Insurance leads from your own ads

Insurance leads are sold by the unit and generated by the campaign, and the two products differ first in who else holds them. EverQuote says its shared leads go to a maximum of three agencies and to 1.9 agents on average, that exclusive leads go to one agent at a time and statistically have higher contact rates, and, in a note published in 2020, that a shared lead costs about $4 to $5 less than an exclusive one. Its agent FAQ lists no price: prices vary by product type, auto, home, life or warm transfer, by risk profile and by subsidy eligibility, with no minimum period or spend.

An own lead is a quote request on your form, from your ad, with your consent text, your click ids and nobody else's phone call. It costs what the auction and your conversion rate make it cost, and the next section gives the 2026 figures. The deeper difference is what happens afterwards: a bought lead ends in the vendor's CSV, while an own lead carries the gclid and the Meta click id that let you send the bound policy back to the platform that produced it, so its bidding learns from binds. Life insurance leads, final expense leads and Medicare leads each bring their own rules into that loop, and the sections below take them line by line.

• Shared: resold to several agents, the cheapest unit, several people calling the same person
• Exclusive: one agent, priced above shared, still on the vendor's consent text
• Own: your form, your consent, your click ids, your bind data

LocaliQ's 2026 search advertising benchmarks, updated in June 2026, give the finance and insurance industry a $3.39 average cost per click, a 9.83% click-through rate, a 2.64% conversion rate and a $74.44 cost per lead. Across the 23 industries in the report the averages are $5.42, 6.64%, 8.18% and $66.69, and LocaliQ notes that cost per lead decreased overall for the first time in five years. The insurance row is the odd one out: clicks are cheaper and more frequent than average, and the conversion rate is the lowest in the table, so the lead ends up dearer. Auto insurance ads on Search live in that row.

LocaliQ's 2026 Facebook advertising benchmarks, updated in September 2026, have a finance and insurance row only for traffic campaigns: a $0.86 cost per click and a 1.46% click-through rate, against $0.60 and 1.93% across industries. The lead generation tables have no finance and insurance row; across the 14 industries they cover, the leads objective averages a $1.80 click, a 2.70% click-through rate, an 8.54% conversion rate and a $27.39 cost per lead. Treat $27.39 as a cross-industry figure for Facebook ads for insurance agents, not as an insurance benchmark.

Neither figure is a cost per bound policy. The arithmetic in the formula below runs: cost per bound policy equals cost per lead divided by the share of quote requests that bind. At $74.44 a lead, a line that binds one quote request in four pays about $298 per policy and a line that binds one in ten pays about $744. That is the figure to hold against first-year commission, by line, and nothing published tells you your bind rate.

• Search, finance and insurance, LocaliQ 2026: $3.39 per click, 2.64% conversion rate, $74.44 per lead
• Facebook traffic, finance and insurance, LocaliQ 2026: $0.86 per click, 1.46% click-through rate
• Facebook leads objective, all industries, LocaliQ 2026: $27.39 per lead
• Cost per bound policy: cost per lead divided by the bind rate

Meta's Business Help Center says Special Ad Categories expanded in October 2024 beyond housing, employment and credit to financial products and services, replacing the Credit category, and lists insurance first among its examples, before bank accounts, investment services and payment services. Since January 21, 2025 the category has been required for advertisers based in the United States or reaching audiences in the United States, and ads may be rejected if an appropriate category is not chosen. Credit ads are a subset of the category and keep their existing enforcement for advertisers based in or reaching the US, Canada or certain parts of Europe.

What it removes, in Meta's words: age, gender, ZIP code or postal code, exclusion targeting, lookalike audiences and saved audiences are limited or unavailable, some interests are unavailable, audiences based on a city or a pin drop include an expanded radius, and Advantage+ catalog ads carry the same limitations. Meta's developer documentation gives the numbers: age fixed to 18 through 65+, all genders, a minimum radius of 15 miles or 25 kilometers in the US and Canada and 15 kilometers in Europe, no location exclusion, no lookalike audiences, and interests only from a limited list. For insurance Facebook ads this is the end of the 50 to 64 band for final expense and of the ZIP list around an office.

