CASE STUDY · ONE PERCENT FITNESS
From $5 a lead
down to $1.06.
Six months. 1,623 qualified leads. Austin Marks, owner of One Percent Fitness, went from paying $4 to $5 per lead under his previous agencies to an average of $1.06 per lead with Strength Scaling — and from booking 1 in 23 leads to 1 in 8.
“I get a ton of messages from people who want to market my business. And I can tell who's there to make a dollar, and who actually cares. I saw myself in these guys. I could tell they actually cared about me and my gym.
AUSTIN MARKS · OWNER · ONE PERCENT FITNESS
The challenge.
Austin had run ads across multiple agencies before coming to Strength Scaling. He was burning almost $4 to $5 per lead, and the quality was so poor that only roughly 1 out of every 23 leads actually booked a session. The math worked against him every month — he was losing money on paid acquisition, consistently.
On top of that, he was fielding constant pitches from marketers promising the same results they never delivered. In his own words, he could always tell who was there to make a dollar and who actually cared. He was ready to pull the plug on paid acquisition entirely before coming to us.
The build.
We rebuilt the campaign from the ground up using our Andromeda framework — a single campaign with one CBO ad set and six creative variations running concurrently. Meta's Advantage+ optimization does the lifting across placements and audiences. No fragmentation. No manual audience segmentation fighting the algorithm.
Conversion location: Meta Instant Forms. No landing page drop-off. Three-field form: name, phone, email. Higher Intent setting enabled. The form hands off directly to GHL via webhook, where SMS fires within 60 seconds of submission.
Early weeks were honest.
Austin described the first few weeks as a little “wishy-washy” — and he was right. Meta's algorithm needs time to figure out which audience segments actually convert. We never scale or kill a campaign inside the first 7 days. That is a rule, not a preference.
Once the algorithm narrowed the targeting down, the CPL dropped fast. By the end of month one, leads were averaging $1.06. It held there for the rest of the campaign.
The result.
1,623 qualified leads across six months on $1,723 of ad spend. CPL averaged $1.06 — roughly five times lower than what Austin was paying before. Even more important: his booking rate jumped from 1 in 23 leads to 1 in 8. Same ad spend. Nearly three times the booked sessions.
The ROI inverted. The business scaled. The owner profited.
WHAT MADE IT WORK
- ✓Meta Instant Forms over landing pages — zero drop-off between ad click and form submission
- ✓Three-field form (name, phone, email) — volume wins at this price point
- ✓60-second SMS follow-up via GHL webhook — every lead contacted before they moved on
- ✓Six ad variations under one CBO ad set — Meta's Advantage+ does the optimization work
- ✓Honest Day 7 rule — no kill or scale decisions during the algorithm learning period
- ✓Creative refreshed on a weekly rolling cadence — no fatigue decay across 6 months
“I went from losing money on every campaign to actually being able to grow the gym. These guys built the system, dialed it in, and kept it running. I do not have to think about my marketing anymore — I just run my business.”
AUSTIN MARKS · OWNER · ONE PERCENT FITNESS
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