Calculating CTV ROI for Personal Injury Law Firms
$150K investment → 192 cases → $4.8M revenue = 32x ROAS. Give campaigns 90+ days. ROAS improves 24% as awareness compounds.
CTV ROI isn’t calculated like digital advertising ROI. There are no clicks. Response is delayed. Attribution is probabilistic. But ROI is absolutely measurable, as our CTV advertising ROI overview explains. You just need the right framework.
It works. You just measure it differently.
The Framework: Impressions to Signed Cases
CTV ROI isn’t a single calculation. It’s a chain. Each link connects to the next, and the firmness of each link determines how much you trust the final number.
The challenge is connecting “cases signed” back to “CTV exposure.” The multi-channel attribution guide covers the broader measurement framework.
Building the Attribution Chain
Impressions → Verified Visits
CTV platforms track which households saw your ads, then match to website visits. Benchmark: 0.5-1.2% verified visit rate.
Verified Visits to Leads
These aren’t random visitors. They saw your commercial and came looking. Conversion rates for CTV-attributed traffic run 3-6% for PI landing pages. Higher than paid search in most markets because the visitor already knows who you are.
Leads to Signed Cases
Your intake process converts leads to signed cases. For qualified PI leads, 15-25% conversion is the benchmark. The quality here depends on creative messaging, targeting precision, and intake speed.
Signed Cases to Revenue
Multiply signed cases by average case value. This is your attributed revenue. The gap between attributed revenue and CTV investment is your return.
Running the Numbers
Let’s walk through a real scenario. Three months, $50K/month in a mid-size market.
192 signed cases. At $25K average case value: $4.8M in attributed revenue.
Total investment: $150K. Return: $4.65M. ROI: 3,100%. Or 32x ROAS.
Those numbers aren’t aspirational. They’re math. And they’re conservative. Catastrophic injury cases at $100K+ average value blow these returns out of the water. Auto PI at $15K compresses them. Your case mix determines your ROI ceiling.
The Time Factor: Why Month One Lies
This is where most firms get it wrong. They run CTV for 30 days, see expensive-looking CPLs, and kill the campaign. The data says they’re making a mistake.
Read those numbers again. Cost per acquisition drops 64% between day one and day 90. The campaign you’d kill at month one is generating leads at a third of the cost by month three.
This isn’t magic. It’s awareness compounding. Week one, nobody knows you. Week four, some people recognize the name. Week eight, your name comes to mind after an accident. Week twelve, someone tells their injured friend “I keep seeing that firm on TV.” CTV builds recognition that feeds every other channel. It makes your search campaigns cheaper and your organic traffic more likely to convert.
The Metrics That Matter
Skip the vanity numbers. These are the metrics that tell you whether CTV is working.
Cost Per Verified Visit
Your CTV spend divided by verified visits. At $50K monthly producing 8,000 verified visits, that’s $6.25 per visit. Benchmark: $5-15 is healthy. Below $5, verify your attribution isn’t over-counting.
Cost Per Lead
CTV spend divided by attributed leads. At $50K producing 320 leads, that’s $156 per lead. But this number means nothing without context. Check the CPL benchmarks chapter and adjust for your market tier.
Cost Per Signed Case
The only metric your partners care about. CTV spend divided by signed cases. At $50K producing 64 cases, that’s $781 per case. Compare to your average case value. If cost per case is 10-15% of case value, you’ve got healthy margins and room to scale.
Blended ROAS
Total attributed revenue divided by total CTV investment. At $1.6M revenue on $50K spend, that’s 32x. But watch this number over time, not in isolation. Month one might show 15x. Month three shows 32x. That trajectory is the story.
Attribution Models Change the Story
How you assign credit to CTV dramatically changes your calculated ROI.
Last-Click Attribution
- CTV gets 0-10% of credit
- Google Ads looks like the hero
- CTV appears to have negative ROI
- Leads to cutting CTV budget
- Which causes search CPCs to climb
Multi-Touch Attribution
- CTV gets 40-60% of credit
- Full-funnel contribution visible
- True ROI measurable at 20-40x
- Leads to proper budget allocation
- Which compounds returns across channels
CTV creates the demand that search captures. Last-click gives search all the credit. Multi-touch tells the truth. CTV accounted for 38% of impressions but 63% of attributable conversions when proper multi-touch models were applied. If you’re still running last-click, you don’t know what your channels actually produce.
The Halo Effect: What Attribution Misses
Even multi-touch attribution doesn’t capture everything CTV does. Some returns are indirect but very real.
Branded search volume increases 20-40% within 90 days of consistent CTV investment. That’s not correlation. The correlation between CTV impressions and branded search volume sits at 0.81. People see your ad. They search your name. Those branded clicks convert at 3-4x the rate of generic “car accident lawyer” searches. And they cost 60-80% less per click.
Organic conversion rates improve because visitors already know who you are. Your website converts better when the person landing on it has seen you on their TV three times this month. That lift doesn’t show up in CTV attribution. It shows up in your overall numbers.