Your ads are taking credit for Perkville referrals
If Meta reports more new members than your front desk can account for, check how many joined through a friend's Perkville referral link. Perkville knows who referred whom, but none of that reaches Google Ads or Meta, so a referred friend who also clicked or saw one of your ads gets counted as an ad conversion and bid toward. Fixed means every new membership is labeled ad, referral or both, and the ad platforms learn only from members your spend actually brought in.
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Perkville · what breaks
What goes wrong when Perkville and paid ads overlap
- 01
Meta counts members a friend brought in
A referred friend who also saw your retargeting ad buys a membership, and Meta books it as an ad conversion. Your cost per member looks better than it is, and you scale a campaign on joins you'd have gotten anyway.
- 02
Referral claims happen where your tags can't see
The referral offer page sits on a yourbrand.perkville.com address unless you're on an Enterprise plan with your own domain. Perkville's branding settings for that page only change button colors, with no documented place for tags, so you can't count on GA4 or the Pixel seeing a claim at all.
- 03
Free-class vouchers showing up as sales
When a member redeems points through the Perkville payment type in Mindbody, it's recorded like a sale. A purchase feed that doesn't filter that payment type can report revenue you never collected, and value-based bidding chases it.
- 04
Referral prospects mixed into your ad leads
Perkville can push claimed referrals into HubSpot, ClubReady or Mariana Tek. If the referral marker gets lost, your sales team and your offline conversion imports treat those friends like paid leads.
Perkville · the fix
What changes once referrals and ads are separated — Perkville
Every new member labeled by source
Referral, paid ad, or both, decided from Perkville's referee records and the click ID saved at sign-up, so you can see which campaigns sell memberships without a friend's help.
Bidding trained on members your ads earned
Membership conversions go out with real value. Referred joins go to Google Ads as a secondary, observation-only action and to Meta as a separate event no campaign optimizes for, so bidding stops chasing word of mouth.
Revenue that matches your membership system
Perkville payment-type redemptions and points-only activity are stripped out, so reported return on ad spend lines up with what Mindbody or ClubReady says you were paid.
Perkville · architecture
What Perkville actually lets you hook into
Perkville is built around loyalty and referral records, not ad tracking. These are the hooks its own documentation describes, plus what we confirm on your account.
- 1
Referral Details and Referral Overview reports
Referrer, referee, sent, claimed and completed dates, source (Perkville or POS) and home location. This is the referral truth we join against your memberships.
- 2
Referral lead syncs
Documented for HubSpot, ClubReady and Mariana Tek, fired when the friend claims the offer. Mariana Tek gets a perkville-referral tag; ClubReady gets a note naming the referrer.
- 3
Perkville API
Transaction, External Member and Connection endpoints cover points, membership data and user lookup by email. We confirm whether referral status comes through there; if it doesn't, the Referral Details export fills the gap.
- 4
Branded referral page address
A yourbrand.perkville.com subdomain, or your own domain on Enterprise accounts. The docs don't mention GA4, GTM or Pixel support there, so we check it on your account.
- 5
No ad platform connection
Perkville's docs list no Google Ads, Meta or webhook integration, so nothing it records reaches an ad platform unless we send it.
Perkville · diagnose
Where Perkville tracking breaks, in the order we check
Start with over-crediting. When a gym or studio runs an active referral program, ads claiming members a friend sent is the fault worth finding first, because it makes campaigns look better than they are.
- 01
Count referred members inside ad-reported conversions
Join last month's Perkville referees to Meta and Google Ads conversions by email and date.
- 02
Check which earning rule completes referrals
If Completes Referral sits on a first visit rather than a paid membership, Perkville's completed count overstates paying members.
- 03
Look for email mismatches
Perkville only completes a referral when the friend buys with the email they claimed with, so a mismatch hides the referral and hands the credit to an ad.
- 04
Inspect the purchase feed for Perkville payment types
Reward redemptions in Mindbody should never carry purchase value.
- 05
Trace one synced referral lead through your CRM
Confirm the referral marker survives and that your offline conversion import skips it.
Perkville · prove
The QA evidence on your Perkville setup
Run on a real referral claimed from a phone and a real ad-driven sign-up, on your live accounts.
Source of truth
Perkville's Referral Details report (referee, claimed and completed dates) joined to membership sales in your booking or POS system
- One test referral claimed through a member's personal link and visible in Perkville's report.
- The synced lead found in HubSpot, ClubReady or Mariana Tek with its referral marker intact.
- One sign-up that started on an ad click, with the gclid or fbclid saved to the member record.
- Exactly one membership conversion per sale in Meta Events Manager and Google Ads, sharing an event ID.
- Referred buyers confirmed in the secondary action only, and Perkville redemptions absent from purchase value.
- Matched member by member over a closed month, then rechecked 30 days later.
Perkville · free audit
What we check in the free audit
- Count referred members inside ad-reported conversions
- Check which earning rule completes referrals
- Look for email mismatches
- Inspect the purchase feed for Perkville payment types
- Trace one synced referral lead through your CRM
Checked against
Perkville's Referral Details report (referee, claimed and completed dates) joined to membership sales in your booking or POS system
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Perkville · when not to buy
When you don't need this with Perkville
Plenty of studios run Perkville and ads side by side without a problem worth paying to fix.
- If you don't run paid ads, Perkville's own referral reports already tell you what the program is worth.
- If referrals are a handful a month next to dozens of ad-driven joins, the over-credit is small and a quarterly spreadsheet check will do.
- If your ads only drive intro-offer leads and you never optimize on memberships, sort out lead tracking first and come back to this later.
- If the only problem is a Perkville payment type counting as revenue, filtering it from your purchase feed is a small change, and we'll tell you how to make it yourself.
Perkville · what we deliver
The event map with Perkville in your stack
Intro offer or trial lead
From your own site's form or booking page, with the ad click ID stored, before Perkville is involved.
Referral offer claimed
Logged from Perkville's claim record (date, location, phone if you require it) as a referral lead, never as a paid lead.
First class or visit attended
Qualified signal from your booking system, marked referred or not by matching the referee's email.
Membership or package purchased
The conversion, valued from the sale and sent server-side to Google Ads and Meta. Referred buyers go to a secondary action.
Referral completed
Perkville's completion date, used to confirm the referral flag and for reporting. Excluded from ad bidding.
Reward redeemed
Perkville payment-type transactions and voucher use, kept for retention reports and excluded from every purchase value.
FAQ
Perkville questions, answered
Not according to its own documentation. Perkville connects to booking, POS, CRM and email tools, so referral and loyalty data has to be joined to your ad conversions separately.
Meta credits conversions from people who clicked or viewed your ads, and that includes friends who arrived through a Perkville referral link. Matching Perkville's referee list against those conversions shows the overlap.
Perkville's docs don't describe a way to add your own tags, and the referral page's branding settings only cover button colors. We confirm it on your account and track the claim from Perkville's records instead.
Track them, but as a secondary action. Google documents secondary actions as reporting-only, not used for bidding, so Smart Bidding won't learn to chase people a friend already sent.
They can if they're imported as though they came from ads. They carry no click ID, so we keep the Perkville marker on the record and leave them out of the import.
Yes, if a Perkville payment type in Mindbody is included in the purchase value you send. We filter those transactions out so return on ad spend reflects cash you actually received.
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