$120 a lead — until we stopped advertising to the people already looking.
OLYMP Fight Club had run ads before. They worked, technically — leads arrived. They just cost more than a new student was worth acquiring at that stage. The fix wasn't a better campaign. It was noticing they were advertising to a sliver of their market and ignoring the rest of it.
Ads were running. The math wasn't.
They'd spent on Meta before we arrived and were paying $120 or more per lead. At that price a martial arts studio is buying attention it can't afford to convert — and the usual response is to blame the platform, the audience, or the budget.
None of those were the problem. The creative didn't understand hooks, retention, or how to make a parent stop scrolling. But underneath that was something structural: every ad in the account was written for a parent who had already decided their kid should do martial arts.
That's the smallest group in the market. Everyone advertising in the category is bidding for them, which is exactly why they're expensive.
Two parents. Two completely different reasons to walk in.
A market isn't one audience at one level of awareness. It's layers. Most gyms advertise to the top layer, because that's the layer that responds fastest — and then wonder why the leads cost so much.
They want martial arts. They're choosing between studios.
This parent is comparing. They respond to pedigree, coaching credentials, results, the look of the room. They're also the parent every competitor is paying to reach.
"This is the best studio in the area."
They have the problem. They've never connected it to a gym.
This parent isn't shopping for martial arts and never will be. They're worried about something else entirely — and martial arts happens to be the answer. Nobody has told them that, so nobody is bidding against us for them.
"If your kid has energy they can't sit still with and no structure to put it into — start here."
The first group is a queue you join. The second is a market you make. Advertising only to the first meant OLYMP was competing on price for a small pool while the overwhelming majority of parents in their radius — parents with exactly the problem the gym solves — never saw a reason to care.
So we built for both, in parallel, with different messaging, different creative, and different jobs. Same gym, two arguments.
Warm the market before you ask it for anything.
Every campaign in the account.
Including the one we're not taking credit for.
| Campaign | Spend | Result | Cost per result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta — awareness | $826.37 | 126,762 reached | $6.52 / 1,000 |
| Meta — DM ads, free class | $4,522.30 | 374 conversations | $12.09 |
| Meta — lead forms | $2,929.33 | 95 leads | $30.84 |
| Google — search (from May 1) | $1,430.00 | 43 conversions | $33.27 |
| Total | $9,708.00 | 138 countable leads | $31.59 blended |
How the return is calculated. 138 leads — Meta lead forms plus Google conversions — closing at 37%, at a first-year student value of $3,000. That's roughly $153,000 in first-year value against $9,708 of total spend: 15.8×. The 374 DM conversations are excluded entirely. They're the cheapest contacts in the account at $12.09, and they almost certainly produced students — but we don't have a measured close rate on them, so they earn nothing here. Measured against only the campaigns doing the converting, the figure is more than double. We'd rather publish the floor.
Reporting window. Meta, April 1 – August 2026. Google, May 1 – August 2026. Both still running. The blended cost per lead therefore covers five months of Meta against four of Google — we've kept the channels on separate lines rather than smoothing that over. We've worked with OLYMP since 2025, so this is a recent slice of an ongoing engagement, not the opening quarter.
Cheaper leads aren't automatically better leads.
The DM campaign produced contacts at $12.09 — a third of what a lead form costs. On a dashboard that looks like the obvious winner, and plenty of agencies would have moved the whole budget across and sent a very good-looking report.
It also put a significant load on OLYMP's front desk. Every conversation is a human replying, qualifying, and chasing. A cheap contact that costs your team an hour isn't cheap — it's a cost you've moved off the ad account and onto the payroll, where it stops showing up in the reporting.
So we ran both and judged them on what actually mattered: students enrolled, and what it cost the business — not just the ad account — to get them. That's the kind of decision you can only make when the same team sees the ads, the follow-up and the close.
It's also the reason we built their CRM. A booked free class that nobody attends is a lead you paid for twice. Once the reminders and the tracking were in place, the gap between "booked" and "walked in" stopped being invisible — and stopped being expensive.
They understand the brand, they care about the outcome, and they move faster than anyone we've worked with.
Aram GrigorianOLYMP Fight ClubYour market has a second layer too.
Thirty minutes. We'll look at who you're currently paying to reach, who you're missing, and what we'd build first — whether or not you hire us.
Book a strategy callNo pitch deck. No pressure. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so.