What still works: countries, states and cities with the expanded radius, custom audiences, which Meta notes may only be available through Ads Manager, the interests that remain, the creative and the offer. Meta also says the restrictions on customer list custom audiences it announced in October 2024 for housing, employment and financial products and services ads will not be rolled out, so a customer list from your book of business still builds an audience. A saved audience is updated to comply once the campaign is declared in the category.

• Removed: age bands, gender, ZIP codes, exclusions, lookalikes, saved audiences, some interests
• Expanded: a city or pin-drop radius, 15 miles at least in the US
• Kept: states and cities, custom audiences, the remaining interests, the creative

Google's financial products and services policy defines its scope as products and services related to the management or investment of money and cryptocurrencies, including personalized advice, and does not name insurance. Every promotion inside it must show three disclosures clearly and immediately, without a click or a hover: the physical address of the business offering the product, all associated fees, and links to any third-party accreditation or endorsement the ad asserts or implies. Debt settlement, complex speculative products and prediction markets need a certification, and an agency that promotes annuities or investment advice next to life policies is inside the scope whatever it calls itself.

Verification is by country. Google's page on financial services verification lists the countries where it applies, from Australia, Austria and Belgium through India, Singapore and Taiwan to the United Kingdom; the United States is not on the list. The regulators it names are financial regulators and, for Taiwan, the Professional Insurance Brokers Association and the Insurance Agents Association, so insurance intermediaries are inside the program there at least; the page makes no general statement about insurance. Separately, Google's advertiser verification page says all advertisers will eventually be required to verify their identity or business operations, with a notice in the account or by email, and that ads may be restricted or the account paused until it is done.

Health plans are the exception that applies in the United States. Google's healthcare and medicines policy on health insurance says that in the United States you must be certified by Google to advertise health and medical insurance coverage, government advertisers excepted, and that the certification is G2RS's Health Insurance Providers Certification, obtained before applying to Google Ads. It lists individual health insurance, short-term, limited-duration and fixed indemnity plans, Medicare Advantage, Medigap and Medicaid; advertisers registered to sell ACA-compliant plans need an additional certificate to bid on ACA keywords; ads exclusively for dental, vision or travel health coverage are not restricted.

Medicare ads carry a federal rule on top of the platforms' rules. Under 42 CFR 422.2267(e)(41), a third-party marketing organization that sells plans on behalf of more than one Medicare Advantage organization must use a standard disclaimer. When it does not sell for all MA organizations in the service area: 'We do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent [insert number of organizations] organizations which offer [insert number of plans] products in your area. Please contact Medicare.gov or 1-800-MEDICARE to get information on all of your options.' When it sells all plans in the service area: 'Currently we represent [insert number of organizations] organizations which offer [insert number of plans] products in your area. You can always contact Medicare.gov or 1-800-MEDICARE for help with plan choices.'

The regulation says where the disclaimer goes: verbally conveyed during sales calls prior to the discussion of any benefits, electronically conveyed when communicating with a beneficiary through email, online chat or other electronic means, prominently displayed on the TPMO's websites, and included in any marketing materials, print materials and television advertisements among them, that the TPMO develops, uses or distributes. A Medicare landing page that takes quote requests is such a website, and the follow-up call is such a call. Section 422.2267 holds far more than this paragraph; read it and your carriers' marketing guidance before you run.

On Google, Medicare Advantage and Medigap sit in the health insurance list above, so a US agent needs the G2RS certification before the first Medicare ad. On Meta, insurance is the first example in the financial products and services category, which fixes the age range at 18 through 65+: a Medicare campaign cannot select the 65+ band, and the ad's words do the selecting.

