How Insurance Lead Vendors Still Collect Restricted Information

The Meta Special Ad Category. Can you compliantly ask for zip code and other information? And if the answer is no, how are lead vendors currently getting away with asking for that information off of Meta platforms? And are there ways that you can compliantly do it as well? Well, that's exactly what we're going to be talking about in today's video. I want to demystify the tech setup whenever it comes to Meta ads, especially whenever it comes to the Meta Special Ad Category. I'm going to demystify these strategies that I currently see lead vendors implementing, whether I agree with them or not. And then I'm going to share with you the actual compliant way that if you have your heart set on, I want to ask for zip code, I want to ask for age, I want to ask for birthday, the technically compliant way that you are able to do that. And then also if that's even the right decision for you. So if you're ready, let's dive in. We are definitely going to be talking about the lead vendor strategy, plus we're going to be looking at some real examples. But before we dive into that, there's 2 little things that I want to touch on because it's going to help make everything make sense. The first, we're going to talk briefly about compliancy, and then second, we're going to talk briefly about the tech setup. I'm going to completely demystify this pixel thing, this tracking thing, this standard event thing, and it's going to fully make sense. Now, whenever it comes to compliancy, let's talk briefly about what you can and cannot collect from a user. Now, if you want the Full video, which you absolutely should know these rules like the back of your hand. I have an entire video that is on the current compliancy rules, but in what we're talking about today, I wanna outright talk about things like the zip code or asking for someone's age or birthday. Now, when it comes to the ad, the information that we are allowed or not allowed to collect from the user, I can tell you with full confidence, it is not compliant to ask for the zip code. It is not compliant to ask for their age. It's not. I can tell you that because I have gone back and forth with many Meta reps. I've seen that the lead vendors are asking for zip codes, right? I am nosy, nosy, always seeing what's happening in this industry to stay on top of things. And so I have reached out to Meta, and I'll be honest with you, a couple of months ago I had a Meta rep tell me, yes, technically you can, and on a lead form you can ask for it as long as you add it in as a custom question. I ran it on a test account. I ran it under 2 different Medicare ad campaigns. I asked for the zip code. I didn't get flagged. I then went and told everyone in my community, the agents enrolled in my course, I said, here's the information that I've been given. Go for it. Let's see what happens. And very quickly, I had 2 agents come back to me that had their ads rejected because it had picked up on, on the form that they had asked for zip code. And that's not compliant. In my experience, I never want to steer you away, but in my experience, you're not going to get your ad account completely shut down for making one mistake and one rejected ad. So if you want to take the risk, because I had other agents that haven't been flagged yet with it, if you want to take the risk, then we can make grown-up decisions here. And I would say you could try it once, but the algorithm is so on top of it, you're most likely not going to be able to run ads that have the zip code. So I say just accept that. We're going to talk about later technically how you could strategically do that compliantly. And then even if that's the right decision for you, but again, if you want to know more all about the compliancy, then check out the video that I have linked below. Now let's briefly talk about kind of the tech setup that you need whenever you're running ads and when it comes to collecting user information. So when we are running lead ads on Meta, you've got 2 different options. Number one, you can use the Meta lead form, or number 2, you can use your own website and send traffic there. Now I like to say if you are brand new to running ads, you Absolutely should be taking advantage of Meta Lead Forms. Look, there's so many different reasons. First of all, it's the easiest setup. It's mobile friendly. You don't have to worry about optimizing for different devices. It's something that people are familiar with. And then on top of that, there's so many different quality control filters that you can implement. So lead forms are not what they used to be because we can ask for SMS verification. We can even have that open in Messenger chat so we can speak to them. We can have a follow-up page that is custom to what we want them to do, whether that's call us or. Or schedule and so on. We can add conditional logic, custom questions, and I could go on. I'm a fan of lead forms for most insurance ads, but the truth is whenever you start running ads to something that requires more from the user, so I'm going to say like a consultation, especially outside of AEP, or if we are talking about a webinar, especially whenever it comes to an in-person event, people often need a little bit more context and they need to feel like the trust is being built up a little bit. And that's when I would say you absolutely to start using landing pages. Now, if you're interested in what makes a really strong landing page to run ads from, I have an entire video that breaks that down because it is critical that you don't just throw any landing page up there because