TV advertising is one of the most expensive and most debated line items in a PI firm's marketing budget. Spend $50,000 per month on cable and broadcast, and you'll get calls. Whether those calls translate into signed cases at an economics that justifies the spend — that's a question most PI firms genuinely cannot answer.
This guide breaks down how to measure the actual ROI of TV leads for a personal injury firm: what data you need, why TV measurement is structurally harder than digital, and what a reliable cost per case calculation looks like for broadcast spend.
Why TV ROI Is So Hard to Measure Accurately
Digital channels have built-in attribution infrastructure. A Google Ads click carries UTM parameters. An LSA lead comes with a timestamp and phone number from Google's system. A Facebook ad generates a pixel event. TV has none of that. A viewer sees your commercial, picks up their phone, and calls — or searches your name on Google — hours or even days later. That gap creates an attribution problem that most firms never fully solve.
The result: TV spend either gets full credit for every organic or brand search that followed a commercial airing, or it gets no credit at all because no one can prove the connection. Both errors distort your cost per case calculation significantly.
The Tools TV Advertisers Actually Use for Attribution
Despite the inherent difficulty, there are practical approaches to TV attribution that move you from guessing to data-informed decisions. None of them are perfect. Used together, they tell a reasonable story.
Dedicated Phone Numbers by Market and Daypart
Assign unique trackable phone numbers to your TV campaigns — ideally different numbers by market (if you run multi-market TV) and by daypart (morning drive, afternoon, prime time, late night). When calls come in on those numbers, you can attribute them directly to TV with high confidence. Services like CallRail integrate with most PI intake systems and make this setup straightforward.
The limitation: viewers who see your commercial but call your main number, visit your website, or find you on Google before calling will not be captured on the TV-specific line. Expect your tracked TV attribution to undercount actual TV-influenced leads by 20–40%.
Geo-Lift and Time-Lift Analysis
Run TV in one market and not another for 60–90 days. Compare overall call volume and case intake between the two markets. The difference in intake — controlling for other variables — gives you a rough lift estimate attributable to TV. This is imperfect but directionally useful, especially for firms entering a new market or evaluating whether to pull back on TV spend.
Intake Source Questioning
Train your intake team to ask every caller, “How did you hear about us?” and record the answer as a source field in your intake system. Many TV-influenced callers will say “I saw your commercial” even when they called your main number. This data is imprecise but adds signal. Firms that consistently capture this data reduce their TV attribution uncertainty significantly over time.
Estimated percentage of TV-influenced leads captured by each attribution approach
Building Your TV Cost Per Case Calculation
With attribution data in hand — however imperfect — here is how to build a working TV cost per case:
- Total TV spend (rolling 90 days): Include media buy, production amortized over the run, and any agency fees. Many firms undercount TV cost by excluding production costs that belong in the attribution window.
- TV-attributed leads: Pull calls from your dedicated TV tracking numbers, plus intake source responses indicating TV, plus a reasonable estimate for untracked TV influence based on your lift analysis.
- Signed cases from TV-attributed leads: Of those leads, how many became signed clients? Pull from your case management or intake system, filtered by TV source codes.
- TV cost per case: Total TV spend ÷ signed cases.
A firm spending $60,000 per month on TV (including production) that generates 40 signed cases attributed to TV is running at $1,500 cost per case — excellent if your case portfolio includes moderate- to high-severity cases. A firm spending the same amount for 12 signed cases is at $5,000 per case — a number that demands either a strategy change or a sharper attribution methodology before drawing conclusions.
Strong TV Performance
$1,500
$60K spend / 40 signed cases
Weak TV Performance
$5,000
$60K spend / 12 signed cases
The 6–18 Month Settlement Lag Complicates TV ROI Even Further
Cost per signed case is a leading indicator of TV ROI, but the ultimate measure is cost per settled case — which requires waiting out the PI settlement timeline. For firms spending heavily on TV, the 6–18 month lag between signing a case and receiving a settlement means that TV's true ROI will not be clear for 12–24 months after a campaign runs.
This is not a reason to avoid TV measurement — it's a reason to start measuring now, so you have a reliable historical dataset when the settlement data comes in. Firms that wait until they want to evaluate TV before they start connecting data will have years of spend they cannot evaluate.
Comparing TV Cost Per Case to Your Digital Channels
TV ROI only means something in comparison. Here is the comparison framework that gives you an honest cross-channel view:
- Cost per signed case: TV vs. LSA vs. aggregators vs. SEO. Is TV producing cases at a competitive cost, or is it your most expensive channel?
- Case severity distribution: TV advertising historically reaches a broader demographic and often captures higher-severity cases — catastrophic injuries, wrongful death — that higher-intent digital searches may not generate. If TV cases settle at higher average values, a higher cost per case may still represent better ROI.
- Brand lift effect:TV creates awareness that benefits your entire acquisition strategy. Your Google Ads quality score improves. Your LSA call volume increases. Branded search traffic grows. Some of these downstream effects belong in TV's ROI calculation, even if they are difficult to quantify precisely.
| Metric | TV | Google LSA | SEO | Aggregators | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost Per Signed Case | $1,500–$5,000 | $800–$2,500 | $400–$1,200 | $1,200–$4,000 | |
| Avg. Case Severity | Higher | Medium | Medium | Lower | |
| Attribution Difficulty | High | Low | Medium | Low | |
| Brand Lift Effect | Significant | Minimal | Moderate | None |
Signs Your TV Spend Is Not Worth It (With Numbers)
TV may not be delivering for your firm if:
- TV cost per case is more than 2x your best-performing digital channel, with no meaningful difference in case severity.
- You cannot attribute more than 30% of your TV spend to specific cases — meaning your attribution infrastructure is too weak to make data-driven TV decisions at all.
- Your TV-attributed leads have rejection rates above 35%, suggesting the commercial is generating curiosity calls rather than qualified prospects.
- You've been running the same creative for 12+ months with no performance data to justify the creative approach.
Signs TV Is Worth Scaling (With Numbers)
TV is likely worth maintaining or increasing if:
- TV cost per case is within 20–30% of your digital average, and TV cases have higher average expected settlement values.
- Your branded Google search volume has increased measurably since launching TV — indicating the brand awareness effect is real and quantifiable.
- Your intake team reports that TV callers tend to be further along in their decision — they've already decided to hire an attorney and are calling to find one, not calling to explore options.
What This Requires From Your Data Infrastructure
Measuring TV ROI accurately requires intake source tracking, dedicated tracking numbers, and a system that connects lead source codes to case outcomes over time. Most PI firms that run TV spend cannot produce a reliable cost per case for the channel because the data infrastructure to connect spend to outcomes is not in place.
Building that infrastructure does not require a technology overhaul. It requires consistent source coding at intake, a tracking number setup that takes a day to configure, and a reporting workflow that compares TV-attributed cases to TV spend on a rolling 90-day basis.
If you want to see what TV attribution and cost per case measurement looks like inside a revenue intelligence platform — alongside every other channel you run — RevenueScale's multi-channel attribution dashboard shows how firms spending $50,000–$200,000 per month on TV connect that spend to signed cases and settlements.
Related guide:For the foundational guide that frames every post in this cluster, seeRevenue Intelligence for Personal Injury Law Firms: The Definitive Guide — the category thesis, the Four Intelligence Layers, and the path to Level 3 maturity.