What a good cost per lead looks like for insurance brokers in Canada

5 September 20266 min readBy Ali Mir

Real cost-per-lead figures from live Meta ad accounts, what moves them up or down, and why cost per booked call is the number to run your brokerage on.

Every broker who has looked at running ads asks the same first question: what should a lead cost? The honest answer is that it depends on the product, the province, the season and the creative, and anyone who quotes you a single number before seeing your account is guessing.

But "it depends" is not useful on its own, so here is what we can say from accounts we run.

The figures we publish

On our home page we show screenshots from live ad accounts rather than a summary, because a summary can hide a lot. Across the UK campaigns shown there, form leads cost between roughly £1.50 and £7 each. A Canadian campaign for a home and auto broker, running August to September 2026, came in at $12.46 CAD per form lead across 77 leads from $959.53 of spend. Meta's own benchmark put that 9.8% below the median for similar ad sets in the same period.

Those are form leads: people who read the ad, tapped it, and submitted their details. They are not booked calls, and the gap between the two is where most of the money is made or lost.

What pushes cost per lead down

• A specific opening line. "Home insurance renewing in the next sixty days?" beats "Looking for great rates on insurance?" every time, because it speaks to one person in one situation.
• The broker on camera. A real person explaining one thing plainly outperforms motion graphics, stock footage and text-on-a-background. We have not found an exception.
• A test week before the budget. Running two creatives against each other for seven days on a fifth of the budget costs a little in the short term and saves a great deal in the blast phase.
• A short form. Every extra question raises the cost per lead. Ask for what you need to make the first call and nothing else.

What pushes it up

• Launching on full budget on day one. You pay full price to learn what a test week would have told you for a fraction.
• Changing things daily. Meta's delivery system needs a few days of stable data to settle. Tinkering resets it.
• A long, general script. Ninety seconds on "why insurance matters" reaches everyone and selects nobody.
• Restricted-category mistakes. Ads for financial products that are not declared correctly get rejected or throttled, which wastes days.

The number to actually run on

Cost per lead is the early signal. Cost per qualified booked call is the business. A $12 lead who never answers is worse than a $30 lead who books a call and turns up.

So once the ad is producing leads at a sensible cost, the work shifts to the ten minutes after the form is submitted: how fast the lead is contacted, whether they can book straight into a calendar, and whether they know who you are before the call starts. That is what month two of our programme is for, and it is usually where a campaign that "gets leads but not clients" is fixed.

A rough rule of thumb

If you want one number to sanity-check a proposal against: in Canada, a form lead for personal lines insurance in the low teens of dollars is good, in the twenties is normal for a new account still testing, and above forty means the creative is wrong, not the platform. Treat those as bands, not promises, and ask to see the account before you believe anyone's average.