What is 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. For a gym, that is cost per member, counted from verified payments.
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Customer acquisition cost for gyms
The formula: total ad spend for a period, divided by the number of new members who paid in that period and came from those ads. Spend is easy to find. The hard part is the denominator, because the ad platform does not know who paid. It knows who filled in a form.
That is why the number in your ad account is CPA, cost per acquisition, and not CAC. CPA is the platform’s cost for whatever it was told to optimize for, and for most gyms that is a lead. A lead is not a member. Between the two sit the consult that never got booked, the booking that never showed and the trial that never converted, and each of those costs money the CPA never shows.
Where CAC misleads on its own: it says nothing about how long those members stay. A cheap member who quits after a month costs more than an expensive one who renews for a year. Read it next to lifetime value; the relationship between the two is what decides whether to spend more.
How Adsu uses customer acquisition cost
Adsu reports cost per member for every campaign at every location, and the denominator is verified payments from your billing system. Adsu counts verified stages only: if a stage cannot be verified, it is not counted. Every report is one line per campaign per location. Alongside it sit cost per lead, cost per appointment and cost per show, so you can see exactly which stage a campaign loses people at.
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 ad platforms then optimize toward people who pay rather than people who fill in forms, which is how the platform’s CPA starts to move toward your real CAC.
Questions, answered.
Add up everything you spent on ads for a period, then divide by the number of new paying members those ads produced in the same period. Use payments that cleared, not leads or sign-ups. If you include agency fees or your own time, be consistent about it so one month compares with the next.
No. CPA, cost per acquisition, is the ad platform’s cost per conversion action, and for a gym that action is usually a form fill or a booking. CAC divides the same spend by paying members. CPA is always the lower number and always flatters the campaign.
The one your lifetime value can carry. If a member is worth several times what you paid to acquire them, and the first payment covers most of the spend, the campaign works. Compare CAC across your own campaigns and locations, not against another gym’s number, because their dues and churn are not yours.
Related
ROAS, return on ad spend, is the revenue a campaign produced divided by what it cost. The gym formula, an example, and Adsu’s verified-payment rule.
Lifetime valueLifetime value, LTV, is the total revenue one member pays you over the time they stay. The dues-over-churn formula, an example, and LTV by source in Adsu.
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.
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.
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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