Cost per lead is the wrong place to stop. How to model a lead price through to cost per settled deal, so you can judge any quote on its real economics.
Figures in this article describe the wider market and are drawn from the third-party sources listed at the end. They are not Lead Foundry results, and nothing here is a projection of what any individual broker will achieve.
Ask whether a lead price is good and every supplier gives you a different answer, all of them favourable to their own price list. The price only acquires meaning once you run it through to a settled deal, because two leads at the same price routinely cost very different amounts per client.
Four inputs turn a cost per lead into a cost per settled deal. Get all four from any supplier before you commit, and measure your own once supply starts.
| Input | Where it comes from | How much it moves the answer |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead | The supplier's price list | Least of the four |
| Contact rate | Your CRM, measured across a full six-attempt cadence | Most of the four |
| Conversion rate | Your CRM, from contacted to settled | Substantial |
| Revenue per settled deal | Your own book, across the relationship | Sets the ceiling on everything |
The sensitivity sits almost entirely in contact rate, which is why supplier quality and response time keep appearing in what looks like a purely commercial question. A supplier whose records reach people is worth a large premium over one whose records do not, and the price list cannot tell you which you are looking at.
Worked shape, not a promise: Take the revenue a settled deal produces across the relationship. Decide the share of it you will spend on acquisition. Divide that by the number of leads it takes you to produce one settled deal, which is one divided by your contact rate multiplied by your conversion rate. The result is the most you can pay per lead. Every input is yours, which is the point.
This is the benchmark that gives a lead price context, because self-generation is the alternative you are choosing against. WordStream's 2026 Google Ads benchmarks, from 13,474 US search campaigns running between April 2025 and March 2026, put the all-industry average cost per click at US$5.42 and the all-industry average cost per lead at US$66.69, described as the first decline in five years.
Finance and Insurance specifically recorded an average cost per click of US$3.39 with a conversion rate of 2.64%, the lowest of any category in the dataset, alongside a click-through rate above 9%.
| All-industry average cost per lead (US$) | US$66.69 |
|---|---|
| All-industry average cost per click (US$) | US$5.42 |
| Finance and Insurance cost per click (US$) | US$3.39 |
| Finance and Insurance conversion rate (%) | 2.64% |
A cheap click paired with the worst conversion rate in the dataset. The cost of an enquiry is the click price divided by the conversion rate, and 2.64% divides hard.
No official New Zealand or Australian dataset on lead pricing exists. The ranges below are working benchmarks assembled from vendor quotes, international mortgage lead markets where the economics are comparable, and the published cost of generating equivalent enquiry through paid search. Treat them as a place to start a negotiation rather than as measured market data.
| Product | Working exclusive range | Why the range sits there |
|---|---|---|
| NZ mortgage | NZ$80 to $200 | High revenue per settlement absorbs the unit cost |
| AU mortgage | AU$100 to $250 | Higher media costs and a far larger broker count competing |
| NZ life and protection | NZ$60 to $150 | Recurring revenue rewards retention over volume |
A good cost per lead is one where the cost per settled deal sits comfortably below the value of that deal, with margin left over for the leads that do not convert. Judge every quote against that rather than against the sticker price.
The lead price is the smallest line in the real cost. The larger one is time, and it is the input you have least of.
Costing the hours changes decisions rather than merely decorating them. Salesforce research puts the share of time sales professionals spend actively selling at around 40%, with the rest going to administration and internal work. For an adviser carrying their own compliance files, buying back that time is often cheaper than buying more leads.
You cannot judge a cost per lead without measuring what happens to the lead. Four numbers, all of which a CRM captures with almost no extra effort, turn a price into a decision.
Review these quarterly rather than monthly. Contact and conversion rates are noisy across four weeks, and reacting to one soft month is how brokers end up switching suppliers on the strength of variance.
Whatever keeps your cost per settled deal comfortably below what a settled deal is worth, with margin for the leads that do not convert. That figure depends on your own contact and conversion rates rather than on a market average. As working benchmarks, exclusive New Zealand mortgage enquiries commonly quote around NZ$80 to $200 and Australian around AU$100 to $250.
Divide your cost per lead by the product of your contact rate and your conversion rate from contacted to settled. That gives the lead spend per settled deal. Add the adviser hours consumed, at roughly 35 minutes per lead across a six-attempt cadence, to get the true cost per client.
Frequently. Contact rate moves the cost-per-client model more than price does, so a cheap record that reaches nobody consumes both the money and the adviser hours without producing a conversation. Once you cost the hours as well as the invoice, low-contact-rate supply is usually the more expensive option for a capacity-constrained broker.
Price the alternative before deciding. WordStream's 2026 benchmarks put Finance and Insurance at a US$3.39 average cost per click with a 2.64% conversion rate, the lowest of any category, so the enquiry cost is far higher than the click cost implies, before you add building and maintaining the funnel. Many brokers run both, using owned funnels for brand and bought supply for predictable volume.