How Basic-Fit should run Meta ads.
A ~€27 membership with real churn. Payback is the whole risk, and January does more volume than clever targeting ever will.
Analysis built with paid.social, the ad-planning tool from Jonas Sluijs, former Meta growth leadLow price plus churn makes payback the only question. At around €27 per four weeks, a new member has to stay several months just to cover their acquisition, and gym churn is brutal. So this is a moderate fit for paid social, not because Meta can't deliver signups cheaply, but because too many of them cancel before they pay back. The account has to be judged on retained members, not joins.
Two things do the heavy lifting, and neither is targeting. First, the calendar: January new-year demand dwarfs the rest of the year, so you front-load hard and treat summer as maintenance. Second, geography: proximity to a club is the strongest predictor of a signup that sticks, so campaigns are built club by club, not nationally.
Brand-led, hyper-local. There's no catalogue here; creative and proximity do the work. Two angles: the January moment, and the objection that kills gym signups.
How we built this plan
We modelled the economics from Basic-Fit's published membership pricing plus low-price-gym churn benchmarks. The derived numbers are estimates, not Basic-Fit's data, meant to show what a low-price, high-churn membership plan looks like and what "good" is.