Blog Inside Sneeze It · Inside Audience · Part 1
Demographics did not predict cost per lead. Comparable locations do.
Before building a forecast for new sites, we tested the industry's favorite inputs against 865 ZIP codes and about $102,000 of real ad spend. Here is what Audience uses instead.
Every site-selection pitch looks alike. A map, a circle, and a table of who lives there: median income, median age, share with a degree, how long they commute. The table implies a promise. Find the neighborhoods that look like your best members, and your ads there will bring cheaper leads.
Before we built Audience, our market tool for new and existing locations, we tested that promise against our own results. We had the ad accounts. We had the leads by postal code. So we asked a plain question: when the demographics of a ZIP code change, does the cost of a lead change with them?
Source: Audience, About
The test
We lined up 865 ZIP codes and about $102,000 of real ad spend, and compared each ZIP's demographics with what a lead there actually cost.
Median income, the input every broker leads with, showed effectively zero correlation with cost per lead on one account. On another it pointed the wrong way. Commute time predicted nothing anywhere we looked. Income did show a real effect in fitness on its own, but it did not repeat across accounts, and a pattern that appears in one account and vanishes in the next is not something you can sign a lease on.
The test also caught something we were not looking for. An early version of the tool ranked ZIP codes, and it put federal mail-only ZIPs (the kind assigned to a government agency's mailroom, where nobody lives) near the top. They looked perfect because nothing bad was measured there. Nothing was measured there at all. We added a rule that an empty ZIP cannot score, and the lesson stuck: the absence of a bad number is not a good number.
A forecast you cannot trace back to real locations is a guess with a chart on it.
What Audience does instead
The forecast in Audience is not a curve fitted through demographics. It is a match. Given a new address, it describes the market around it, then finds the client locations Sneeze It runs whose markets most resemble it, and reports what those locations actually produced: enquiries a month and cost per enquiry.
The match still uses market facts, but it weighs them by what our data showed matters:
Source: Audience matching weights, from the code
Density and competition lead because they describe the auction a location is buying into, and contested markets cost more. Income is in the match at a low weight: it informs the comparison without driving it. Commute time is out entirely, because including something that predicted nothing would only add noise.
A demographic forecast
Takes the neighborhood's income, age and education, runs them through a model, and returns a number. Nobody can say which real business the number came from.
A comparable-location forecast
Finds the locations we run whose markets look most like this one, and reports what they did. Every forecast names how many matches it came from, and says "low confidence" when nothing is close.
There is a second advantage that turned out to matter more than accuracy. A comparable-location forecast can show its working. A franchise development team can see that the range came from five locations with similar density and competition, and judge for themselves whether those are fair comparisons. Same brand beats same industry, because locations that share an offer and a sales process are the fairest comparison of all.
The rules that keep the forecast honest
A forecast built on real locations is only as good as the locations it uses, so Audience is strict about which ones count.
- 1AddressThe site you are weighing
- 2MarketDrive-time trade area, census, competitors
- 3MatchThe most similar locations we run, weighted
- 4CheckDrop stale locations, mark down old ones
- 5ForecastEnquiries and cost per enquiry, with a match count
A location that stops reporting stops counting. If a live location's leads have not arrived in our records for 21 days, its numbers describe a period, not the location, so the forecast leaves it out and says so.
Old accounts fade. A location we no longer run can still count, but its cost per lead was set by an auction, an offer and creative from that year. It keeps full weight for a year, then counts for less and less, and after five years it cannot move a forecast on its own.
No match, no number. On Audience's public homepage, the sample comparison shows three sites side by side. Two get a range of enquiries a month. The third gets "No forecast. Low, no close match." That is the correct answer when we have nothing like it, and we would rather show it than invent one.
Presales wait for evidence. For a club that is not open yet, Audience will not forecast presale joins until it has at least four measured presales to learn from.
What this changes for a franchise team
As of October 10, 2026, the live strip on Audience's homepage shows 3,860 enquiries measured in the last 90 days and 31 open locations feeding the forecast. Those numbers will move, and that is the point: the forecast is fed by locations that are open and reporting now, not by a demographic file bought years ago.
It also changes the conversation with a franchisee. A demographic report invites an argument about whether the neighborhood is "right". A comparable-location report invites a better one: are these really the right comparisons, and what would make this site different? That is a question a franchisor and a franchisee can actually answer together.
There are limits, and the tool states them. It works at the ZIP code level and nothing finer. It reports what comparable markets did, not whether a market is good. And it cannot report cost per member for most locations, because few of them report signed memberships back to us.
Audience is live and used by our team. Clients see its output as a printed market report, not the tool itself. The drive-time trade area at the start of every forecast has its own story, which we tell in A circle is not a trade area. For the same habit applied to ads, see We judge ads by cost per lead.
