Buying leads vs running your own ads
Every broker eventually asks: why pay a provider when I could run the ads myself? Sometimes you should. Here is what "myself" actually involves, written by a company that runs the ads.
- Media buying. Keyword and audience research, bids, budgets, daily checks. Finance keywords are among the most competitive in Australia.
- Creative. Ads that pass platform finance rules and still pull intent, refreshed before they fatigue.
- Landing pages and forms. A page that converts and a form that asks the hard questions: ABN, GST status, amount, purpose, timeframe.
- Verification. SMS checks, duplicate detection, fake-number filtering, human review.
- Compliance. Finance advertising rules, consent, privacy, record-keeping.
- Time. Months to learn what converts, and an hour a day forever to keep it converting.
None of that is hard in isolation. Doing all of it while writing loans is the hard part.
Not a list. A provider runs the whole stack above across many brokers, absorbs the failed campaigns, and sells you the enquiries that clear the criteria. The price per lead carries the ad spend, the creative, the verification and the failures. You are buying the output of a machine someone else has already tuned.
That is also the limit of it: you do not own the audience data or the campaign assets, and the provider decides how the machine works. If you want those things, you run your own.
Run your own if
You have a marketing person, twelve months of patience, a budget you can lose while learning, and a narrow niche nobody else serves.
Buy leads if
You need enquiries this month, can call within the hour, and would rather pay for verified enquiries than for activity.
Do both if
You are a brokerage building a brand: own campaigns for the long game, bought enquiries to keep the team busy meanwhile.
Never
Buy shared or unverified leads to save money. You become the fourth caller and the discount is the reason.
Estimate what your own hour is worth writing loans. Estimate the hours a week a campaign would take you to run properly. If the second number times the first is more than you would pay a provider for the same number of verified enquiries, buy. If not, and you have the patience, run. Most brokers who do the maths honestly buy first and build later.
Whichever you choose, the follow-up is yours either way. Our guide to converting finance leads is where the return actually comes from.