Insurance Google Ads Clicks Cost $31.22 on Average vs $10.82 Across Industries

An insurance agent sets up a Google Ads campaign for car insurance quotes. The price on screen for "car insurance quotes" is $156.95 a click, and "auto insurance quotes" is $180.17. One click, from one person who may or may not buy a policy, costs as much as a nice dinner out.

Cost per click, or CPC, is what an advertiser pays each time someone clicks its ad, whether or not that person buys. It decides how many potential customers a monthly budget reaches. In insurance, where national carriers, comparison sites and local agents all bid for the same shoppers, the price of a quote search can decide whether paid search works at all for a smaller agency.

A click on an insurance keyword costs $31.22 on average, 2.9 times the $10.82 average across 18,477 keywords in 23 industries. Only personal injury law costs more. The typical insurance keyword is cheaper, at $17.08, but the quote searches that bring in new policyholders cost many times that.

In September 2026 we collected Google Ads Keyword Planner prices for insurance keywords, each searched at least 2,900 times a month in the US, and analyzed the 993 insurance keywords with a price above zero. For those we calculated the average, median and spread of cost per click and compared them with 18,477 keywords across 23 industries. We also collected state-level prices for the 25 largest states and Microsoft Ads prices for the 863 keywords priced on both platforms.

Cost per click is Google's estimate of the average price an advertiser pays for one click on an ad shown for that search. The median is the middle keyword: half cost less, half cost more. The volume-weighted average counts each keyword by how often it is searched. Each state is compared with the national price of the same keywords, so its percentage shows how much more or less a local agency pays for identical searches.

Insurance ranks 2nd of 23 industries by average cost per click, behind personal injury law. Half of insurance keywords cost $17.08 or less, and the middle half cost between $10.69 and $36.33. 78% cost $10 or more, and the most common price band is $10 to $20, holding 345 keywords.

Weighted by how often each keyword is searched, the average rises to $36.45, because the most searched quote terms are also among the priciest. "car insurance quotes", searched 673,000 times a month, costs $156.95 a click. Brand searches are the cheap exception: "geico", the biggest insurance keyword at 2,240,000 searches a month, costs $15.66.

The most expensive 10% of insurance keywords cost $83.46 or more, and quote searches fill the top of the list. "auto insurance quotes florida" costs $243.16 a click, "home and auto insurance quote" $202.77 and "car insurance florida" $197.18.

A quote search comes from someone ready to switch or buy, and a new policyholder can stay for years, so carriers bid heavily for them. State names push prices higher still: Florida and Texas searches appear three times in the top four. Bundled home and auto searches are also near the top, because a bundle wins two policies at once.

Location changes the price of the same search. Among the 25 largest states, Massachusetts is the most expensive for insurance clicks at $39.74 on average, 23% above the national price of the same keywords, followed by Colorado at $38.15 (19% above) and Florida at $36.03 (14% above). California is the cheapest at $24.06, 23% below.

Microsoft Ads, which shows ads on Bing, is much cheaper for the same searches. For the 863 insurance keywords priced on both platforms, a Microsoft Ads click costs $14.45 on average against $32.57 on Google Ads, 56% less. Insurance demand is steady through the year, with 1.2 times as many searches in the peak month, March 2026, as in the lowest, July 2026.

Local agents should avoid broad national quote terms, where they bid against carriers with far larger budgets, and focus on city and state phrases where they are licensed. Those still cost money, but they match the searcher to someone who can actually write the policy, and the local agent's office, reviews and phone number become an advantage.

Set bids by state, not one national bid. A Massachusetts or Florida click costs well above the national price, while California and New York cost less, so the same budget buys very different numbers of quotes in each. Then copy your best campaigns to Microsoft Ads, where the same insurance searches cost less than half as much. A google ads agency such as Suff Digital builds insurance campaigns around state-level prices and cost per quote, not cost per click.

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