What is cost per lead?
Cost per lead, CPL, is ad spend divided by the number of enquiries it produced. It is the first and least reliable number in a gym’s ad funnel, because a lead has not booked, shown or paid for anything yet.
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Cost per lead for gyms
A lead is a name and a phone number. Somebody filled in a form, tapped a call button or messaged the page, and now your front desk has to turn that into a booked consult. Cost per lead tells you what each of those names cost. It does not tell you whether any of them turned into a member.
Ad platforms love CPL because it is the number they can see and the one they can drive down. Tell Meta a form fill is a win and it will find you cheaper form fills all day, from people who were curious for a second and never answer the phone. Your CPL improves and your gym does not get any fuller.
A cheap lead is not a cheap member. Cost per lead is the first stage in a chain that runs enquiry, booked, showed, paid, and the later stages are where the money hides. Read CPL beside cost per appointment, cost per show and show rate.
How Adsu uses cost per lead
Adsu reports cost per lead as the first stage in the chain, next to cost per appointment, cost per show and cost per member for the same campaign, so a cheap lead that never books is visible as exactly that. A lead counts when the enquiry lands in your CRM with a name attached, tied to the click or call that produced it. Adsu counts verified stages only: if a stage cannot be verified, it is not counted. Every report is one line per campaign per location.
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. Sent those stages instead of the form fill, the platforms stop hunting for cheap leads and start hunting for people who book and pay.
Questions, answered.
The one that turns into an acceptable cost per member. Work backwards: decide what you can pay for a paying member from your lifetime value, then multiply by the share of leads that end up joining. That gives you the most a lead can cost at your gym, on your own conversion rates, and it will differ by source.
Because the platform optimized for the thing you asked for. A form fill is easy to produce, and the cheapest ones come from people with the least intent. Track booked, showed and paid separately and send those back to the platform, and the leads get more expensive while the members get cheaper.
An enquiry with contact details your front desk can act on: a form submission, a call, a message or a walk-in captured in the CRM. A page view or a click is not a lead. If the same person enquires twice, count them once.
Related
Cost per appointment is ad spend divided by the number of consults, tours or intro sessions booked. The formula, an example, and why booked is not showed.
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
Stop paying for leads. Start paying for members.
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