The State of Martial Arts School Marketing Martial arts marketing statistics.
Martial arts marketing statistics from the schools in the US and Canada whose ads and follow-up we run or have run: what a lead costs by discipline, country and program, how many leads book a trial, and how many show up. Built from Meta ads and CRM data, May to October 2026. Updated monthly.
US median cost per lead $8.91 USD
- Booked a trial 35% of new leads
- Showed up 61% of booked trials
- On the mat
What a lead costs, and what it becomes.
Medians across schools, so one outlier can't drag the number. Every figure on this page is a median across a group of schools. No single school's numbers are shown.
Median across US schools. Half paid between US$5.24 and US$12.87.
Median across Canadian schools, billed in Canadian dollars.
Median across schools' CRMs. The middle half ran 29% to 38%.
Median across the schools that mark attendance in their CRM.
Share of all ad leads that came from kids, after-school and camp campaigns.
Median for US schools. Cost per thousand impressions: US$13.35.
What changed this month.
This is the first edition of the report. From next month, this section lists what moved since the last update.
Every art pays a different price.
Median cost per lead for US schools, in US dollars, grouped by the art the school mainly teaches. Lowest: multi-discipline schools at $8.91. Highest: taekwondo at $10.84. Disciplines with too few schools to stay anonymous are left out.
Who the ad is for.
The same schools, split by who each campaign was written for. Kids ads speak to parents, adult ads to the person who will train. Taken together, every kids, after-school and camp campaign ran at a median US$15.49 per lead, and every adult campaign, women-only and men-only included, at US$6.88. US schools, US dollars.
Six months, month by month.
The median US school's cost per lead in each month of the window. A school counts in a month when it spent at least 100 and got at least 5 leads that month. Schools join and leave through the year, so read this as a direction, not a like-for-like trend.
- $14.69 May
- $14.12 Jun
- $12.13 Jul
- $11.65 Aug
- $13.19 Sep
- $8.22 Oct
Where the numbers come from.
Veuze Media runs Facebook and Instagram ads, websites and lead follow-up for martial arts schools in the United States and Canada. This report reads two sources for every school in the sample, and publishes only totals across groups of schools. The sample size is 50+ martial arts schools.
Ads data
Spend, impressions, link clicks and leads come from the Meta Ads reporting API, for the lead campaigns we build and manage, from May 1, 2026 to October 31, 2026. A lead is a completed Meta lead form or a tracked website lead. Campaigns a school ran before us, or alongside us, are not counted.
A school's cost per lead is its total spend divided by its total leads. It counts only when the school spent at least 250 in its billing currency and got at least 10 leads. We then report the median school and the middle half (25th to 75th percentile). US schools are reported in US dollars and Canadian schools in Canadian dollars. Discipline, audience and month breakdowns use US schools only, so no currency conversion is involved. A school billed in a currency other than its country's is left out of the money figures.
CRM data
Booking and show rates come from each school's CRM. A lead is a contact created in the window with a lead source (a form, an ad or a website visit), not an imported list. A lead counts as booked when it has an appointment on any of the school's booking calendars, which for a new lead is almost always the trial class. Show rate is showed ÷ (showed + no-show) for those leads' past appointments, from schools that mark attendance on at least half of their bookings. Schools need at least 30 leads in the window to count.
What isn't here yet
Trial-to-member conversion and speed to lead are not reported. Schools record enrollments in different billing systems, and too few mark them in the CRM to give a reliable rate. Response time depends on the first reply in each conversation, which we can't yet measure the same way across every school. When either can be measured reliably across enough schools, it will be added and the change noted above.
Privacy
No school is named and no single school's numbers are published. Groups too small to keep a school anonymous are left out. Lead names and contact details are never stored or published: the report keeps only counts and medians.
Use the numbers. Link the source.
Journalists, bloggers and school owners are welcome to quote any figure here. Please credit Veuze Media and link to this page.
Veuze Media, "The State of Martial Arts School Marketing" (October 2026 edition, data May to October 2026), https://veuzemedia.com/resources/state-of-martial-arts-marketing
Past editions.
One URL, updated every month. The headline numbers from earlier editions stay here.
This is the first edition. Each month the edition it replaces moves here, with its headline numbers, so you can see the trend.
Put the system to work.
Every lead on this page came from a campaign we built and a follow-up system we run. Here is how each part works.
The numbers, answered.
The questions school owners ask about cost per lead, bookings and show rates.
Across the US schools running Facebook and Instagram lead ads with us from May to October 2026, the median cost per lead was US$8.91. Half of the schools paid between US$5.24 and US$12.87. In Canada the median was C$15.32 across Canadian schools, billed in Canadian dollars. We use the median, not the average, so one very cheap or very expensive school doesn't move the number.
In this edition, kids, after-school and camp campaigns together had a median cost per lead of US$15.49 and all adult campaigns US$6.88, both from US schools. A kids lead is a parent filling in the form, and the ad has to win over the parent, not the child.
At the median school, 35% of new leads booked a trial class. The middle half of schools ranged from 29% to 38%. That is measured in each school's CRM: every new lead added from May to October 2026, matched to the appointments booked on any of the school's calendars.
At the median school, 61% of booked appointments from new leads showed up (middle half 50% to 77%). We only count schools that mark attendance in their CRM for most of their bookings, so the number isn't diluted by bookings nobody updated.
Every month. The numbers come from a trailing six-month window that moves forward one month at a time, and each update lists what changed. This is the October 2026 edition, updated November 11, 2026. Older editions stay in the archive at the bottom of the page.
Yes. Quote any number on this page and link back to this URL as the source. The citation line is in the "Cite this report" section.
Beat the median.
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