-57% Intro Offer Acquisition Cost
More offer add-to-carts were delivered despite 36% less spend - an intentional cost-saving move.
135% Conversion Rate Increase
More than double the success of visitors progressing to purchase an intro offer.
Love Athletica does Pilates with the intensity turned up. Their signature reformer offering packs cardio, strength and HIIT in one athletic class, alongside functional and strength based heated mat classes for extra sizzle.
With nine studios across Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra focused on getting sweaty and having fun, the priority was getting people who’d never set foot in a studio through the door for their first class.
What challenges did we face?
nimbl took on Love Athletica’s digital marketing spanning across SEO, Google Ads and Meta and working with brand new ad accounts. For Meta Ads specifically, that meant starting with nothing. No historical performance, no audience learnings, no conversion history to work from.
In April, Love Athletica raised that intro offer lead volume had been struggling against historical levels across all regions. Those conversions drive membership growth, which makes intro offers the metric that matters most. No inherited data meant diagnosing the drop was difficult in itself.
Measurement made it harder. Love Athletica’s booking platform doesn’t pass clean purchase data back, so tracking (in previous ad accounts) had historically treated all ‘add to cart’ activity as one pool. Intro offers, class packs and memberships were indistinguishable. There was no way to see whether intro offer demand specifically was the problem.
Rebuilding intro offer acquisition through segmented Meta Advertising
The first job was measurement. We reworked the analytics setup to isolate intro offer add to carts as their own tracked event, separate from class pack and membership activity. Without that split, every decision afterwards would have been made blind.
Then we restructured the Meta Ads account around a single question: is this person a first timer or already a client? Acquisition and retention campaigns had overlapping targeting, which meant media spend intended to bring new people through the door was partly being spent on people already inside it. We drew a hard line between intro offer candidates and existing clients considering a membership, and moved the weight of the budget behind cold acquisition.
Intro offer audiences were structured into a dedicated funnel, from cold prospecting through to retargeting, with budget allocated deliberately to each stage rather than pooled across them.
Creative was rebuilt around the customer journey rather than purely the offer. We mapped content pillars from brand discovery through consideration to conversion, so someone meeting Love Athletica for the first time saw what a class actually feels like before they saw a price.
Studios offer different class types, and the suburbs they’re in face different competitive pressures, so creative was built to reflect what each location actually sells and who it competes against. We also increased creative volume and variation, leaning harder into UGC video, which gave the algorithm more to work.
The destination changed too. Intro offers had been living inside individual studio pages, buried among timetables, class descriptions and everything else a location page has to carry. We introduced a single conversion focused landing page listing every studio’s offer in one view, and pointed all intro offer traffic there. Fewer steps between the ad and the decision.
What impact did we make?
Comparing a recent two month period against the two months prior, Love Athletica pulled in more first time interest out of a smaller budget. Ad spend was 36% lower by design, yet intro offer add to carts still increased by 48%.
The bigger story was efficiency, not just volume. Intro offer add to cart conversion rate improved by 135%, and cost per intro offer ‘add to cart’ fell by 57%.
Because Love Athletica’s booking platform doesn’t return clean purchase data, add to cart is the closest reliable signal of intro offer demand. Isolating it is the reason these numbers can be read at all. Before that work, the same performance would have been hidden inside a single undifferentiated pool.
-57% Intro Offer Acquisition Cost
More offer add-to-carts were delivered despite 36% less spend - an intentional cost-saving move.
135% Conversion Rate Increase
More than double the success of visitors progressing to purchase an intro offer.
What did we learn about this project?
Starting a fresh Meta Ads account with zero historical data for an established brand can have its challenges, but it also strips out the temptation to inherit someone else’s assumptions. Love Athletica’s recovery came from deciding what to measure, then spending against a clear split between finding new people and keeping existing ones. With 36% less media spend, the account did more. Structure did the work that budget used to.
