"In the end they can get you leads, whether it's worth it depends on your ability to convert those leads."
That was a commenter in a Reddit thread full of school owners arguing about marketing companies, and most owners reading it would nod. The job splits neatly: they bring people, you close them. Your closing is your problem.
He's half right, and the half he missed is the one that costs students. Whether the right families arrive in the first place isn't decided by your closing. It's decided by information that exists in exactly one place in the world, which is your building, in your head, usually by Tuesday evening, and nowhere else.
What numbers should a martial arts school track every week?
Three counts and a list of words.
- Booked. Families who took a class time for this week.
- Showed. Families who walked in.
- Enrolled. Families who joined.
Then, beside every family who came in and didn't join, one word for why. Price. Distance. Age. Schedule. Commitment. Not a paragraph. One word.
That's it. Not impressions, not click-through rate, not cost per lead. Whoever runs your ads can already see all of that and is already acting on it. The three counts and the words are the part nobody outside your building can see, and they're the part that changes what the campaign does next week.
Bookings turn into attendance. Attendance turns into enrolments. And when you've watched those three numbers for a month, you can actually plan your weeks around them, which is a different feeling from hoping September is better than August.
Why doesn't my marketing company already know who's a fit?
Because tracking online ends at the booking.
Everything that happens on a screen can be measured, and measured well: the ad someone saw, the form they filled in, the class time they picked. What can't be measured from a screen is who that family turns out to be once they're standing in your lobby. Whether they could afford the programme. Whether they'd driven twenty-five minutes and said so. Whether the five-year-old was really three.
Here is how that goes wrong without anybody doing anything wrong. We see bookings landing and families walking through your door, so from where we sit the campaign is working. You're standing there watching families come in who were never going to enrol. Both of those are true at the same time, and only one of us can see the second one. You have to tell us, because we can't see it.
It's the same with your own numbers in reverse. We know within hours which ad produced which booking. You know, and only you know, which of those families was a fit.
The one word beside every family who didn't join
This is the part worth getting right, because the word has to be theirs, not your best guess at it.
A dad wrote on Reddit about taking his seven-year-old to a trial class. The boy loved it. The family walked out without signing, and the dad's own explanation was this:
"If it was a like, 10 week commitment or something, we probably would have tried it."
If you'd been filling in your weekly tally that night, what word would you have written next to that family? Most owners write "price". The dad's reason wasn't price. It was the length of what he was being asked to sign, and he'd have paid for ten weeks on the spot. He ends the post with "my son is disappointed", which tells you the yes was in the room.
Write "price" and you've told your marketing company to go and find richer families, which wouldn't have fixed anything, because that family had the money. Write "commitment" and the fix is yours to make and takes an afternoon.
So ask. "Totally fine, can I ask what tipped it?" is enough, at the door, as they leave, no pitch after it. You'll get a real answer more often than you expect, and the real answers are not evenly spread. Five "distance" in a month is a radius problem for us. Five "schedule" in a month is a timetable problem for you. Five "price" in a month means the value isn't landing before the number does. Those are three completely different weeks of work and the tally is what tells them apart.
What should I tell my marketing company about lead quality?
The outcomes, and the names.
"The leads are low quality" isn't usable. It's a feeling, and we can't act on it. What's usable is: four families showed last week, two enrolled, and of the two who didn't, both said the fees were out of their range, and here are their names.
The names matter more than they sound like they should. Given a name we can trace which ad and which audience that family came through, and if they came through the same one, that's the thing to change. Low-income leads are a real problem in some areas and usually an easy fix, and the fix is in the targeting and the copy, not in your offer. We change the targeting and the ad copy, find out which ads are bringing in families who can't take the programme, and go after different ones.
Which also means this: you don't need to learn anything about audience targeting, demographics or behaviours. That's our job, and the pixel we've trained across 400+ schools is better at it than an opinion. What we need from you isn't a theory about who to target. It's a report on who turned up.
The five-minute weekly tally
One sheet. Fill it in on the same day every week, Sunday night or Monday morning, and send it to whoever runs your ads on that same fixed day. Five minutes.
| Week of | Booked | Showed | Enrolled |
|---|---|---|---|
| Family | Showed? | Reason, one word |
|---|---|---|
Words to use: price · distance · age · schedule · commitment · fit. Pick from a short list so you can count them at the end of the month. If a family gave you a reason that isn't on the list, add the word and keep using it.