not everything is made to convert cold traffic. So brand new people that have never heard from you off of Meta platforms. But when you do decide to use a website, let's talk about, let's demystify right now the, the, the pixel, or now Meta is starting to call it the dataset, right? So let's kind of demystify how this whole tracking things work. So you are given, you, you actually create in your ad account, you are given a pixel, um, that is unique to your ad account and that is attached to everything that you have going on in your ad account. You then take that pixel and you install it across every single page of your entire website. Okay? So your entire website has this pixel that is firing anytime someone lands there. And what that pixel essentially does is it tells Meta what people are doing on your website. Now, the tracking isn't as robust as it used to be due to certain privacy laws, which is why Meta really started pushing in about 2020 through 2022. Meta really started upping their game when it came to their lead form. But once someone lands on your website, the pixel's going to be firing, right? So now we create a landing page. page that we are asking people for information. So we're like, hi, we want you to complete this information so we can pluck you off the platform and pop you into our CRM, right? And whenever someone completes this page, so they say, my name is this, whether they're requesting a consult, after they click that enter button, the next thing that happens is they open up a page that we refer to in the industry. Pretty much everyone says it's the thank you page. So what is the page that the person is taken to? And that thank you page can say, thanks so much. Um, you know, you're all set. Go check your inbox, whatever it is. But this is the page that they end up on. Now, technically, because we have the pixel installed and you could be using a third-party landing page and you could install your pixel, all CRMs are compatible with allowing metadata to be able to integrate with it. So we've got a pixel that's firing and what that pixel tells Meta is, hey, someone landed on this website. Someone landed on it. However, when someone lands on the thank you page, that's when they become a lead. And there is something that is called a standard event. So a standard event is something that if I say it, everyone in the marketing industry knows. Google knows, Meta knows. So things like lead, they understand when you say we're optimizing for a lead that we are asking someone for their information, uh, so that way we can contact them. Complete registration. That means that it's probably going to be some sort of an event purchase. They bought something. You can even put in the amount of the value for the purchase. Video views, a link click, which just means that someone lands on this page. They just click on it. A landing page view, which means that they landed on the page and they allowed some of the content to load and absorbed it, and so on. There's lots of these different little standard events. Well, in this situation, we're gonna say we're going for a lead. It also could be completed registration. Then we are going to add a standard event. Let me grab a different color. We're going to add a standard event on the thank you page, and we are going to have it fire back to Meta that we have gotten a lead. So now Meta knows when someone lands on that page, they have become a lead for your website. Now, when we are running ads, so we've got all of our ads. Our ad's URL at the bottom of it is pointing to this page, the landing page. The landing page is only triggering an event like page view. That's it. Now on the metrics on the backend, we can see exactly what the link click-through rate was on that ad. We can see what the landing page's views actually were, the link clicks and so on. So we can figure out if this page is optimized for mobile or not. And then when someone converts, Meta goes, yep, we got a lead. So in the backend of the ads manager over here, it's very important that we are optimizing for conversions and we are choosing that conversion to be a lead on our website. So now that you kind of understand how, and I'm just going to throw this out there, a big mistake that I see is a lot of agents just run ads and they optimize for link clicks. If you optimize for link clicks, Meta is going to go, I'm going to go get you people that be clicking on some links. You're going to get a lot of link clicks. No one's going to convert. When you optimize for a lead, they understand we're looking for an individual that could be interested in what you have to offer and actually give you their information, and it completely changes the audience that they're going to be going after. Now that you understand the pixel setup, the optimization setup, and so on a little bit more clearly, let's get into the nitty-gritty of how lead vendors are actually still asking for zip codes. Now, we talked about there's the lead form way and there's the website way. So there are insurance ads that are allegedly being ran by lead vendor pages that are asking for zip code and other information. I'm going to show you some examples right now, and the way that they're getting away with it is— you're not going to like this answer, I don't like this answer— but they're not declaring a special ad category. They're not. I'm about to show you some ads inside of the Meta Ad Library That are clearly for insurance, and they're not getting flagged for the Meta Special Ad Category. Now, how is this possible? I don't know. I'm going to tell you right now, I am not technically a Meta Special Ad