What is 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.
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Cost per show for gyms
A show is a person standing at your front desk. They saw the ad, enquired, booked, and turned up. Everything before this point happened on a screen; from here your team can sell. Cost per show is what it cost to get one of those people through the door, and for most gyms it is the number the whole funnel turns on, because the sale happens in the room, not in the ad.
The formula is spend divided by shows, on the same campaign, location and period. Track it separately from bookings. A campaign can book cheaply and show badly, and only cost per show tells you which.
A cheap lead is not a cheap member. Where cost per show misleads is when the show itself is the wrong person: a free-class offer can fill the room with people who were never going to buy, and the number looks great until you check what they cost per member. Read it with show rate and customer acquisition cost.
How Adsu uses cost per show
Adsu reads the show from your CRM, where the appointment is marked as attended, and ties it to the booking, the enquiry and the click or call that started it. That is what makes cost per show a computed number rather than a guess from a spreadsheet. 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. The show is the signal most ad accounts never receive, and sending it teaches the platform the difference between someone who books and someone who turns up.
Questions, answered.
Cost per appointment divides spend by bookings; cost per show divides the same spend by the people who attended. The gap between them is your no-shows, priced. If the two numbers are close, your front desk is confirming well; if they are far apart, the ads are paying for bookings that never happen.
Because a show happens in your building, not in a browser, and the platform only sees what its pixel or tag can see. Unless something sends the attended appointment back to the platform as a conversion, it has no idea the person turned up. That is exactly what Adsu sends.
Yes, if the person came in. A show is an attended appointment of any kind: consult, tour, intro class or trial session. What differs is what happens next, which is why the paid stage is tracked separately. A trial that never converts is a show that cost you money.
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.
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.
Cost per leadCost 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.
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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