A leading fitness industry brand

Lifted a fitness industry brand's Top-of-Funnel Meta ROAS +53% in six months, while monthly Bookings climbed 24% to a record $886K.

What was broken

The brand inherited a Top-of-Funnel Meta acquisition account from an incumbent agency that was mis-managing spend quite drastically. Meta is their primary TOF acquisition channel. I started transitioning the account in January. January 2025 should have been peak season, the year's strongest New Year demand window for their category. Instead it was the ROAS floor of the prior twelve months, one of the worst months on record despite the calendar saying otherwise. Spend hit $825K and bookings did not keep pace.

The diagnosis was structural and creative: too many campaigns with low performance eating significant budget. Creative had stopped grabbing attention, and Meta's algorithm did not respond well to the engagement slump that followed.

What I did

Step 01Budget reallocation.

The account had dozens of campaigns competing for spend, with CPLs ranging from one campaign at $30 to others at $90 and up. I consolidated aggressively, cut the campaigns burning budget at 2 to 3 times the account average, and concentrated spend on what was already working. The CPL effect was immediate, with the account-wide trendline bending down within weeks of full operating control.

Step 02A fresh video assembly line.

Meta rewards fresh inventory. The brand's creative had stalled, so I built a system to keep new video coming in on a real schedule. The first attempt was UGC creators. Quality was sub-par. So I pivoted, taking a page from Nike's playbook: I started reaching out to trainers, not creators, to tell their stories. Day in the life. Biggest fears. What they loved about helping clients. What advice they would give someone starting out. Real, specific, human. Nothing directly about the product.

The mechanics were an assembly line. Small budget for outreach. Content flowing in continuously. Editors briefed on top performers and why I thought those were winning. Iteration on the winners running alongside net-new concepts, on a fixed cadence so the algorithm always had options to compare against.

Excluding BFCM promotional creative, monthly evergreen launches went from a ~24/mo agency-period average to ~76/mo across the engagement, a 3.14x increase. A few things the data taught us:

• Two messaging sets dominated, both around the economics of being a trainer, making money, building a career.
• Hooks with dynamic editing won. Cuts that felt almost weird outperformed clean cuts.
• Higher-quality video footage mattered, more than expected.
• Rap and trap music, edited to hit frame changes, consistently beat softer music choices.
• Faces mattered, but not gender. Some creators just worked no matter the concept. Some never worked no matter what we tried. The male/female split did not move the needle.

The proof of this work wasn't only in CPL. The bigger movement was in hook rate, monthly revenue, and backend ROAS.

Step 03Cross-platform priming.

I rendered the top-converting Google search terms as headline banners directly into the Meta videos: the exact high-intent phrases users were typing in. When users who had seen those videos later searched those phrases on Google, they were measurably more likely to engage. The two channels stopped being separate buckets and started reinforcing each other.

What happened

Hook rate climbed throughout the engagement and peaked at 28.1% in April. CPL came down from a $53 January floor to $37 at exit, a 30% improvement on the engagement trajectory.

Monthly Meta-driven Bookings climbed from a $716K agency-period average to $886K in June. That is a 24% lift at the exit month and a $170K-per-month increase against the agency baseline. AOV moved from $696 to $777, a 12% lift. Fewer leads converted on a raw percentage basis, but the ones that did spent meaningfully more. That is what quality traffic looks like in revenue terms: lower lead cost, higher value per customer.

ROAS climbed with all of it. From the 0.93 January floor to 1.41 at exit, a 53% lift. $4.2M in Meta spend stewarded across the six months. Total account ROAS (Meta plus Google plus TikTok) rose from 2.01 in December 2024 to 2.57 by June 2025, which confirms the Meta gain was real lift, not credit shifting between channels.