Category. I don't sell insurance. I'm never targeting people for insurance. I target insurance agents. I'm not a Meta Special Ad Category. However, because I use insurance language, I have been flagged for one since June of 2025. So it's been about a year now, and I have tried to get myself. Myself out of being categorized as that because I would like to be able to target insurance agents as a title, but I can't. I can't even tell you how many hours I've messed with Meta, and I've just come to realize my ads are so specific in their messaging. I still am able to run ads and I'm able to target insurance agents. So the content truly does find the user. I'm an example of that. However, let's go take a look at the Meta ad library. Now, in case you weren't aware, this is a resource that it is a disclosure of any ads that are currently being ran, or it's supposed to also be past ads that have been ran on Meta that we can go look at ads that are being ran. So we are looking at this very specific page. This is local area updates. In my opinion, it is allegedly a lead vendor page. Um, you, I'm about to do a video that we break down how you can spot a lead vendor page. So, Take it or leave it. When we go look them up in local ad, now you can see right here, dropdown all ads. I could choose financial products and services. They're not going to show up. So when I do all ads and I go try to look at this page's ads, and if you go to this page, you'll see there's like nothing on it. Um, you can go through and you can see right now we are primarily running P&C on this page, but you can go through like, here's a new auto insurance plan. There's probably something that is going to be, um, they also sometimes run Medicare whenever it's during This page also runs final expense quite regularly. But clearly, can we not see that this is an insurance ad? But we can see that it is not declared any type of special ad category. So, let's just randomly pick one. Residents get massively discounted rates through new auto coverage program. It's only $64.10. Well, I'm going to click on this ad right now. We're clicking on See Ads Details. Now, this one, see how there's not a button for me to click on to see? It's because they're using a Meta lead form, and we're going to click on more assets from this page, and we are going to see we can see their privacy policy, which I'm going to tell you right now. I'm going to open it in a new tab. I think that it has expired. Yeah, it's not even. How are we getting away with this? I I don't know. Okay, okay. We don't we don't want any type of spam getting on my computer from me clicking on this. But you can see this: the text on their lead form is enrollment in soon. Most Americans are not aware of this new car insurance program, which by the way, let me just say. Okay, if you're a PNC and you bought from this ad, what do you think they immediately want to talk to you about? They want to, they're like, my insurance should be $64. It literally says it on the ad. Anyway, let's scroll down. We can see that they ask for a lot of information. They ask for date of birth, not compliant. They ask for zip code, not compliant. Um, and that's what they're doing in this ad. They are not running as a special ad category. Now, I'm going to go to another lead vendor page. So let me click over. Or actually, this is just me doing a search for Medicare, and you can see that I've selected financial products and services, and you can see in ads that are being ran that are actually declaring it, that they have this little guy right here that shows the category, and this one does not. Why? I don't know, friends. I don't know. I know that there are lead vendors that are for sure spending hundreds of thousands of dollars So maybe the algorithm just hasn't gotten to crawling their page. Do I think that it'll crawl it eventually and it'll shut this down from being ran? I do, because the reason why the Meta special ad category exists is not to protect us, it's to protect Meta. It's because they were getting in trouble. So they are incentivized as a whole, as a business, to stop these practices from happening. But right now, if you click on a lead form, and it asks for zip code or date of birth, then they're not declaring a special ad category. And for whatever reason, they're getting away with it. Now let's talk about lead vendors that are running traffic to their website. Now here I have pulled up in the Meta special ad category. This is another page that in my opinion is allegedly a lead vendor page that primarily generates leads for— it's mainly IUL and And occasionally, I believe that I see annuity ads associated with this. The name of the page is Lifetime Wealth Society. Now, you can see that they have this ad. They do have it as the special ad category. When we go to see summary, we can see some of the different versions. Let's just look how great this ad. Unlock tax-free growth. Convert your retirement plans while offering your tax liability from your principal balance. Now, look, this is not what this video is about, but I want to tell you that especially for IULs. So many are going for the like very, very top of the funnel of people that are already ready to convert. They need to understand what unlock tax-free growth is. Your opportunity is on educating people that a product like this even exists and what the actual benefits are instead of just diving right into basically we have IULs basically. Okay, so you can see that this page we're running and we're able to click on the link and actually go to the page that they're running ads to. So I'm going to click on it. And then