Rules. The reason is what the family said, not what you concluded. One word, not a story. A family who didn't show goes on the list too, with the same question asked by text. And it goes out on the same day every week, because a report that arrives when you're annoyed arrives too late to be a pattern.
This is your sheet, for your decisions. It isn't software and nobody needs to set anything up for you to start it this week.
What does a marketing company actually do with those numbers?
Two things, and they're both immediate.
The first is the obvious one: change who the ads go after, and what they say, when the words in your reason column keep repeating. That's targeting and copy work and it happens in the same week you report it.
The second is less obvious and builds up. Meta lets a business send its offline and CRM events, the things that happened after the click, back into the ad account, where they're used for optimisation and measurement alongside everything the pixel saw (Meta's own documentation on it, updated 28 September 2026). So "showed up" and "enrolled" stop being your private knowledge and become the thing the algorithm is hunting for. It stops optimising towards people who fill in forms and starts optimising towards people who look like the families who joined your school.
That's why the tally isn't admin. Every week you send it, the campaign gets a slightly better definition of the family you actually want, and we're watching those numbers constantly, because we're paid when a student walks in and not monthly.
Judge the whole thing the same way. Not by what a lead cost, but by what it cost to get a student through the door and onto your mat. An ad with a very low lead cost that produces nobody is an ad to cut, whatever it looks like on a dashboard. A dearer one that keeps producing students stays on. Data is money in advertising, and decisions should be data driven, not opinion driven: an ad or a target that isn't getting students doesn't survive, and the ones that do get reproduced into more accounts. Yours included, which is the quiet benefit of being one school in a network of 400+ rather than one account on its own.
What the tally won't fix
Three things, so you know what you're looking at when the numbers don't move.
A booked column that's healthy and a showed column that isn't is a follow-up problem, not a targeting problem, and it's the fastest money in your whole school. Text inside fifteen minutes, from the number the confirmation came from. We wrote the full version of that up separately: why booked trial students don't show up.
A showed column that's healthy and an enrolled column that isn't is the trial class and the enrolment conversation, not the ads. If people are showing up and not enrolling, the offer is usually not the problem.
A reason column that's all one word for three months is a decision you've been avoiding, and no amount of reporting makes it. The tally tells you which one. It doesn't make it for you.
None of that is a reason to skip the sheet. It's the opposite: three numbers and a column of words is the cheapest check in your business, and it's the only one that tells you which of those three problems you actually have. Guessing costs you a quarter.
The thing to do on Monday
Open a blank sheet. Three columns, booked, showed, enrolled, and a second table underneath with a row per family who came in and didn't join. Fill it in for last week from memory, right now, while you still remember the conversations. Then fill it in every Monday and send it to whoever runs your ads on the same day, every week, even the weeks it's boring.
Then ask the next family who walks out what tipped it, and write down their word, not yours.
That's the whole job on your side. On ours: we find the families, get them booked and remind them to come. You welcome them, run a great first class, and enrol them. The tally is the handoff between those two halves, and it's the reason the second month beats the first.
If you'd like that loop running on your school, book a call and bring your timetable and the number of spaces you can genuinely take this month. If we don't think we can fill them, we'll say so on the call. No retainer, no contract, and we're paid when a student walks through your door.
For what the first weeks look like, and what to expect before the tally has anything in it, start with your first month with a marketing agency.
Questions owners ask
What numbers should a martial arts school track every week?
Booked, showed, enrolled, and a one-word reason for every family that didn't join. Three counts and a short list of words, on the same day every week. Everything else, clicks, impressions, cost per lead, is already visible to whoever runs your ads. Those four lines are not, and they are the ones that change what the campaign does next.
What KPIs should a martial arts school owner track?
Keep it to the stages a family moves through: enquiry, booked class, showed up, enrolled, and then how long they stay. That last one, average months on the mat times your monthly fee, is your student value, and it decides what a new student is worth paying for. Attendance and billing reports are useful for running the school. The five stages are what you run your marketing on.
What should I tell my marketing agency about lead quality?
Tell them what actually happened at the door: who showed, who enrolled, and the reason the rest gave. If a group of families turned up and couldn't afford the programme, say so and name them, so the ads they came from can be found. Lead quality is not a feeling about the leads. It is a short list of outcomes only you witnessed.
Why is my marketing company sending the wrong students?
Usually because nobody has told them the wrong ones are arriving. Tracking online stops at the booking: it can see a form filled in and a class time chosen, not whether that family could afford your tuition or lived twenty minutes too far away. Once the school reports it, the targeting and the ad copy get changed to go after different families. It is normally a quick fix.