What is ROAS?
ROAS, return on ad spend, is the revenue a campaign produced divided by what it cost. For a gym, the revenue that counts is verified member payments, first payment and renewals, not the purchase value the ad platform reports.
Updated
ROAS for gyms
Every ad platform will show you a ROAS. The trouble is what it uses for revenue. Meta and Google count whatever you told them a conversion is worth, and for most gyms that is a form fill with a made-up value attached. The front desk sees something different: an enquiry, a booked consult, a person who showed, a membership that was paid for, and the renewals that follow. Your ROAS is the money from those last two stages divided by the spend that produced them.
The formula is simple. Take the verified revenue a campaign produced, first payments plus renewals from the members it brought in, and divide by the ad spend for the same period at the same location.
Where ROAS misleads: a campaign that produced one big up-front payment can look better than one that produced three members who will renew for a year. Read it beside lifetime value and show rate, and over a date range long enough for renewals to appear.
How Adsu uses ROAS
Adsu computes ROAS from the billing system, not from the ad platform’s purchase value. Revenue is the first payment plus every renewal that member makes, net of refunds, credited to the ad that produced the enquiry. 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. So the same campaign can show a strong ROAS at one gym and a weak one at another, and you can move budget between them instead of averaging the two.
Booked, showed and paid go back to Google as offline conversions and to Meta through the Conversions API. That is the feedback loop: the platforms learn who pays and go looking for more people like them, which is how ROAS improves without the budget changing.
Questions, answered.
The one that pays back your ad spend faster than members leave. Work it out from your own numbers: monthly dues, how long members stay, and the ROAS at which a campaign covers its spend in the first month. A gym with high dues and low churn can live with a lower ROAS than a drop-in studio. Nobody else’s number tells you that.
In Adsu, yes. A member’s first payment establishes the acquisition, and later payments are carried as recurring value for that member, credited to the same ad. Platform ROAS stops at the purchase event it was told about, which for a gym is usually the form, so it never sees a renewal.
Because they measure different things. The platform’s revenue is the value you assigned to a conversion action, often at the form fill, and it counts every conversion it believes it produced. Adsu’s revenue is payments that cleared at the front desk, matched to a real person and credited to one ad. The gap between the two is the point.
Related
Customer 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.
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 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.
Attribution windowAn attribution window is the number of days after an ad click or call during which a conversion can still be credited to that ad. Adsu uses 30 days.
The proof
- Net members
- +21
- Lifetime value added
- $67,000+
Bobby & Maria Gasdia, Big Day Fitness, 2 locations
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