A lead is called. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, as the Eleventh Circuit summarized it in January 2025, those wishing to make a robocall, a call or text made with an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice, must obtain the called party's prior express consent, and an FCC rule from 2012 makes that prior express written consent when the call is telemarketing or advertising. The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule adds that a number on the National Do Not Call Registry may be called only when the consumer has given prior express written consent to be called by that seller, or under an established business relationship, which lasts 18 months after the consumer's most recent purchase and 3 months after their most recent inquiry or application, and that telemarketing calls may be made only between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the consumer's time zone.

The FCC's one-to-one consent rule, adopted in 2023, held that a consumer cannot consent to a telemarketing robocall unless he consents to calls from only one entity at a time and only to calls whose subject matter is logically and topically associated with the interaction that prompted the consent, and the opinion calls lead generation the industry most affected by it. On January 24, 2025 the Eleventh Circuit, in Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC, held that the FCC exceeded its statutory authority because those restrictions conflict with the ordinary statutory meaning of prior express consent, granted the petition for review, vacated that part of the order and remanded. The baseline rules in the previous paragraph remain.

For an own lead form, write the consent the way the TSR reads it: a written agreement in which the consumer gives your business permission to call the number given, kept with the lead. Your form says who will call, so the call is expected. A bought lead carries the vendor's consent text, written for the vendor's purposes, and you inherit whatever it says.

• Telemarketing robocalls and texts: prior express written consent
• Do Not Call numbers: written permission, or an established business relationship of 18 months after a purchase or 3 months after an inquiry
• Calling hours: 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the consumer's time zone
• One-to-one consent rule: vacated by the Eleventh Circuit on January 24, 2025

A quote request that asks the qualifying question costs more per lead and less per bound policy. For auto: current carrier, renewal month, number of drivers and vehicles, and a ZIP code typed by the person, which the special ad category no longer lets you target but does not stop you asking; for life: age band, tobacco use and coverage amount; for Medicare: whether the person is already enrolled and when their coverage starts; for final expense: a phone number and the best time to call. Each answer removes a call your team would have made to find it out.

On Meta, the question can sit in the instant form or on your landing page; on your page the form is yours to design, the visit is recorded on your site and the click ids are saved for the bind. On Search, the page itself is the qualifier: the disclosures Google asks for, the TPMO disclaimer where it applies, the quote fields and a calendar. Whichever form you use, a quote request is a person comparing, and the agent who calls first quotes first. Record minutes to first contact as a campaign metric next to cost per lead, and route the lead to a phone, not an inbox.

• Auto: current carrier, renewal month, drivers, vehicles
• Life: age band, tobacco use, coverage amount
• Medicare: current enrollment and coverage start
• Final expense: phone number and the time to call

Google's help page on offline conversion imports describes the case exactly: an ad starts a customer down a path that ends in a sale in the offline world, at your office or over the phone, and the fix is to save the Google Click ID with whatever lead information you collect, then import the conversion later. The same holds for Meta's click ids. The quote request is a conversion the platform can see; the quote and the bind are conversions only your systems see, and bidding that learns from binds buys more of the people who bind.

Adrails tracking does the plumbing. A script on your quote pages keeps the click ids for 90 days and records the visit; your server, or anything your agency management system can trigger, sends the quote request as a lead event and the bound policy as a purchase event with the premium as its value, signed with a server key that never goes in a page. Meta receives each signed event right after it is recorded, with value, currency and the event id for deduplication, and Google Ads, once your workspace can connect it, receives the signed events that carry a gclid for the one event you chose, in hourly batches once they are 6 hours old. A value limit and a daily limit per platform hold back anything a leaked key might send.

Then the weekly reading is three columns per product line: cost per lead, cost per bound policy and the bind rate between them. Cost per lead down with cost per bound policy up means the extra leads were noise, a shared list or a form that got easier; cost per lead up with cost per bound policy down means the qualifying question worked. Hold cost per bound policy against first-year commission by line, and move budget only when the second column, not the first, has held for a week.