BUILD FASTER, EARN MORE

FitXR: How a One-Person Ad Team Turned Guesswork Into Profitable Growth on Meta Quest

One marketer rebuilt FitXR's Meta Quest ad program from scratch. Discover their strategy for lifetime value, wishlister targeting, and profitable growth.

FitXR⁠ is a VR fitness app with six years on Meta Quest. After broad targeting proved inefficient enough to shut down entirely, they rebuilt their ad strategy from scratch with guidance from Meta's consultation program and a single in-house marketer. The result: spend increased 2.3x while installs grew 4.8x and trials grew 4.5x, cutting cost per install in half and cost per trial by nearly half.

The Challenge

FitXR makes people love working out. The studio's namesake app turns VR into a fitness habit for users who've struggled with traditional workouts. It's subscription-based with a 7-day free trial, which means every ad dollar needs to bring in users who stick around, not just ones who download and disappear.

Before optimizing, FitXR's approach was broad targeting across the entire Quest ecosystem with generic creative. "[We were] reaching anybody in the Quest ecosystem with a pretty generic set of ads, without a lot of sophistication at the campaign management level," says Rae Hoki, FitXR's marketing lead.

That approach proved so inefficient they shut it down entirely.

The core problems were VR-specific:

Attribution complexity. The user funnel from ad impression to headset install to trial to subscription involves multiple touchpoints across devices. Tracking what's working is harder than traditional mobile or e-commerce.
Smaller total addressable market. VR's install base means developers often compete for the same audience segments, driving up CPMs without a smart targeting strategy.
Going beyond CPI. Optimizing for cost-per-install alone missed the point. A cheap install from someone who churns after day one costs more than an expensive install from a subscriber who stays for years.

What came next was a ground-up rebuild, led by Haley Goldlist, FitXR's dedicated in-house growth manager.

The Strategy: Smarter Targeting, Not Bigger Budgets

FitXR rebuilt their ad program with one guiding principle: understand who delivers long-term value, then spend every dollar reaching those people.

Deep-Funnel Optimization Over CPI

Rather than chasing the lowest cost-per-install, FitXR focused on lifetime value (LTV) relative to customer acquisition cost (CAC). "You have to think beyond the CPI level," says Goldlist. "Maybe it's more expensive to bring someone in the door, but they end up delivering longer-term value."

This meant accepting higher acquisition costs for segments that convert to paying subscribers and retain over time.

Wishlister Targeting

One of their biggest wins came from Meta's ads integration with the Store on Quest, which lets advertisers target users who've wishlisted their app directly through Ads Manager. Users who wishlist an app have already raised their hand. FitXR built campaigns specifically to nudge these high-intent users toward installing and starting a trial.

"Wishlisters in general are a pretty high-intent audience," Goldlist says. "We've done a lot of optimizations and testing around that audience, from how long it's been since they wishlisted us to what regions they're coming from."

LTV-Based Lookalike Audiences

FitXR combined their internal subscriber data with Meta's lookalike audience tools. They built audiences modeled on their highest-value customer segments, then tested relentlessly.

"If you can marry those two pieces, and bake it into lookalikes, bake it into budget reallocations, it becomes a very winning strategy," Goldlist says.

Their findings: 1% lookalike audiences (closest match to source) consistently outperformed broader ones.

Strategic Exclusions

Not every Quest owner is a good fit for FitXR. The team excluded younger demographics (18-24) who showed lower LTV for their fitness-focused app, and tailored geographic targeting to regions where their creative resonated.

"Different developers have different opportunities on the platform," Goldlist noted. "If they can go through this testing process and find their audience, they might be competing in a low-competition space."

The Tools: AI Doing the Heavy Lifting for a Team of One

Haley Goldlist manages FitXR's entire paid ads program solo without agency support or a large marketing department. That's possible because of how AI tools have changed campaign management.

A lot of developers probably think that if they don't have a big team or people with deep marketing expertise, that's a barrier to entering into the Meta ad space. But with how advanced AI tooling has gotten, this channel is remarkably accessible to teams of any size.

Haley Goldlist

Growth Manager, FitXR

AI helps FitXR in three key areas:

Data interpretation. Analyzing performance by segment, age, region, and LTV to spot opportunities that would take hours to find manually.
A/B testing at scale. Running more creative variations without proportionally more production work.
Budget optimization. Understanding which segments within legacy campaigns are ripe for scale, and reallocating spend based on LTV-to-CAC ratios.

