Work backwards from allowable cost per client. The model, the published benchmarks, and the number that decides whether buying leads works.
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.
Brokers evaluate lead suppliers on price per lead, which is the equivalent of choosing a car on the price of a tank of fuel. It is a real cost, it is easy to compare, and it tells you close to nothing about what the thing will cost you to run.
The number that matters is allowable cost per client. Once you have it, every other question about lead buying answers itself.
It is the most you can spend to acquire one client while still making the margin you need. You derive it from your own revenue per client and the share of that revenue you are prepared to commit to acquisition.
If a settled client is worth a given amount of revenue to you across the relationship, and you are willing to spend 15% of that on acquisition, your allowable cost per client is 15% of that figure. That single number is now the budget, and cost per lead becomes an input rather than a decision.
Why this order matters: A NZ$40 lead and a NZ$160 lead are indistinguishable until you know how many of each it takes to produce one client. Working forward from cost per lead means guessing at that ratio. Working back from allowable cost per client means measuring it.
Four inputs, all of which are already in your CRM if you have been running for a few months. If they are not, that is the first thing to fix, since you cannot budget for something you have never measured.
| Input | Where it comes from | What it does in the model |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue per settled client | Your own book, across the relationship not the first transaction | Sets the ceiling on everything |
| Contact rate | Share of leads that reach a live conversation within six attempts | The first multiplier |
| Appointment rate | Share of conversations producing a booked next step | The second multiplier |
| Appointment-to-client rate | Share of held appointments that become clients | The third multiplier |
Multiply the three rates together and you get clients per lead. Divide your allowable cost per client by the number of leads it takes to produce one client and you have the maximum you can pay per lead. That figure is specific to your process, which is exactly why a published market average cannot answer it for you.
The sensitivity in this model sits almost entirely in the first multiplier. Contact rate moves more than the other two combined, and it is the one most affected by supplier quality and by how fast you call, which is why the response-time research keeps reappearing in commercial questions.
There is no published New Zealand dataset for insurance or mortgage lead pricing. The nearest usable public benchmarks describe what it costs to generate enquiry yourself through paid search, which is the real alternative to buying.
WordStream's 2026 Google Ads benchmarks, drawn 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, the first decline in five years. Finance and Insurance specifically showed an average CPC of US$3.39 and a conversion rate of 2.64%, the lowest of any category measured, against a click-through rate above 9%.
| All-industry average cost per lead (US$) | 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% |
The category has a cheap click and the worst conversion rate measured. That combination is why building your own enquiry funnel is more expensive than the click price suggests, and it is the cost that any bought lead is competing against.
Read that pairing carefully, because it is the whole argument for buying rather than building. A low cost per click with the lowest conversion rate in the dataset means the clicks are affordable and most of them go nowhere. The cost of an enquiry is the click price divided by the conversion rate, and a 2.64% conversion rate divides hard.
The invoice is the smallest line. A lead consumes time, and time is the input you have least of.
Costing the time properly changes decisions. A cheaper lead with a lower contact rate consumes more adviser hours per client than a dearer one with a higher contact rate, and adviser hours are usually the more expensive resource.
Take your monthly new-client target, multiply by your allowable cost per client, and check the result against the calling capacity you actually have. Where the two disagree, capacity wins, because a budget that buys more leads than you can work through a full cadence spends money on records that receive one call.
Review the model quarterly rather than monthly. Contact rate and appointment rate are noisy over four weeks, and reacting to a single soft month is how brokers end up changing suppliers on the strength of variance.
How Lead Foundry answers this: You set the criteria an enquiry has to meet before supply starts, and anything failing them is replaced, so the invalid-record share of your budget is not a cost you carry silently. Exclusive supply means the contact-rate assumption in your model is not being shared with three other advisers.
Derive it from allowable cost per client rather than from a market price per lead. Take your revenue per settled client across the relationship, decide what share of it you are prepared to spend on acquisition, and that figure is your ceiling per client. Divide it by the number of leads it takes you to produce one client, which is your contact rate multiplied by your appointment rate multiplied by your appointment-to-client rate.
It depends on your conversion rates, but the public benchmarks show why building is harder than the click price suggests. WordStream's 2026 data puts Finance and Insurance at a US$3.39 average cost per click with a 2.64% conversion rate, the lowest of any category measured. A cheap click with a poor conversion rate produces an expensive enquiry, before you have added the cost of building and maintaining the funnel.
There is no publishable universal figure, and any supplier quoting one is describing their price rather than your economics. The right number is whatever keeps your cost per acquired client under your allowable cost per client, which depends on your own contact and conversion rates. A dearer lead with a materially higher contact rate is routinely cheaper per client than a cheap one.
Yes, and it usually changes the answer. Budget roughly 35 minutes of contact effort per lead across a six-attempt cadence and cost it at what an adviser hour is worth. Once time is in the model, a cheap lead with a low contact rate often turns out to consume more of your most constrained resource per client than a dearer one.