ClassPass, Google or Instagram: what a new student costs

Mid-July is the quietest stretch of a studio’s year. Regulars are traveling, the outdoor crowd is outdoors, and in many studios the late-morning reformer class runs with machines to spare. It is also the right moment to decide where the September budget goes, while there is time to look at numbers instead of reacting to an empty room.

Three channels compete for that budget in most studios: Google search, Facebook and Instagram ads, and ClassPass. Each brings a different kind of student at a different price. Here is how they compare on the figures published so far this year, and how to put all three on one page.

Start with what a member is worth

Every cost below means little until it sits next to what a member brings in. ABC Fitness’s mid-year Wellness Watch, released last month from its own platform data, put average spending by studio members at $69 a month for January to May, against $27 for members of small and boutique gyms. In the same data, studio check-ins were up 27% on a year earlier and cancellations were down 6%, although new joins fell 5%. That is one software vendor’s customer base, so read it as a direction rather than a rule.

Demand is not the worry. The Health & Fitness Association’s April report counted 17.7 million fitness facility members practicing yoga in 2025, the most of any activity, and said pilates kept growing. Placer.ai’s April analysis of Club Pilates found the chain has grown its monthly visits by more than 200% since 2019, across more than 1,400 studios, and that most of its visits come from local clients.

Capacity is the other half of the sum. Mindbody, which also sells studio software, puts a mid-range reformer at $1,000 to $3,000 and a high-end one at $3,000 to $5,000 or more. Every machine is a seat bought in advance, and an empty one in a scheduled class earns nothing. So the real question is never which lead is cheapest. It is what it costs to put a paying member on a machine or a mat that would otherwise sit empty.

Google search: the dearest lead, and the closest to a booking

WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2026 Google Ads benchmarks, published in May and covering April 2025 to March 2026, put the Health & Fitness category at a median $6.17 per click, a 6.94% conversion rate and $67.36 per lead. At that conversion rate it takes roughly 14 clicks to produce one lead. The Sports & Recreation category came in at $44.26 per lead and the median across every industry at $66.69, so fitness search is priced much like search advertising as a whole.

What the price buys is intent. Someone typing “reformer pilates near me” or “hot yoga” with a neighborhood name wants a class this week, not someday. In our experience those searches turn into first visits faster than any other channel, which makes search the right tool for a studio that knows exactly which classes need filling and points the ads at those times.

Search is also where people check you after hearing about you somewhere else. A strong ad that sends someone to a site with no class schedule, or to a profile with a handful of old reviews and no Book button, throws away much of what it cost.

Instagram and Facebook ads: cheaper forms, more follow-up

The most recent Facebook ads benchmarks from WordStream by LocaliQ, published last September and covering April 2024 to June 2025, put Health & Fitness campaigns run for leads at a median $52.98 per lead, with a 5.63% conversion rate. That is about $14 under the search figure above, though the two cover different periods, and a form lead is a name and a phone number rather than a booked class.

Where Instagram earns its place is in showing the class. Mindbody’s advice to pilates studios, published last October, is short-form video of reformer flows, and a short clip of a real class with real students tends to do more than any offer graphic. The lower cost per lead holds only if someone replies quickly; a form lead left until the next day rarely books, in our experience.

ClassPass: cheap to start, expensive as a plan

ClassPass makes three claims on Mindbody’s site, all vendor figures as of January 2025. Some 94% of its users were new to the venues they visited. Another 47% said studio classes were not part of their routine before ClassPass. And the average Mindbody business saw about a 29% rise in revenue after six months on it. ClassPass also describes its typical member as someone who “does not typically have loyalty to a specific brand”, and its SmartRate tool adjusts class prices in real time by demand.

Read together, that describes a channel built for discovery and variety. It is good at filling a 1 pm class that would otherwise run half empty, and weak at producing members, because the student it brings is, by its own description, shopping around. The test is simple. Of the ClassPass students who came in during the last six months, how many bought a pack or a membership directly? If you cannot answer that, it is the first thing to fix.

How to compare the three on one page

Cost per lead is the wrong unit for a studio. The right one is cost per new member, and it takes three numbers for each channel:

• What you spent, or for ClassPass, the revenue given up against your own drop-in price.
• How many intro students the channel produced.
• How many of those became members within 60 days.

An illustration, not a forecast: if search brings an intro student for $67 and one in three becomes a member, each member costs about $200 in ads, less than three months of the $69 average. If Facebook ads bring intro students for $53 but only one in six converts, each member costs about $318. The cheaper lead can be the dearer member. Your own conversion rates settle it, which is why tracking comes before any change to the budget.

What we are telling clients

• Pull six months of intro sales by source and count how many became members.
• Put search money behind the two or three classes that run short, not the whole timetable.
• Keep ClassPass for off-peak classes and close the spots it sells at peak times.
• Answer every lead from Facebook ads the same day, by text, from a named person at the studio.
• Use Instagram for real class video, and judge it on bookings rather than likes.
• Set the September budget now, on cost per member rather than cost per lead.

The studios that come out of summer in good shape are the ones that know which channel produced last year’s members, not last year’s leads. For how we approach that with yoga and pilates studios, and how we run Meta ads for businesses that sell classes rather than products, those two pages are the place to start.