you can see that the very first question is asking if I have a minimum of $100,000, and then it's gonna be one question at a time. Now, something that I'm gonna show you that's really interesting about this, cuz then we're gonna talk about some of these different strategic approaches that they're using, is when I click over here on the little Meta Pixel helper, they actually don't even have a pixel installed on this page. Now, most lead vendor pages that I see, they go to some sort of GoHighLevel landing page. Um, I've seen lots of different ones. Most of them look very basic like this, and then they ask a series of questions. They're going to take the user kind of a page at a time, and then on the very last page, it says that an agent will contact you. Now, let's see. When I go over here and I look at the Meta Pixel Helper, the interesting thing is I don't see that there is a pixel even installed on this page. So interesting approach, and it's no wonder if this belongs to the lead vendor, then I believe it does. I think that these annuity leads or IUL leads, I think that Guys, I just paused the video and I went to who I think that this page is connected to to see how much the leads are. Annuity leads are $250. Retirement leads are $1,000. Whew. Okay. All right. So look, I'm literally flabbergasted right now, but okay, let's get back to this ad library and looking at what happens. Now, this is an interesting approach. This is definitely increasing what their cost per lead is. So let's kind of break down exactly what they are doing. Okay. So I decided to get petty with this one and I decided to go through each and every single page and they asked a series of questions. Interesting enough, there was zero meta pixel on any of the pages until I got to the thank you page. So after I did SMS verification, I then was taken to this page right here. Now I have blurred out the poor agent's name that is probably going to be sold my dummy lead. Sorry, friend, I'm on your side, but I had to know if my suspicions were right. And you can see based on this screenshot, they have the standard event lead on their thank you page. So let's kind of dive in and talk about exactly what their approach is, cuz it's sneaky. Okay, so here we are. We just talked about how the ideal way that we set up ads is we have the pixel that's populating through everything, and then we have that lead pixel on the very last page. So the way that this vendor or whoever they are, it has this set up is they've got their ad that has the link on it, right? And it is being sent to that very generic high-level page that has been created and it's got one question on it. Then the next page has one question on it. Then the next page has one question on it. We go through, um, until we get to one page that does have, it's got SMS on it so that way they can verify it's a phone number. So they land right here on the thank you page, which is what you just saw. Interesting enough, when we go through on this, there is no pixel, zero pixel, zero pixel, zero pixel, zero pixel. And on the thank you page, they not only have a pixel, but they have the standard event firing lead. So that means that on their ads, on the backend of their ads manager, they're optimizing for lead. And their sneaky snake approach right now is banking on the fact that because they don't have pixels on these pages, that hopefully Meta won't crawl them. Now Meta will always crawl all the very, very first page that shows up, so they say. Um, I have not had any experience that I can verify that I know it's crawled every single page. I also have not set up like sneaky snake ads like this before. Um, so long story short, this is the way that they are sneakily generating leads and asking for information. It's because they're banking on Meta not crawling right here. Now I'm gonna tell you this right now. I'm gonna tell you how you can compliantly do But this is important. I want you to know this. The way that they have this set up is not optimal for a mobile conversion, for a cold lead. Listen, the point of social media advertising, and this actually flows into what we're gonna talk about, how you can compliantly set it up if you even want to. The point of social media advertising is it is the very, very tippity top of your funnel, the very, very top of your PCB, your prospect conveyor belt of us building up a relationship and getting people to convert. It's the very top. So Facebook is not our bouncer. It is not the, you can't, you can't sit here with us. It, we don't have the bouncer there. It's like, hey, the more that comes in, the better. Then once we get them in our system, we can pre-qualify them, we can warm them up, we can continue to nurture them. Um, just did a deep research and it said that over 55% of final expense forms that are completed are not ready to convert for 90 days. So think about that whenever it comes to all of your marketing, whenever you have them in the system. We can now email them. So the purpose of social media is go get me leads, and I would like for them to be like, you know, within the right demographic, and let's get them off the platform for as cheap as possible. Now we can run retargeting ads if we want to continue to get in front of them on Meta platforms, or we can make the decision to market to them via text, via Messenger, via calling them, and so on. Them doing this approach, they are generating leads, and it's no wonder that they're selling them. for $250 to $880 a pop because they probably only have these marked up 2, maybe 3x what they're generating them for. You should be able to pluck leads even if it is for a