Why your cheapest leads are not your best members
Studios that optimise for cost per lead often miss the channels that produce members who stay. Day-90 retention by source is the number that changes budget decisions.
- attribution
- acquisition
- cac
A discount code can bring in 40 new members in a month. Six might still be active 90 days later. The channel looked cheap until you joined sign-ups to retention.
Volume is not the same as quality
Most studios track acquisition by volume and cost per lead. That number looks great until you check retention by source and find the cheapest channel attracts people chasing the next discount, not a place to train.
The fix is a join: tie ad platform campaign or promo-code data to membership records in your booking platform, then look at day-90 retention or early LTV by source.
- Two channels can cost the same per lead and produce completely different month-three outcomes.
- Cut spend on sources that reliably produce one-and-done sign-ups.
- Shift budget toward channels that quietly produce long-term members, even at higher CPL today.
Day 90
A practical horizon to compare channels before lifetime value models are in place
Where to start
If you cannot answer which channels produce members still training 60 or 90 days later from one view, the fix is usually data plumbing between ads, your site, and your booking platform.
If you run paid acquisition on Mariana Tek, MindBody, or PushPress and want to see CAC payback by channel, we can map it on a call.