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

Ask a PI marketing director what their OTT spend costs per signed case and you will usually get one of two answers: a blank stare, or a reach figure pulled from the streaming platform's dashboard. Neither is a cost per case. Neither belongs on the same dashboard as your Google Ads, Facebook, and lead aggregator numbers.

OTT and connected TV advertising—ads served through Hulu, Peacock, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Pluto TV, and dozens of other streaming platforms—has become a meaningful line item for PI firms at virtually every spend level. A mid-sized firm running $200K per month in lead generation may be allocating $15K–$40K of that to streaming video. But because CTV doesn't produce a click, most firms park it in the “brand awareness” bucket alongside traditional TV and exempt it from cost-per-case accountability.

That exemption is costing you. CTV produces attributable cases. The attribution is harder than paid search, but it is achievable with three methods used in combination. This guide walks through each one and shows you how to calculate a cost-per-case number for streaming video that belongs on the same dashboard as every other source you manage.

Why CTV Attribution Is Different from Both Traditional TV and Digital

Traditional TV attribution is hard because impressions are broadcast over the air with no device-level data. Digital attribution is relatively easy because every click creates a logged event your CRM can capture. CTV sits in an uncomfortable middle ground: it is served digitally, which means impressions are logged by device and household, but it does not create a click. A prospect who sees your 30-second spot before a Hulu documentary about wrongful death cases does not tap anything. They remember your name. Two days later, when they are ready to call, they search “PI attorney near me” and your CRM logs it as branded search.

This is the attribution gap that makes CTV look like a pure brand play when it is actually a case-generating channel with measurable outcomes. Closing that gap requires layering three methods: platform-level IP attribution, dedicated landing pages, and structured intake questioning. No single method captures everything. Together, they recover enough to calculate a defensible cost-per-case number.

Method 1: Platform Pixel and IP-Level Attribution

Every major CTV buying platform—The Trade Desk, Basis Technologies, Hulu's direct buy, and others—offers an attribution product that connects ad exposure to website conversions. They use two mechanisms: device graph matching and IP-based attribution.

Device graph matching works like this: a user sees your CTV ad on their Roku. The platform logs the device identifier. When that same user visits your website on their phone an hour later, the platform probabilistically matches the device identifiers at the household level and credits the CTV exposure.

IP-based attribution is simpler: most households have a consistent IP address. When your intake form fires a conversion event from an IP that also received a CTV impression in the prior 30 days, the platform flags it as a CTV-attributed conversion.

To set this up, ask your CTV vendor to install a conversion pixel on your intake form confirmation page and your contact form thank-you page. Every time a prospect who received a CTV impression subsequently submits a form, the platform records it. This method does not capture phone calls—which represent the majority of PI contacts—but it gives you form submission attribution, typically 20–35% of total leads. It is your most automated attribution layer and the one to implement first.

Method 2: Dedicated Landing Pages with UTM-Tagged Creative

Many CTV creatives end with a URL displayed on screen— “Learn more at AccidentAttorneys.com” or a market-specific subdomain. If yours does, that URL is an attribution opportunity you may be leaving untracked.

Configure a dedicated landing page URL for each CTV campaign or platform. Examples: yourlawfirm.com/streaming for a broad CTV buy, or yourlawfirm.com/hulu for a platform-specific creative. Append UTM parameters to the URL that appear in every CTV placement:?utm_source=ctv&utm_medium=streaming&utm_campaign=hulu_q2

When a prospect sees your ad, types that URL, and fills out a form, your CRM captures the CTV source automatically. The reality is that most streaming viewers who want to contact you will search your firm name rather than type a URL from an ad they saw on their television. Dedicated landing pages typically capture 10–20% of CTV-attributed contacts—not the majority, but a clean, reliable data layer that requires no intake training to maintain.

Method 3: Structured Intake Questioning

The majority of your CTV-attributed cases will arrive as phone calls. A prospect sees your ad, goes to sleep, remembers your firm three days later when their car insurance adjuster calls, and dials your intake line. Your CRM logs it as unknown or direct. That case never gets credited to CTV.

