What Percentage of PI Firms Can Calculate Their True Marketing ROI?

The answer to this question is more uncomfortable than most PI marketing leaders expect — and more relevant to their daily work than most managing partners realize.

Ask a PI marketing director if they track marketing ROI and most will say yes. Ask them to show you a specific cost per signed case number by lead source, validated against actual case outcomes over the last 12 months, and the number who can actually produce that data drops sharply.

What “True Marketing ROI” Actually Requires

Before discussing the benchmark, it's worth defining what “true marketing ROI” actually means — because there are multiple definitions in use, and they produce very different numbers.

Level 1: Cost Per Lead Tracking

Most PI firms can do this. They know how much they're invoiced per lead from each vendor and can calculate a blended cost per lead. This requires nothing more than dividing a vendor invoice by the number of leads delivered. It's useful but incomplete.

Level 2: Cost Per Signed Case Tracking

This requires connecting lead volume from each source to signed case outcomes — which means tracking every lead from initial contact through intake and signing, attributed back to its source. A meaningful step up from cost per lead. Achievable manually at low lead volumes. Increasingly difficult with 5+ sources and hundreds of leads per month.

Level 3: Cost Per Case With Settlement Outcome

True marketing ROI for a PI firm requires connecting marketing spend not just to signed cases, but to settled cases — because a signed case that withdraws generates zero revenue and represents pure cost. This requires tracking a cohort of leads from initial contact all the way to case resolution, often 12 to 24 months later.

This is what separates firms that understand their actual marketing ROI from firms that think they do.

The Real Numbers: How Many PI Firms Can Calculate Each Level

Based on what we see across PI firms in our market:

• Level 1 (Cost Per Lead): Approximately 70% to 80% of PI firms with dedicated marketing functions track this at some level. Most vendor relationships produce invoices with per-lead pricing that makes this straightforward to calculate.
• Level 2 (Cost Per Signed Case): Roughly 20% to 30% of PI firms can calculate cost per signed case by source with confidence. Many more try, but attribution gaps, manual tracking errors, and data silo problems produce numbers that are systematically off.
• Level 3 (True ROI with Settlement Outcomes):Fewer than 10% of PI firms can calculate true marketing ROI that includes settlement outcomes, attribution back to the original lead source, and the 6 to 18 month timeline that connects marketing spend to actual revenue.

This is consistent with the broader finding that over 80% of PI firms still track marketing ROI manually in spreadsheets — a method that breaks down at Level 2 and is essentially impossible to maintain reliably at Level 3.

Why Level 1 Is Dangerous Without Level 2

A firm that knows cost per lead but not cost per signed case is making budget decisions on incomplete information — and often making them in the wrong direction.

Here's a scenario that plays out regularly: Vendor A sends leads at $90 each. Vendor B sends leads at $200 each. The marketing director, working from cost per lead data only, allocates more budget to Vendor A because it looks more efficient.

But if Vendor A converts at 3% and Vendor B converts at 9%:

• Vendor A: $90/lead ÷ 3% conversion = $3,000 per case
• Vendor B: $200/lead ÷ 9% conversion = $2,222 per case

The “cheap” vendor is actually producing cases at 35% higher cost. The budget decision made from Level 1 data is exactly backwards. This pattern — where the cheapest-per-lead vendor is not the most efficient per case — is common across PI firm portfolios.

The Settlement Lag Makes Level 3 Hard

The 6 to 18 month gap between lead generation and case settlement is the primary reason fewer than 10% of PI firms have Level 3 ROI visibility.

Consider the math: leads generated in January 2025 produce signed cases by March 2025. Many of those cases settle between September 2025 and September 2026. To close the loop between January marketing spend and eventual settlement revenue, a firm needs to:

• Track which lead source each case came from at the time of lead arrival
• Maintain that attribution through intake, signing, case management, and settlement
• Connect settlement revenue back to the original lead cohort — 12 to 18 months later
• Account for cases that withdrew (and their marketing cost with zero return)

Without a system built to maintain this attribution over a multi-year window, it simply doesn't get done. The data exists in separate systems — marketing platforms, CRM, case management software, accounting records — and connecting them manually is prohibitive at any meaningful scale.

What Firms That Do Calculate True ROI See

The firms that invest in Level 3 ROI visibility consistently discover significant variation across lead sources that is not visible at Level 1 or Level 2. Some specific patterns:

• Vendors that look acceptable on cost per case often show much higher effective cost per settled case when withdrawal rate is factored in. A vendor with 25% withdrawal rate is producing cases at 25% higher true cost than Level 2 data suggests.
• Average settlement value varies significantly by lead source. A vendor that sends leads generating $35,000 average settlement is more valuable than one generating $22,000 average settlement, even if cost per signed case is the same.
• Some channels that look expensive on a cost-per-lead basis produce significantly higher settlement values — making their true ROI substantially better than Level 1 or Level 2 data suggests.

The Practical Gap Between “We Track ROI” and Real Visibility

Most PI marketing directors genuinely believe they are tracking ROI. They have spreadsheets. They review vendor invoices. They calculate conversion rates.

But when pressed on specific questions — “What was your cost per case from Vendor X in Q3, including cases that withdrew?” or “Which of your current lead sources produces the best average settlement value per dollar spent?” — most cannot answer with confidence.

That gap between “we track ROI” and actually having the data to make confident decisions is where most PI firms are today. It's not a failure of effort or intent — it's a structural problem in how marketing data, intake data, and case outcome data are stored and connected (or not connected) in most firms.

Closing the Visibility Gap

The path from Level 1 to Level 3 ROI visibility requires two things: a consistent attribution framework that tracks each lead from source through resolution, and a system that can maintain that attribution over the multi-year settlement timeline without requiring manual intervention.

Firms that close this gap typically find 15% to 25% of their marketing budget allocated to sources that are underperforming relative to their true ROI — and can shift that budget to sources that produce better outcomes. That's achievable within 90 days of implementing proper attribution, and it doesn't require adding a dollar of new marketing spend.

RevenueScale's marketing attribution platform closes exactly this gap — connecting spend to intake outcomes to case resolution in a single system that maintains attribution through the full PI settlement cycle.