by sales; at a gym the sale is the membership, so it is cost per member.

Attribution

• Attribution model An attribution model is the rule that decides which ad, click or call gets credit when someone joins after several touches.
• Attribution window An attribution window is the number of days after an ad click or call during which a conversion can still be credited to that ad.
• Last-click attribution Last-click attribution gives all the credit for a conversion to the last ad click or touch before it happened.
• Multi-touch attribution Multi-touch attribution splits the credit for a conversion across the ads and visits that came before it, using a formula such as linear or time-decay.
• First-party data First-party data is the information your business collects directly: CRM contacts, the booking calendar, billing records, website visits.
• Feedback loop The feedback loop is Adsu’s name for sending verified outcomes, appointment booked, showed and membership paid, back to the ad platforms as the wins to optimize for, so their targeting learns who pays instead of who fills in forms.
• Lead tracking Lead tracking is recording where each enquiry came from and what happened to it next: which ad, which campaign, whether it booked, showed and paid.
• Call tracking Call tracking is working out which ad or campaign made the phone ring, and what happened after.
• First-touch attribution First-touch attribution gives the whole credit for a member to the first touch, the ad, post or search that introduced you, whatever came after.
• Revenue attribution Revenue attribution is crediting the money a customer paid, first payment and renewals, to the marketing that produced them.
• Marketing attribution Working out which ad, channel or campaign gets the credit for a member, and how that credit is decided.
• AI ad tracking Tracking that follows a real person from the first click to the payment that clears, then tells the ad platforms who paid.
• Ad attribution Working out which ad produced an outcome; for a gym, the outcome that matters is a paid membership.

Tracking plumbing

• Conversion tracking Conversion tracking is telling an ad platform that something worth paying for happened, so it can credit the ad and find more of it.
• Google Ads conversion tracking Google Ads conversion tracking is how Google learns which clicks led to something valuable.
• Offline conversion tracking Offline conversion tracking is sending an ad platform a conversion that happened off your website: a booked consult, a show, a payment at the desk.
• Enhanced conversions Enhanced conversions is Google’s method for improving conversion matching by sending hashed first-party data, an email or phone, with the conversion.
• Meta pixel The Meta pixel, formerly the Facebook pixel, is a piece of code on your website that tells Meta what visitors do there: page views, form submissions, purchases.
• Meta Conversions API The Meta Conversions API, CAPI, is the server-side way to send events to Meta, from your systems instead of a browser.
• Server-side tracking Server-side tracking sends events to ad platforms from a server, not the browser.
• Gclid A gclid, Google click ID, is the unique code Google Ads adds to your landing URL when someone clicks an ad.
• Fbclid An fbclid is the click identifier Meta adds to your landing URL when someone clicks a Facebook or Instagram ad.
• UTM parameters UTM parameters are five tags added to a link, utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content, that tell your tracking where a visit came from.
• Dynamic number insertion Dynamic number insertion, DNI, swaps the phone number your website shows for each visitor, so the ad that made the phone ring can be identified.
• Auto-tagging Auto-tagging is the Google Ads setting that adds a gclid, Google’s unique click ID, to the landing URL every time someone clicks your ad.
• Final URL suffix A final URL suffix is the set of parameters Google Ads appends after your landing page URL, next to the gclid.