We Find Which Ads Bring In Your Best New Members.
Most gyms are paying for leads that never join, and cannot tell which ads are bringing in the members who stay. Portside Social runs Google and Meta ads for gyms and climbing gyms.
We start with your numbers.
Free. No call, no meeting. Send us your website and we’ll email you a written Growth Check within two business days: what your tracking counts, what your ads promise, and the one fix we’d make first. Yours to keep whether or not you hire us.
Rated by gym and multi-location operators
Longest-running gym client, still active
Both platforms managed in-house
Five Reasons Your Ads Bring In the Wrong Members
It's counting events, not people.
One member fills in one form. Your analytics fires the event four times. Your report says four leads. Your front desk says one.
Your best channel looks like your worst.
When attribution breaks, the channel that actually drives joins gets credited to "Direct". So it gets defunded, and the channel that takes the credit gets more money.
Smart Bidding is learning from the wrong signal.
Google and Meta optimise toward whatever you tell them to count. Tell them to count direction requests and they will find you people who want directions. Not members.
"Leads" includes people who were never leads.
Map clicks. Page views. Portal logins from existing members. We have seen all three counted as new leads in a live gym account.
Nobody can tell you which ad produced a membership.
Not a click. Not a form. A membership. If your agency cannot answer that, they are guessing, and guessing expensively.
Free Gym Growth Check
Grant Guthrie, who runs our accounts, reviews your gym himself and emails your Growth Check within two business days.
- Your information is private and secure. No email automation. No spam.
Numbers From a Current Client Account
Tracked purchase revenue per dollar of Google Ads spend, four years running.
Tracked online revenue in 2026 for one fitness gym client, across 3 locations.
One system, one source of truth, still running 4 years later and growing.
These are current numbers from a live account, not lifetime totals. We publish what we can stand behind.
A Gym And Fitness Marketing Agency That Starts With Your Numbers
Portside Social is a gym and fitness marketing agency. We run Google Ads and Meta ads for fitness studios, boutique fitness brands, multi-location gyms and climbing gyms, build the pages people land on, and set up the tracking so you can see which new members came from where. Most gyms we look at don’t have an awareness problem. People walk in, sign a waiver, try a class, and never come back. The Growth Check shows you where that is happening before anyone spends another dollar on ads.
- Where your new members actually come from
- What happens after the first visit
- What your ads are counting versus what the front desk sees
Get true numbers you can spend against.
Three Things, In This Order
Step 1
Fix what you're counting
We audit every conversion event in your Google Ads, Meta and GA4 setup. We find the duplicates, the junk events, and the ones that have never fired at all. We define what a real lead is for your gym: a booked tour, a trial signup, a paid day pass. Then we make the platforms count that, once, per person.
Most accounts we open have at least one conversion action that has never recorded a single genuine event. Sometimes it’s the one the whole campaign is optimising toward.
Step 2
Feed the truth back to the platforms
This is the part almost nobody does. Once the data is clean, we push it back into Google and Meta as conversion signals, including what happens after the click, in your gym software.
Now the algorithms are optimising toward people who actually join, not people who click. That is where the cost per member drops, and it drops without touching your budget.
Step 3
Buy the demand
Google for the people already searching: “climbing gym near me”, “gym day pass”, your competitors’ names.
Meta for the people who don’t know you exist yet, with creative that shows what it actually feels like inside your gym.
Budget moves between them monthly, based on which one is producing members. Evidence, not habit.
Get A Free Gym Growth Check
Not a strategy deck. Not a sales call. We look at your website, your tracking and your live ads from the outside, and email you what we find.
- Which tracking tags fire on your site, and which are missing or counting twice
- What your ads promise versus what your landing page delivers
- Where a new member drops off between your ad and a booked trial or tour
- The one change that would move the needle most, whether or not you hire us
Tell Us About Your Gym
Grant Guthrie, who runs our accounts, reviews your gym himself and emails your Growth Check within two business days.
- Your information is private and secure. No email automation. No spam.
The Number In Your Report Should Be A Number You Can Act On
If you’re not sure yours is, the Growth Check will tell you.