Carriers and intended parents are not one marketing problem.
Carrier recruitment
Where carriers come from.
High volume, heavy disqualification, and the most restricted ad category on every major platform. Published figures put cost per lead at $120 to $300 and inquiry-to-qualified conversion at two to three percent, which means the expensive part is not the click.
- Meta: Facebook
- Meta: Instagram
- TikTok ads
- Third-party job boards
- Email campaigns
- SMS campaigns
- Cold calling
- Call dialer design
- Data feeding
Dialer design and data feeding. It is the difference between a dialer your team fights and a dialer that hands them the right person, in the right state, with the notes already on screen.
Intended parent demand
Where intended parents come from.
Lower volume, far higher intent, and a different economy entirely. Published figures put commercial search leads at $200 to $450 and organic at three to five times cheaper than paid, with search delivering close to half the traffic of the agencies that do it well. A single matched intended parent is reported at $30,000 to $60,000 in agency revenue.
There is a timing argument this year too. California’s SB 729 took effect on 1 January 2026, requiring large group policies to cover three egg retrievals with unlimited embryo transfers. More insured intended parents is a demand-side change, and the agencies already positioned in search and in clinic relationships will feel it first.
- Google ads, commercial intent
- SEO and content
- IVF clinic partnerships
- Fertility-adjacent podcasts
Fertility-adjacent podcast placement, and systematic IVF clinic partnership development. Both are slower than paid search and both compound, which is the opposite of an ad account.
Carrier recruitment is a volume and disqualification problem solved with creative velocity and a screening engine. Intended parent demand is a trust and intent problem solved with search, content and referral. A vendor running one playbook across both is quietly losing you money on whichever half they understand less.
Knowing which door is open, in which state, is most of the job.
TikTok
Restricts or prohibits surrogacy advertising in most markets, with no published certification path. Repeated rejections risk the account.
Meta
Requires certification, and can suspend an account that gets it wrong. This is where most agencies have already been burned.
Runs a healthcare-restricted approval, market by market, so an approval in one state proves nothing about the next.
Compliance management here is a standing operational cost, not a one-time setup. It is also the reason a generalist media buyer cannot simply be pointed at this category.
What a marketing agency does not do
Volume handed over the wall is not a result.
And the promise that makes this safe to buy: nothing operational about another agency leaves that agency. Not their creative, not their cost per application, not the channel working for them this month. If it is not already public, you will not hear it from us, and the same protection runs the other way.
This one does not require the audit. Plenty of agencies start here.