Most insurance agency owners are flying blind with their marketing spend.
They're dumping thousands into Facebook ads, lead vendors, direct mail, and referral programs. But when you ask them how to track marketing campaign performance, they shrug and say something like "the leads seem okay."
That's not a strategy. That's gambling.
After seven years scaling Peachy Insurance to over $40 million in premium and running Next Call Club's lead gen operations, I've seen the same pattern over and over. Agencies waste money on campaigns that don't work because they're not tracking the right things, or they kill campaigns that are actually profitable because they're looking at the wrong metrics.
Here's how to fix that.
Every marketing campaign needs to be measured. But not all metrics tell you the same story.
Here are the core numbers you need to track:
Cost per lead - Not all leads are created equal. A $4 lead might be cheaper than a $10 lead, but if it doesn't convert, you're still losing money. We believe there's no such thing as a bad lead, only a bad price for that lead.
Contact rate - If people aren't picking up the phone, you've got a problem. Low contact rates across all campaigns usually means your numbers are flagged as spam. That's not a campaign problem, that's a phone number problem.
Quote rate - This tells you how well you're converting conversations into quotes. If you have a high contact rate but low quote rate, your team isn't overcoming objections. That's a training issue, not a lead quality issue.
Quote to close rate - This shows competitiveness. High contact rate, high quote rate, but low close? Your targeting is off or your pricing isn't competitive.
Close rate - Leads bound divided by leads bought. This is your secondary metric because it gets influenced by your team's performance, not just the campaign quality.
Average number of calls - We typically see a drop-off after seven or eight calls. The juice isn't worth the squeeze after that. But here's a trick: if you let a lead sit for five or six days after calling them seven or eight times, you get a bigger contact rate because everyone else stopped calling.
ROI - This is the ultimate number. You can have high cost per sale and still be profitable if the revenue is there.
Cost per item and cost per sale - Important to track, but don't obsess over them. You could have high costs in both and still crush it on ROI if premiums are high.
Bundle rate - If you're suddenly getting a bunch of monoline sales when you normally bundle, something changed. If it's happening across the board, it's probably a training issue with your team.
Return rate - If you're returning tons of leads, you're either being too harsh on the vendor or the quality actually sucks.
Answer to quote rate - Shows intent and your team's skill level. This is extremely important.
The key thing to understand is that these metrics don't work in isolation. You need to look at them together to see what's really happening.
Let me give you a real example from one of our campaigns.
We were running a mobile home campaign. Quote rate was solid, but quote to close was only 5%. That's about one-third of what we normally saw. When we ran our large-scale analysis, it got flagged and almost turned off.
But when we dug deeper, we noticed something: ROI was sitting at 459%.
Here's why. We were paying $3 per lead with a 2.1% close rate. Yes, the cost per sale was $142. But the average premium on these mobile homes was $2,200. We were getting paid $220 in revenue per sale, and that's not even counting the extra lines we were writing.
If we had just looked at cost per sale and killed the campaign, we would have walked away from a 459% ROI.
This is why you can't just look at one number. A lot of people avoid mobile home leads because they seem hard. But when we called these customers, they were desperate for help. The sale was actually easier. The only reason close rate was low was eligibility issues, which was on us to fix with better targeting.
We ended up raising our bid price to win more of these leads.
You don't need fancy software to start tracking campaigns. You just need to start.
At Peachy, we use Tableau to build custom dashboards for the KPIs that matter most. But many CRMs come with built-in reporting that works just fine.
The most important thing is getting all your data into one system. Nothing is worse than sitting down to analyze something and realizing you're not even collecting the info you need.
Here are your options:
Spreadsheets - If you're just starting, this works. Track your basics: cost per lead, contact rate, quote rate, close rate, and ROI. Update it weekly.
CRM reports - Most CRMs have some kind of reporting. Use what you've got. The key is consistency.
Custom dashboards - Tools like Tableau, or services like Little Giant Marketing, Lead Swami, and Agency Tool Chest can help you get a better handle on analytics. At Next Call Club, we build these dashboards for clients as part of our service.
Outsource it - Sometimes it's better to hire someone. Whether that's a VA from Scale Army or outsourcing to a service like ours, having someone who knows what they're doing can save you a lot of headaches.
The tool matters less than the habit. Pick something and use it every week.
Here's where most people screw up: they change things too fast.
Our general approach is to look at everything on a 30-day and 90-day basis.
If you don't give a campaign at least 90 days, you don't have an adequate sample size. Research shows it takes an average of 14 to 21 days for a lead to convert in the insurance industry. If you change things after five days, you're not even letting the cycle complete.
Here's how we break it down:
First 30 days - We're looking at contact rate and quote rate. Are the leads getting on the phone? Are they taking quotes? This tells us if the campaign has potential.
Days 31 to 90 - Now we're looking at close rates and ROI. Are they actually buying? Do we need to tweak targeting? What's the real competitiveness?
If something is trending positive at 30 days, it's going the right direction. If it's negative at 30 days, it's going the wrong direction. Compare both time frames.
If it's bad on both, you probably need to make a big change. If it's good on one and bad on the other, figure out what changed in the last 30 days.
The people who change campaigns every 5, 10, or 15 days think they're being decisive. They're actually being impulsive and stressed out. Give things time to bake.