high-profile product, like we're talking maybe long-term care or annuity or IUL, or we're talking about even estate planning and this type of thing. We should be able to get them off the platform by hitting on a pain point or showing a benefit and piquing curiosity for a much, much lower rate. So their prices are gonna Continue to go up and they're going to continue to put that on you, the consumer, and they're going to use all of this BS stuff that's like, well, we ask all of these questions. Just because a person sits there and completes the questions does not mean that they're qualified and does not mean that any trust has actually been built. Now, if you really, really want to ask for zip code, let's talk about how you can compliantly do that, or age, or anything else that you want. So in order to do this, we're not going to be doing it on a lead form. You are going to get flagged. I am I'm willing to bet that your account is going to get flagged. You're not going to skirt by like local area updates is so far. So we would need to have your website set up with a landing page that is optimized for mobile. And I would recommend that we have this where we ask for compliant information that is the basic information that we need. So probably like name, email, uh, you can ask for state. If you want to really get into the compliancy, I've got that full video on it. Maybe a qualifying question, right? Mm-hmm. And then on the next page, and after they complete this form, okay, so we've got a form on here with this stuff. After they complete this form, they are popped into your CRM or wherever you're collecting your leads. Okay, so it's a form. They're popped into your CRM the moment that they click submit on this page. But then on this page, we say to them, we're almost done. Done. Okay? And we say something like, in order for us to match you with the right plan, it's based on your zip code. Or before we talk, like, I wanna make sure that I have everything lined up, so I need this like little bit of extra information. Then you ask your extra questions. Whether they complete the questions or not, they're in your CRM and they're a lead. We're just trying to get that extra information. And then they go to, then they go to another page that is kind of like the thanks, you're all Okay, if they if they happen to give us this information, then with Meta we take our pixel and we install it across the pages. So we've got a pixel across all pages, and then what we do is we add the standard event to this page right here. So this is technically our lead event that we are optimizing for. Okay, so this is lead. So now when they complete this information and they come over here. They're a lead. They belong to us now. We now can compliantly ask them for anything that we want for, and now we're going to ask them for the information here and hope they end on this thank you page. Now on this thank you page, we'll probably we could create it's called a custom conversion. So we've talked about standard events. There's also something that's called a custom conversion, which is basically a standard event that we've decided to customize. So this page means something to us. It's like a bonus lead or it's a lead page two or something like that. You could create something. Something to track to see how many of those you actually get. But the point of this is when someone completes this page and they land here, they're a lead, we are compliant. Now we can ask them for whatever we want. Now, all of that being said, in my experience, it's not worth it to push for that extra information. Sure, you could set it up that way if you want to. That's really not that big of a deal. But what I'm trying to say is don't obsess over this information that we can't get immediately off the platform, because once we have them in your system, we can ask them for that information. And it's just a good reminder that social media lead generation is the tippity-toppity of the funnel. And listen, I always say like the best policies are bought, they're not sold. So whenever you can get some sort of education and some sort of trust with someone, then that's going to set you up to have a true conversation instead of having to go up all ready for some sort of a sale or high-pressure conversation with a lead. My friend, if you have made it this far, then I'm going to ask you to click that subscribe button. I am on a mission to expose the realities of what's happening in your industry. And when you do that, it helps support me and it costs you absolutely nothing. Now, what I want you to walk away with is social media advertising is a skillset. It is. It's one that you have to decide to learn, just like riding a bike. But here's the thing, you're more than capable of it. There are so many people in this industry that push you down and they profit off of you believing that this is too complicated for you to understand. It's not. You can absolutely understand it. And after looking at that annuity lead and thinking that someone is spending $250 for a lead that's generated from that ad, my friends, you can do so much better. Now, as always, if you have any questions, drop them below. And then something that's really kind of cool is the YouTube algorithm is really good at picking up exactly what video is going to be best for you to watch and what you're going to find the most interesting. So if you're ready to continue on this journey of taking control of your lead generation, then this is the video that is custom to you that the YouTube algorithm believes that you should be watching next. So I hope that I will see you in the next video.