How to Track Cost Per Case from TV Advertising for Personal Injury Firms

A PI firm spending $60,000 per month on TV just got their quarterly media report. It showed 215 gross rating points per week, strong reach in the 25–54 demo, and a frequency of 6.8. What it didn't show: how many signed cases came from TV, or what each one cost.

That report is not the exception. It's what every TV station delivers.

PI firms spending $30,000 to $80,000 per month on TV — local news adjacencies, cable dayparts, OTT pre-rolls — have no native connection between the broadcast schedule and the cases that sign. The media buyer calls it a strong flight. The marketing director calls it brand awareness. Both phrases mean the same thing: we can't measure it, so we don't try.

You can measure it. Not as precisely as Google Ads — but precisely enough to make allocation decisions on data rather than assumptions. Here's how.

Why TV's Own Reports Don't Tell You What You Need

TV stations and media buyers measure success in reach and frequency. A gross rating point (GRP) represents one percent of your target market reached once. A schedule with 200 GRPs per week sounds substantial — and may be — but GRPs have no relationship to whether a viewer called your firm, qualified, and signed a retainer.

The structural problem: TV is a broadcast medium. There is no click. No UTM parameter. A viewer watches your 30-second spot during the local news, then searches your firm name on Google three days later before calling. Google gets credit. TV gets nothing. That halo effect is real, and it means TV's true contribution is consistently undercounted when teams rely on last-click attribution alone.

The goal is not perfect TV attribution — it doesn't exist. The goal is directionally accurate attribution: enough signal to compare TV cost per case against your other channels and make allocation decisions that hold up in a budget review.

The Three TV Attribution Methods

Reliable TV attribution for PI firms combines three methods. Used together, they recover 55–70% of TV-attributed cases — enough to calculate a defensible cost-per-case number.

Cost Per Case by TV Format: What the Data Shows

Not all TV placements perform equally. Local news adjacency, cable daytime, cable prime, and OTT/streaming each produce different cost-per-case outcomes — and lumping them into a single “TV budget” line hides the variation.

PI firms with proper TV attribution consistently find OTT/streaming at the top of the efficiency ranking. Targeting is more precise, viewers are self-selecting, and the second-screen behavior makes URL-based attribution possible. Local news adjacency drives strong direct response — viewers call the number on screen — but CPM rates run higher. Cable daytime and prime deliver broad reach with lower per-spot conversion intent.

These figures are directional. Actual numbers vary by market size, creative quality, intake response speed, and the brand recognition your firm has built through years of TV presence. The point is not to use them as benchmarks but to illustrate that the cost range within TV is nearly as wide as the range across all channels. A firm with 70% of budget in cable prime and 30% in OTT is running a very different cost structure than one with the inverse allocation.

The 90-Day Attribution Window: Why It Matters for TV

Digital attribution defaults are built for channels with immediate intent. Google Analytics uses 30-day lookbacks. Meta's view-through window is seven days. Neither is calibrated for TV.

TV does not work that way. A viewer who sees your commercial during Monday night football may not need legal help that week. They may get into an accident six weeks later and remember the firm name they saw repeatedly on TV for months. Standard 30-day attribution windows systematically undercount TV performance.

PI firms that run TV continuously report that 40–50% of TV-attributed signed cases come from prospects who first encountered the creative more than 30 days before they called. A 90-day window is the minimum for TV. For firms with high brand saturation in a market, some attribution analysts extend to 180 days for long-running creative.

TV Attribution Pitfalls That Corrupt the Data

Reusing tracking numbers across placements.If the same CallRail number appears in both your 6 AM news spot and your cable prime run, you lose placement-level visibility. Assign one number per creative rotation and log the assignment.

Free-text intake fields for TV.If your intake team types “TV,” “television,” “commercial,” or “saw you on TV” depending on who answers, you can't aggregate the data reliably. A forced-choice dropdown eliminates spelling variation and makes the source field queryable.

Attributing TV credit to the last digital touch.The scenario is common: a prospect sees your TV commercial, forgets the tracking number, and searches your firm name on Google two weeks later. Last-click gives Google full credit. Intake questioning surfaces the real touchpoint — ask “How did you first hear about us?” not “How did you find our number today?”

Measuring TV against 30-day spend windows.If your attribution window is 30 days but your TV flight ran in January and cases sign in February and March, those cases fall outside the window. Run TV cost-per-case calculations on 90-day periods, and align the spend period with the signing period.

What to Do Once You Have TV Cost Per Case Data

The first insight most PI firms get: OTT/streaming outperforms cable prime on cost per case — often by a significant margin — but receives a fraction of the budget. If OTT is running at $2,800 per case and cable prime is running at $6,200, the reallocation case writes itself.

The second is where TV fits in your channel portfolio. If TV is producing signed cases at $4,000 to $5,000 and your acceptable threshold is $5,500, TV is earning its budget. If TV is running above threshold across all formats, that's a signal to renegotiate the media buy, refresh the creative, or shift spend toward channels that more reliably clear your number.

TV attribution also has a portfolio effect that pure cost-per-case math misses. TV builds the brand recognition that makes your other channels more efficient. Firms running consistent TV report higher contact rates on aggregator leads and higher conversion on branded search — because the prospect recognizes the firm name before they call. That halo effect is hard to quantify precisely, but geo-lift analysis gives you a directional read on it.

The goal is not to hold TV to the same attribution standard as a Google Ads search campaign. The goal is to move from “we can't measure TV” to “here is TV cost per case by format, and here is how it benchmarks against the rest of the portfolio.” That shift — from faith-based to data-informed — is what turns TV from a line item into a managed investment.

If you want to see what TV attribution looks like inside a connected multi-channel attribution dashboard alongside your digital channels, aggregators, and referrals, book a demo. We'll walk through how the data connects and show you what cost per case by channel looks like when every source — including TV — is in the same view.