The challenge: To make Places Leisure’s media budget work harder.

Feeling that their media spend wasn’t working as hard as their gym-goers, Places Leisure asked us to find efficiencies, reduce their reliance on paid media, and maybe even increase lead generation in the process.

How we did it

Previously, each Places site had its own budget that didn’t allow for any flex if some campaigns were performing well but were limited by spend. We brought in a more agile approach, deploying additional budget to individual campaigns that were driving a lower CPA, thus making them even more effective.

Going granular

Places have over 100 sites, each with different facilities. Places’ previous account structure made it hard to manage local search for each facility, meaning people would see search results for sites that — for example — offered swimming lessons where they didn’t have pools. 

We broke the account down into the specific facilities each site has to offer, so we could be more competitive for local searches like ‘Swimming Pool Lessons Ripley’. This gave us a more granular level of control that improved our standing in local search pages.

The result 

We’ve drastically reduced Places’ search costs while staying competitive in the search rankings. 

For example, we reduced May’s YoY search spend by 47% (from £18,400 to £9,600) and their CPA by 53% (from £18.39 to £8.63), while increasing conversions by 10% (from 1,000 to 1,100). 

To date, we’ve made savings on Places’ budgets every month while achieving the same or higher engagement and conversion.