Creative That Converts: Social Proof Over Sales Pitches

VR apps face a unique creative challenge: you're selling an immersive 3D experience through a 2D ad format. After testing extensively, FitXR landed on a few principles that consistently drove performance:

User-generated content wins. Real customer stories, videos of people sharing fitness transformations, and written testimonials all outperformed produced creative. "The more you can match the voice and themes of those reviews to the segment itself, generally you see higher performance because of that alignment," Goldlist says.

Visual hook first, copy hook second. The team invested in figuring out how to make VR fitness look compelling in a static or short-video ad format, then layered messaging on top of those visuals tailored to each audience segment.

Authentic stories over polish. Stories of customers who lost 30 or 60 pounds and people who could hike again show that FitXR is more than a game. These performed better than standard highly-produced marketing materials.

The Results

FitXR's transformation from shut-down campaigns to consistent, profitable growth delivered measurable impact within the first month:

2.3x increase in ad spend enabled by confidence in the new strategy's returns.
4.8x increase in installs while simultaneously improving efficiency.
4.5x increase in trials driven by smarter targeting and deeper funnel optimization.
Cost per install cut in half. Cost per trial reduced by nearly half.

Results within 30 days: even at a conservative initial spend level, cost per install immediately came in significantly below the prior year baseline, signaling that structural changes were working before full scale commitment.

Compounding gains: improvements compounded month over month. Even as spend was adjusted around objectives, cost per install kept improving, confirming the gains were structural and durable, not just a byproduct of high spend.

Deliberate, confident scaling: rather than immediately redirecting efficiency gains into aggressive spend increases, FitXR grew budget incrementally to avoid disrupting the algorithm and to ensure a clean ROAS read at each spend threshold.

Paid halo effect: beyond directly attributable installs, FitXR sees correlated spikes in organic search volume, Google searches for "FitXR," and organic Store discovery during periods of elevated ad spend.

"You can see in the data that the paid efforts are having this halo effect outside of what's directly attributable through the Meta platform," Goldlist says.

The Biggest "Aha Moment"

For Goldlist, the most surprising insight was how often intuition about customers was wrong.

You build assumptions over time about what your audience responds to, and those assumptions can quietly become a ceiling on your performance without you realizing it.

Haley Goldlist

Growth Manager, FitXR

The breakthrough came from going deeper on customer segmentation: who are the people your campaigns are reaching? Where else do they shop? What are their actual pain points? How does VR fit into their daily routine, and where does it not?

"When you start asking those questions by talking to customers directly, and not just analyzing behavioral data, you discover insights that change how you think about everything," Goldlist explains.

Advice for VR Developers Starting With Ads

Actionable Insights for Developers

Know your audience before you spend. Gain a complete understanding of who your different audiences are, what about your app appeals to them, and what delivers long-term value. You can layer that into everything from your budget strategy to your campaign structure to your creative.

Don't fear the small team. AI tools have made it possible for a single marketer to run sophisticated campaigns independently. The barrier to entry is lower than most developers think.

Optimize for LTV, not installs. Focus your campaign structure around reaching customers who deliver the highest LTV. You'll have a lot more wiggle room on the acquisition cost side to make it profitable.

Start focused, then expand gradually. You don't need to rush to scale right away if you have a limited budget. Once you can get your core demographic firing and the LTV-to-CAC makes sense, gradually expand that audience.

Pay attention to the halo. Track organic metrics alongside paid performance. The full value of your campaigns extends well beyond what shows up in your ads dashboard.

The tooling is ready for you. Running a paid ads program across Meta platforms can be a significant growth driver for your user acquisition objectives. It comes with patience, time, and precision, but the tooling is now incredibly sophisticated to support that effort.

Get Started With Meta Ads

Ready to run ads for your Quest app? These resources will walk you through setup, launch, and optimization.

Meta Ads for VR: How our advertising tools empower you to market your app to Meta Quest device users on placements such as Facebook and Instagram.
Quick Start Guide: A concise overview for new Meta Quest advertisers.
Launching your first ad campaign: Once your app is approved and an ad account is set up in the Developer Dashboard, you'll be ready to launch your first ad.
Understanding and optimizing your ad campaign: After launching your first campaign and seeing the incoming data, this topic will help you understand and optimize your ad campaign.

About FitXR

FitXR⁠ is the top global VR fitness app available on the Store on Meta Quest. It helps users build lasting fitness habits through immersive, game-like workouts targeting adults aged 35 and older. The app uses a subscription model with a 7-day free trial.

This case study is part of Meta's Build Faster, Earn More series, helping developers find success on Meta Quest. For the latest developer news, subscribe to our monthly newsletter and follow us on X⁠, Facebook⁠, and LinkedIn⁠.