National fitness franchise · 100+ UK clubs
One national lead engine, run across 100+ gym clubs
How we took over the national marketing fund for a major UK fitness franchise and turned it into a single, measurable lead machine, delivering enquiries at scale to every club in the network.
UK clubs on one managed programme
enquiries generated across the network
blended cost per lead on paid search
The client
A national health and fitness franchise, one of the largest gym networks in the UK, with 100+ individually-owned clubs operating under a single brand. Each club needs a steady flow of local membership enquiries, but marketing was funded centrally through a national fund that had to work fairly and efficiently for every franchisee.
The challenge
Running paid media across 100+ locations from one budget is a different problem to marketing a single gym. Spend has to be split intelligently by territory, tracking has to be watertight so every club can see its own results, and the whole thing has to stay efficient as it scales. When we took it on, the priority was to turn a large national spend into a clean, accountable system that produced measurable leads for each club, not just headline impressions.
What we did
Fixed the tracking first. We set up proper conversion tracking across Google and Meta so every enquiry was captured accurately and attributable to the right club and channel. Without that, nothing else can be optimised honestly.
Introduced server-side tracking. As browser tracking became less reliable, we moved to server-side to protect data accuracy, keep conversion signals feeding the platforms, and keep optimisation working as it should.
Restructured the campaigns. We rebuilt the account to maximise conversion volume and drive down cost per lead, and introduced themed negative keyword lists to cut wasted spend and stop the budget chasing the wrong searches.
Rewrote the ad copy. New ad copy across the network lifted click-through rates, so more of the budget turned into clicks and more of those clicks turned into enquiries.
The results
The programme became a genuine lead engine. On paid search alone, the network generated in the region of 38,600 enquiries in the first year and around 56,300 the next. We grew volume roughly 46% year on year by deliberately scaling budget behind the campaigns and clubs that were converting, not by squeezing a fixed spend, and delivered more than 130,000 enquiries in total across the period we managed it.
On Meta, the restructure and new creative did what they were meant to: comparing like for like month on month, lead volume rose around 40% while cost per lead came down. Across the network, blended cost per lead stayed in the single figures, efficient numbers for the fitness market, with the strongest clubs well under £5.
Just as important as volume was accountability. Leads are only the start; they have to convert to members, so we built the reporting around lead quality and cost, not vanity metrics. Every club could finally see its own numbers, its leads, its cost per lead and how they were performing, so the national fund stopped being a black box and became a system where budget followed results, territory by territory.
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