The ads got cheaper every month. Membership didn’t move. The problem was the phone.
The goal
More members. We’ve run this San Diego gym’s marketing since 2022, and by 2026 the ads were the most efficient they’d ever been.
What we found
March 2026: 27 inquiries, zero new members. The lead-to-member match rate had gone from 63.6% in May 2025 to 0%. We didn’t need more traffic. We needed to close the leads we already had.
In July, the dashboard showed 122 form submissions. 91 were bots from a campaign leaking onto the Display network. Of the 22 real leads that month, only 2 came from the ads at all. And the month’s revenue drop came from private training sessions, down 29%, while ad spend moved only 8.8%. It was a sales-floor problem, not a marketing problem.
What we changed
Same-day follow-up rules, one owner per lead, a daily tracking sheet. I read the transcript of every one of the 70 calls in August and found an answering line giving wrong hours and callers asking for a class pack that didn’t exist. September got a printed call sheet.
What happened
August closed at 82 active members, up from 80. Thirteen callers asked to schedule; one got booked on the call, and that one walked in.
What happened next
The gap between the call and the visit is where the work is now. Ads keep running at the same budget; the numbers we report are members, not clicks.
Back in 2022 the owner told us May had been “the most amount of sales … compared to every other month this year and the last two years.” We’d rather report the honest months too.