The type of marketing matters too. With purchased leads, you can be more nimble. With direct mail, you've got a 30-day lead time built in. Google and Facebook ads might need faster adjustments.
At Next Call Club, we do monthly optimization reviews with clients at no extra cost. We look at volume, quote rate, contact rate, and close rate to make meaningful adjustments and make sure marketing dollars go where things are working.
This is where it gets tricky. When your reps are working mailer leads, purchased leads, referrals, and inbound calls all at the same time, how do you know what's actually working?
Tag everything at the source.
Every lead needs a campaign tag in your CRM when it comes in. Mailers, paid vendors, referrals, whatever. Don't try to figure it out later.
Track what matters: where the lead came from, transfer rate by source, and close rate by source. Your rep gets credit for the transfer, but you're analyzing performance by campaign separately.
So if Sarah is crushing it with mailer leads (30% transfer rate) but struggling with purchased leads (18%), you know whether it's a lead quality problem or a training gap.
The actual problem you'll run into is that reps will cherry-pick the easy sources and ignore the hard ones. You either need dedicated reps per source, round-robin assignments with minimums, or blended quotas that account for difficulty.
What actually works is daily and weekly dashboards showing each rep's performance broken down by source. They see their numbers, you see everything. Then monthly reviews where you're asking "why did this source drop 6 points last month?" That variance tells you what's broken.
After working with hundreds of agencies, I see the same mistakes over and over.
Making decisions too quickly - You need a decent sample size (at least 500 leads) to make meaningful decisions. Changing things after 50 leads is just noise.
Focusing on just one metric - People obsess over sold rate or cost per item. These are pieces of the puzzle. I don't care if my cost per sale is good if my ROI is poor. Look at the whole picture.
Blaming the leads instead of the team - If contact rate is good but quote rate is bad, that's not the leads. That's your team not overcoming objections. If quote rate is good but close rate is bad, that's a competitiveness or targeting issue.
Having garbage data - Many agencies have producers who mismark things. They attribute the sale to the wrong source or put in the wrong premium. This skews everything. Studies show that poor data quality costs businesses an average of $15 million per year. If you don't have good data, it's garbage in, garbage out.
Not understanding what the data is telling them - People take data to make a decision instead of taking data to understand WHY the data looks that way. Find the root cause and fix it. Don't look for a quantum leap. Look for little tweaks in multiple places and let it all come together for a big improvement.
This is the million-dollar question.
Look at the combination of metrics and client feedback. Volume, quote rate, contact rate, and close rate all tell part of the story.
But be careful. If contact and quote rate are healthy but close rate is bad, it could be your sales agents need help making the sale. That's not a campaign problem.
Also look beyond direct contribution. Some campaigns drive awareness or nudge people to reach out through a different channel. They might not show up as direct sales on that campaign, but they're still working.
Here's what we look for:
If contact rate is bad across the board, your phone numbers are flagged as spam. Fix that first.
If quote rate is consistently low after 90 days and you've already worked on objection handling, the intent is probably too low. Kill it or renegotiate pricing.
If close rate is bad but everything else is good, look at competitiveness and targeting before you kill anything.
And always, always look at ROI. A campaign with "bad" metrics can still print money if the premium is high enough.
One of our clients was running four different campaigns. All were performing okay, but he was spreading his budget evenly across all of them.
When we did a deep analysis, we found that the niche campaign we created a few weeks earlier was crushing it. Contact rate was 8 points higher than his standard campaigns. Quote rate was up 12 points. Close rate was nearly double.
Based on that data, we helped him increase bids on the niche campaign to get more volume and pulled back spend on the lower-performing campaigns.
Within 60 days, his overall cost per sale dropped by 23% and his ROI jumped from 180% to 287%. Same budget, just reallocated based on what the data showed.
That's the power of actually tracking your campaigns instead of guessing.
Here's how to get started tracking your marketing campaigns properly:
Set up your tracking system - Pick a tool. Even a spreadsheet works. Just start collecting data on cost per lead, contact rate, quote rate, close rate, and ROI for each campaign.
Tag everything in your CRM - Make sure every lead that comes in has a campaign source tag. You can't analyze what you can't identify.
Give campaigns 90 days - Stop changing things every week. Let campaigns run for at least 90 days unless something is catastrophically broken.
Look at metrics together, not alone - Don't make decisions based on one number. Look at the full picture.
Fix your data quality first - Make sure your team is marking things correctly. Bad data means bad decisions.
Review weekly, decide monthly - Look at your dashboards every week to spot problems early, but make major changes on a 30 or 90-day basis.
Compare campaigns to each other - Don't just look at one campaign. Compare them to find patterns. If contact rate is down across the board, it's not the campaigns.
Track individual rep performance by source - Know which reps do well with which types of leads. Use that info for training and assignments.
Calculate actual ROI, not just cost per sale - A high cost per sale can still be profitable if revenue is high.
Ask why, not just what - When you see bad numbers, dig into the root cause before you kill the campaign.
Look, I get it. You didn't start an insurance agency to become a data analyst.
At Next Call Club, we help agencies get a handle on their marketing campaigns. We build custom dashboards, do monthly optimization reviews, and help you figure out where your marketing dollars should actually go.
If you're tired of guessing which campaigns work and want to start making decisions based on real data, let's talk.
Because at the end of the day, you can't improve what you don't measure. And you can't measure what you don't track.
Start tracking today. Your bank account will thank you.