Ask ten PI marketing directors which metric they use to measure lead generation performance and you'll get ten different answers. Cost per lead. Conversion rate. Monthly case volume. Vendor-reported quality scores. None of them are wrong, exactly — but most of them are incomplete. And when you're spending $200,000 a month across six vendors, incomplete metrics are expensive.
This article breaks down the metrics that actually matter for measuring lead generation performance in a personal injury firm — ranked by how directly they connect to outcomes that affect your bottom line. Some will be familiar. A few will reframe the way you think about vendors you've been working with for years.
The Problem With How Most Firms Measure Lead Gen
The default measurement framework for most PI firms is built around inputs, not outcomes. You track cost per lead because vendors give you that number. You track monthly lead volume because it's easy to count. You might track a rough conversion rate if your intake team is disciplined about disposition codes.
None of that tells you what you actually need to know: which vendors are producing signed cases at an acceptable cost, and which are burning budget. The gap between cost per lead and cost per signed case can be dramatic — it's not uncommon for the cheapest lead source to produce the most expensive cases, once you factor in conversion rates and case quality.
The fix isn't more data. It's the right metrics, measured the right way, connected to the right outcomes.
Tier 1: The Metrics That Drive Budget Decisions
These are the metrics that should govern how you allocate spend across vendors. If you don't have reliable data on these, your budget decisions are guesswork.
Cost Per Signed Case by Vendor
This is the number. Not cost per lead — cost per signed case. It accounts for the full funnel: how much you spent with a vendor, divided by how many cases your intake team actually signed from that vendor's leads. RevenueScale's cost per case tracking calculates this automatically across every vendor in your portfolio.
A vendor charging $150 per lead who converts at 8% costs you roughly $1,875 per signed case. A vendor charging $250 per lead who converts at 18% costs you roughly $1,389 per signed case. The second vendor is more expensive per lead and dramatically cheaper per case. You will never see this by looking at cost per lead alone.
Target range for most PI firms: $1,200 to $3,500 per signed case, depending on case type, market, and practice mix. Firms tracking this metric know their floor. Firms that aren't are paying whatever vendors charge and hoping.
Lead-to-Case Conversion Rate by Source
Conversion rate answers the quality question that volume never can. Two vendors each send you 100 leads. One produces 12 signed cases. The other produces 4. The difference is not intake performance — it's lead quality at the source.
Track this number monthly per vendor. A healthy conversion rate for mass tort leads is different from a healthy conversion rate for auto accident leads. Establish benchmarks per case type, and flag vendors whose conversion rate is declining even if raw volume looks fine. Declining conversion rate is an early warning sign — usually six to eight weeks before it shows up as a cost problem.
Case Severity Distribution by Source
Not all signed cases are equal. A vendor who consistently sends soft-tissue-only cases at low severity is less valuable than a vendor who sends a mix that includes fractures, surgeries, and TBIs — even if both vendors produce the same case volume at the same cost per case.
Track the severity distribution of cases attributed to each vendor. Over time, you'll see patterns. Some vendors specialize in case types your firm handles well. Others send volume that looks good in the pipeline and disappoints at settlement. Case severity analyticsconnect intake quality to financial outcomes, and it's the metric most firms wish they'd been tracking two years earlier.
Tier 2: Diagnostic Metrics That Explain Tier 1
When your Tier 1 numbers move, these metrics tell you why.
Contact Rate by Source
What percentage of leads from each vendor does your intake team successfully reach? A vendor sending 100 leads with a 40% contact rate is effectively sending you 40 workable leads. Factor contact rate into your cost per signed case calculation and many vendors look dramatically different than their raw numbers suggest.
Low contact rate is often a lead freshness problem — leads that are sold multiple times or delivered hours after the prospect completed a form. It can also indicate a mismatch between how the vendor acquired the lead and what the prospect actually wants. Either way, contact rate is a fast signal that something is wrong upstream.
Rejection Rate by Source and Reason
When intake rejects a lead, why? Tracking rejection reasons by source gives you specific, actionable data you can take back to vendors. If 35% of leads from a specific vendor are being rejected because the liability situation doesn't support a case, that's a sourcing quality problem. If they're being rejected because of existing representation, that's a different problem with a different solution.
Vendors who see their rejection rate by reason tend to respond faster to quality concerns than vendors who only see an aggregate rejection number. It also protects you from the most common vendor counter-argument: “your intake team isn't working the leads properly.”
Speed-to-Contact and Speed-to-Sign
How long does it take your intake team to make first contact after a lead arrives? And once contact is made, how long before a retainer is signed? These numbers matter because lead quality degrades over time. A lead that reaches a competitor before your intake team calls is a lead you paid for and lost.
Track these metrics by source, not just firm-wide. Some vendors deliver leads with very short response windows — often because they're selling the same lead to multiple firms simultaneously. Knowing this shapes your intake staffing decisions.
Tier 3: Outcome Metrics That Close the Loop
These take longer to measure because PI cases take 6 to 18 months to settle, but they are the most financially meaningful metrics a PI firm can track.
Average Settlement Value by Vendor Source
A vendor who produces cases that settle at $85,000 on average is worth more than a vendor producing cases that settle at $42,000 — even if their cost per signed case is identical. Once you have 12 to 24 months of settlement data connected to marketing source, you can calculate true marketing ROI at the vendor level.
Most firms never reach this metric because they don't connect their marketing data to their settlement data. Building that connection — even imperfectly, even with manual inputs — is one of the highest-value improvements a PI marketing department can make.
Case Retention Rate by Source
What percentage of signed cases from each vendor make it to settlement without the client withdrawing or firing the firm? High withdrawal rates from a specific vendor are a quality signal that cost per signed case misses entirely. You want cases that stay signed.
Start Here: CPC + Conversion Rate
These two numbers, tracked monthly by vendor, immediately surface your worst-performing spend.
Add Diagnostics
Rejection reasons and contact rate explain why conversion looks the way it does.
Build Severity Tracking
Record severity at sign. This data compounds over time and predicts case value.
Connect to Settlements
The long game -- every month delayed is data you'll wish you had in two years.
Building Your Measurement Stack
You don't need all of these metrics on day one. The practical sequence most successful PI marketing teams follow:
- Start with conversion rate and cost per signed case. These two numbers, tracked monthly by vendor, will immediately surface your worst-performing spend.
- Add rejection reasons and contact rate. This gives you diagnostic tools to understand why conversion looks the way it does.
- Build toward case severity tracking. Work with your intake team to record severity at sign and disposition. This data compounds over time.
- Connect to settlement outcomes.This is the long game — but every month you delay is another month of data you'll wish you had in two years.
The firms running this measurement stack are making budget decisions their competitors can't make — because they're using data their competitors don't have. Cost per lead is a commodity metric that every vendor in the market can give you. Cost per signed case by vendor, tracked over 18 months with severity and settlement data attached, is a competitive advantage.
A Note on Vendor-Provided Metrics
Vendors often provide their own quality scores, contact rate metrics, and conversion benchmarks. Use these as context, not as source of truth. Vendor-reported data has an inherent incentive to look good. Your first-party data — what your intake system actually recorded — is the only number that matters for budget decisions.
When your data and a vendor's data tell different stories, lead with yours. That's not adversarial — it's how legitimate performance conversations happen. Good vendors welcome your data. They want to know how their leads are actually converting in your intake environment, because it helps them improve sourcing. Vendors who push back on your first-party data are a different problem.