What is cost per appointment?
Cost per appointment is ad spend divided by the number of consults, tours or intro sessions those ads got booked. It is the second stage of a gym’s funnel and the first one the front desk had a hand in.
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Cost per appointment for gyms
Between the lead and the member sits the appointment: a consult, a tour, a free class, a discovery call. Whatever you call it, someone put a time in the calendar. Cost per appointment tells you what each booking cost, and it is the first number that reflects your front desk as well as your ads, because a slow reply or a clumsy booking link loses appointments the ads had already paid for.
The formula is spend divided by bookings, for the same period, campaign and location. Count a booking once, even if it gets rescheduled, and count it on the day it was booked rather than the day it is scheduled for.
Where it misleads: a booking is a promise, not a visit. A source that books cheaply and then fails to show is expensive at the next stage, which is why cost per show and show rate sit beside it. A cheap lead is not a cheap member, and neither is a cheap booking.
How Adsu uses cost per appointment
Adsu reads the booking from your CRM calendar and ties it to the enquiry, so cost per appointment is computed from real bookings against the campaign and location that produced them. Adsu counts verified stages only: if a stage cannot be verified, it is not counted. Every report is one line per campaign per location. Bookings that Adsu cannot connect to a click or call stay out of the number rather than being spread across campaigns.
Adsu credits the last eligible touch inside the 30 days before the payment. Booked, showed and paid go back to Google as offline conversions and to Meta through the Conversions API. A booking goes back the moment it lands, so the platform learns from people who book rather than people who fill in forms, and next month’s bookings come from more of them.
Questions, answered.
The same thing as cost per appointment: ad spend divided by the number of appointments booked. Studios that sell intro classes say booking; gyms that run consults say appointment. Either way the stage is the same, someone put a time in the calendar and has not yet turned up.
Book more of the leads you already have. Speed to lead is the biggest lever: reply within minutes, offer specific times rather than "whenever suits you", and follow up more than once. Then send bookings back to the ad platform as the conversion, so it goes looking for people who book.
Count each person once. A rescheduled consult is the same appointment moved, not a new one, and counting it twice makes the campaign look better than it is. Count no-shows as bookings too, because the booking happened; they show up as a lower show rate, which is the right place for them.
Related
Cost per lead, CPL, is ad spend divided by the number of enquiries it produced. Why it is the least reliable number in a gym funnel, with an example.
Cost per showCost per show is ad spend divided by the number of people who booked and walked in. Why a gym’s funnel turns on it, with an example and Adsu’s rule.
Show rateShow rate is the share of booked appointments where the person turned up. Why it decides whether a cheap lead is cheap at all, with a gym example.
Customer acquisition costCustomer acquisition cost, CAC, is what you spend to win one new paying customer. The gym formula, an example, and why CPA is a different number.
The proof
- Net members
- +21
- Lifetime value added
- $67,000+
Bobby & Maria Gasdia, Big Day Fitness, 2 locations
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