Should I buy insurance leads or run my own Facebook ads?

By The Run My Ads team · Updated October 16, 2026 · 5 min read

What you are really choosing between

A lead vendor runs ads, collects form fills and sells them to you. When you run your own ads, you do the vendor's job: you pay the ad cost directly, keep every lead, and take on the testing and the risk. Public benchmarks put the median Facebook cost per lead for Finance and Insurance at $38.09,^[1] and published exclusive final expense lead prices run about $45 to $70.^[2] Roughly speaking, the gap between those two numbers is what you pay a vendor to do the work. Whether it is worth it is the whole question.

When buying leads makes sense

• You are new and need to learn to sell first. Leads on day one let you practise your call while someone else figures out the ads.
• Your time is worth more on the phone. If one extra hour of calls writes more business than an hour in Ads Manager, buying is the better use of your day.
• You want a known price. A vendor's price per lead is set before you spend. Ad costs move with the auction.
• You need volume next week. Your own ads need time to learn. A vendor already has the machine running.

When running your own ads makes sense

• You want leads that are only yours. A person who fills in your form was not bought by anyone else from you.
• You want to see the source. You know the exact ad, form and consent wording behind every lead.
• You buy enough that the markup adds up. If you spend a few thousand dollars a month on leads, the gap between ad cost and lead price is real money.
• You can give it a few weeks. In our experience a new ad needs about a week of data before you can judge it, and your first ads will not all work.

What running your own ads really takes

Be honest with yourself about these before you start:

1. A Meta ad account and a Facebook business page. Free, but they take an afternoon to set up properly.
2. The special ad category. Insurance ads must run under Meta's financial products and services category in the US, which removes age, gender and ZIP code targeting.^[3] Your words and visuals have to find the right people instead. See is insurance a special ad category on Facebook?
3. Visuals and words that stop the scroll. And new ones every few weeks, because people tire of the same ad.
4. A form with the right consent wording. If you plan to call or text with a dialer or an AI voice, the form has to collect consent that covers it. See what consent you need.
5. A testing budget you are fine losing. Some ad sets will not work. That money buys the answer.
6. Fast follow-up. In our experience a lead is easiest to reach right after the form is filled in, whether you bought it or made it.

Mistakes we see when agents start their own ads

• Judging on clicks or cost per lead alone. A cheap lead that never answers is not cheap. Judge on cost per booked appointment and cost per sale.
• Changing things every day. Big budget swings and constant edits keep resetting Meta's delivery. Small, steady changes have worked better for us.
• Calling it after three days. Early results bounce around. Give each ad a full week.
• Skipping the special ad category. Copying an old campaign without the financial products and services declaration breaks Meta's rules for insurance ads.
• Slow follow-up. Paying for a lead and calling it the next morning wastes the spend.
• One ad, one visual. Test a few angles at once, so one flop does not end the test.

How to test both side by side

You do not have to pick on faith. Run a small test:

1. Keep buying from the vendor you trust.
2. Set a daily ad budget you are fine spending for four weeks, and do not change it more than about 20% at a time.
3. Track both sources on the same scorecard: cost per lead, cost per booked appointment, cost per sale.
4. Give each new ad seven days before you judge it.
5. At the end, move money toward whichever source wrote business for less.

In our own Family Equity Protection mortgage protection campaigns in September 2026, our ad cost per lead was about $14 over two weeks. That is one account and one product, not what you will pay. Your test is the only number that counts.

The middle ground: own ads, less work

Running your own ads does not have to mean doing it all yourself. Run My Ads gives you three ways in:

• Do-It-Yourself Ads: you run ads in your own Meta ad account, and Ados, our AI assistant, tells you what to do next, what to pause and what to scale. You click.
• Premium: our team runs your ads for you inside your own ad account. You own the account and the data.
• Done-For-You Ads (insurance only): if you would rather keep buying, we run the ads on our accounts and send you the leads. Your lead rate locks in each time you load your wallet.

The how it works page shows how Ados plans and reports, and pricing lists every plan.

About this guide. Run My Ads sells ad software and a Done-For-You Ads plan that delivers leads, so we have a stake in this topic. We have tried to show both sides, cite every number to a public source, and label our own numbers as ours.

Common questions

Sources

1. Facebook Ads Benchmarks 2024. WordStream (LocaliQ). 2,946 campaigns, February 2023 to April 2024; figures are medians.
2. Final Expense Leads Cost Per Lead 2026. Elevarus. Ranges the author says reflect what his firm sees across buyer accounts; not an independent survey.
3. Special Ad Category (Marketing API documentation). Meta for Developers.