Structured intake questioning is the only method that captures these cases. Add CTV-specific options to your intake source dropdown:

• Streaming TV / Hulu
• Streaming TV / Peacock
• Streaming TV / Roku or Fire TV
• Streaming TV / YouTube TV
• Streaming TV / Other

Train intake specialists to ask the source question on every call: “Before you contacted us, how did you first hear about our firm?” When a caller says “I saw you on TV” or “I saw an ad online,” prompt them: “Was it on a streaming service like Hulu or Peacock, or was it regular cable TV?” That one follow-up question separates CTV-attributed cases from traditional TV. Without it, all video ad spend gets lumped into a single TV bucket and you lose the ability to compare them on cost per case.

This method recovers 40–60% of CTV-attributed cases that IP matching and dedicated landing pages miss. Combined, all three methods give you a recovery rate in the 55–70% range—which is enough to calculate a cost-per-case number you can act on.

What Cost Per Case from OTT/CTV Actually Looks Like

CTV cost per case varies more than most digital channels because CPM rates span a wide range and conversion rates depend heavily on intake quality and market competition. Premium streaming inventory on Hulu and Peacock carries CPMs of $15–$35. Long-tail FAST channels (Pluto, Tubi, free Roku channels) run $5–$14 CPM. YouTube TV and connected YouTube run $10–$22 CPM with strong household income and demographic targeting.

For a PI firm spending $20K per month across a blended CTV buy and converting at a 3–5% signed case rate from all CTV-attributed contacts, cost per signed case typically lands between $2,500 and $5,500 depending on market size, intake conversion, and targeting precision. That range makes CTV competitive with traditional broadcast TV in most markets—and often better, because CTV allows household-level targeting by age, income bracket, and geography that broadcast cannot match.

How CTV Compares to Traditional TV and Your Other Channels

The most valuable output of CTV attribution is not the absolute cost per case—it is the relative comparison to every other channel in your portfolio. Once CTV has a cost-per-case number, it belongs on the same dashboard as Google Ads, Facebook, radio, traditional TV, and your lead aggregators. That comparison reveals whether your streaming investment is producing cases at a rate that justifies its spend share.

For most PI firms in competitive markets, CTV lands between branded Google Search (typically lower cost per case) and traditional broadcast TV (typically higher). It outperforms traditional TV for two reasons: household-level demographic targeting reduces waste, and the attribution infrastructure makes performance visible rather than invisible. A traditional TV spend that is “brand awareness” by default cannot be optimized. A CTV spend with cost-per-case data attached can be.

If your CTV cost per case comes in at $4,000 and your Google Ads cost per case is $2,800, that is not a reason to cut CTV. It is the data you need to have a real budget allocation conversation. CTV builds recall that makes your paid search ads more effective when a prospect who saw your streaming spot later searches your name. The cost-per-case number captures the direct conversions. The brand lift is the part that makes your other channels work harder.

RevenueScale's Source Intelligence layer consolidates CTV attribution data—platform pixel conversions, UTM-tagged form submissions, and intake-tagged phone cases—into a single cost-per-case view alongside your digital and offline channels. That unified view is what makes CTV budget decisions as data-driven as any other line in your marketing spend.

Start with One Platform, Then Build Out

If you are running CTV across multiple platforms and have no attribution infrastructure, start with your highest-spend platform. Install the conversion pixel this week. Add the streaming TV options to your intake dropdown in the same conversation. Run the setup for 30 days and pull your first attributed case count.

That first number will be incomplete—you are not yet recovering phone cases that came from intake questioning because the tags are new. By day 60, you will have a cleaner picture. By day 90, you have enough data to calculate a cost-per-case number that you can put on the same slide as your Google and Facebook performance.

The PI firms spending $20K–$50K per month on streaming ads without attribution are making that decision blind. Every month that CTV operates as a brand-awareness exemption is a month your managing partner cannot see whether that line is earning its budget. The infrastructure to fix that takes less than a week to build. The data it produces is worth far more than the time it takes to set up.

If you want to see what a full-channel cost-per-case view looks like when CTV is on the same dashboard as every other source you manage, book a demo and we will walk you through how RevenueScale connects your streaming ad spend to signed cases alongside your digital, paid, and offline channels.