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

Television is personal injury law's most visible advertising channel. “Have you been in an accident? Call us now.” That format has run in local markets for decades. Mid-sized PI firms routinely spend $30,000 to $80,000 per month on TV — local news adjacencies, cable runs, and increasingly OTT/streaming placements.

Yet most of those firms cannot answer a simple question: what does TV cost us per signed case?

The TV station delivers a media report. It shows gross rating points, estimated reach, and cost per thousand impressions. None of those numbers connect to the phone call that turned into a retained client. The attribution gap is wide, and most PI marketing directors fill it with the same answer: “TV is brand awareness.” That's often a polite way of saying, “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 budget 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 is that TV is a broadcast medium. There is no click. There is no UTM parameter. A viewer watches your 30-second spot during the local news and, three days later, searches your firm name on Google 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 report the following ranges. OTT/streaming typically leads on cost efficiency because targeting is more precise and viewers are self-selecting. Local news adjacency produces strong direct response (viewers call the number on screen) but at higher CPM rates. Cable daytime and prime carry more reach but lower per-spot intent.

These figures are directional — actual numbers vary by market size, creative quality, intake response speed, and firm brand recognition built over years of TV presence. The point is not to treat them as benchmarks but to illustrate that the range within TV is nearly as wide as the range across all channels. A firm spending $60,000 per month on TV with 70% on cable prime and 30% on 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 is built around short windows. Google Analytics defaults to 30-day lookbacks. Meta's view-through window is seven days. Those defaults are calibrated for channels where users click with immediate intent.

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 use 180-day windows 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 track the assignment in a simple log.

Free-text intake fields for TV.If your intake team types “TV,” “television,” “commercial,” or “saw you on TV” depending on who answers the call, 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.A common scenario: a prospect sees your TV commercial, forgets the number, and searches your firm name on Google two weeks later before calling. Last-click attribution gives Google full credit. You need intake questioning to surface the TV touchpoint — “How did you first hear about us?” rather than “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 the cases sign in February and March, the cases fall outside the window. Run TV cost-per-case calculations on 90-day periods minimum, 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 is that 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 argument is straightforward.

The second insight is where TV fits in your 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 either renegotiate the media buy, improve the creative, or evaluate whether the spend should shift to channels that more reliably clear your threshold.

TV attribution also has a portfolio effect that pure cost-per-case math misses. TV builds the brand awareness that makes your other channels more efficient. Firms that run consistent TV report higher contact rates on aggregator leads and higher conversion rates on branded search — because the prospect recognizes the firm name before they call. That halo effect is difficult 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 our estimated TV cost per case by format, and here is how it benchmarks against the rest of our 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.