Strengthening Lifestyle Fitness’ paid search power

Lifestyle Fitness came to Evolved after around a year of re-opening following Covid lockdowns.

With many memberships and renewals on hold and tighter restrictions in place in gyms, the business wanted to reassess its paid marketing spend and identify opportunities for membership growth to recover from the downturn.

The client believed that their campaigns had become over-reliant on the performance of brand keywords, and spend was being wasted on existing members, while new customer acquisition through non-brand keywords wasn’t being focused on enough.

Our initial audit revealed that the account was not structured in a way that was conducive to membership growth, and wasn’t transparent in revealing what was working well.

We found that more than 10% of spend was against users already identified as members, so our initial objective was to rebuild the campaign structure in a way that was transparent and maximised non-brand keywords, reducing over-reliance on the brand.

What we did:

• Restructured the account to improve transparency, split out the brand and utilised brand negatives.
• Improved generic keyword coverage for each gym, re-built keyword lists, and improved budget allocation.
• Tailored strategy to each individual gym location to maximise accuracy and relevancy.
• Fully re-invigorated the Ad Copy strategy, which had become difficult to manage given the varied facilities at each location.
• Shared daily reports to allow the client to review daily, weekly, and monthly performance data, as well as gym-level performance.
• Tested the use of Performance Max campaigns to boost conversion volumes across the entire account.
• Supported the opening of a new location, using our new campaign structures and strategy.

Our approach, even within its first month, flipped the previous strategy on its head by placing more of the focus on capturing users who were higher up in their conversion journey, rather than those who were almost guaranteed to become members anyway.

We were able to consistently optimise the performance of the account, to the point where revenue from non-brand keywords doubled, and ROAS from brand terms more than doubled compared to the previous period. Even with a focus higher up the funnel, we still were able to grow account revenue, with a minor increase in spending.

Thanks to the consistent collaboration with the client, we were able to fully understand their brand, business objectives, and challenges within their varied gym portfolio.