Connected TV Case Study: Personal Injury Law Firm

The short version

A multi-state personal injury law firm with offices in California, Texas, Nevada, and Arizona invested $54,743.57 across Google Ads and connected TV (CTV) in August 2026. Of that, $15,202.85 went to connected TV.

The result: 95 first-time qualified callers in August, up from 45 in July, a 111% month-over-month increase, at a household CPM of $11.73 and a cost of $0.022 per unique viewer reached.

The number that matters more than any single metric is the timing.

Call volume did not move for the first three weeks of CTV. Then it moved all at once. That pattern is the whole story, and it is the reason most law firms that try connected TV quit before it works.

The problem: personal injury is the most expensive keyword auction in America

Personal injury is not a normal advertising category. Search clicks in this account averaged $37.19, and in the highest-intent motor vehicle accident auctions, a single click can cost more than a month of advertising in most other industries.

That creates a hard ceiling. A firm can bid more, but it cannot bid its way to more people searching. In any given month, only a small, fixed number of people in a market type "car accident lawyer near me" into Google. Once a firm is capturing its share of that demand, additional search budget buys the same clicks at a worse price.

This client had hit that ceiling. Google Ads was working. It was simply not able to grow, because the demand pool was not growing.

The strategy question was not "how do we bid better?" It was "how do we create demand instead of only harvesting it?"

If your firm is at the same point, our law firm digital marketing systems page walks through how the search and demand-generation layers fit together.

The strategy: use connected TV to create the demand that search harvests

Connected TV (CTV) is video advertising served on internet-connected televisions: Samsung TV Plus, Tubi, Roku, YouTube TV and similar streaming environments. It looks and feels like a traditional TV commercial. It is bought like digital media, through a demand-side platform, with geographic, demographic and behavioral targeting that broadcast TV cannot match.

For a personal injury firm, that combination is unusually well suited to the actual buying behavior. Nobody watches a lawyer’s ad and calls a lawyer that night. They watch it, they forget they watched it, and then eight weeks later they get rear-ended on the freeway and one firm’s name surfaces before the others.

CTV does not generate the accident. It decides which firm the accident victim thinks of first.

We built the August campaign around three principles:

The creative itself came out of the same video marketing process we use for every client running video: one clear message, one clear action, built to be understood with the sound off.

The results

The CTV campaign delivered 1,295,760 ad impressions. But it produced 1.73 million household views.

The gap is not an error. Ad servers count one impression per ad served to one screen. Televisions are watched by more than one person. Co-viewing measurement estimated 430,000 additional human views beyond the billed impression count, which the firm did not pay for.

Effective cost per household view worked out to $8.79 CPM against the $11.73 billed CPM.

Across 686,000 unique users, cost per unique viewer reached was $0.022. Two cents to put a full-screen, high-definition video ad in front of one local viewer, on the largest screen in their home.

Connected TV inventory in competitive metros typically clears between $15 and $30 CPM, and premium sports or news inventory routinely prices above that. This campaign delivered at $11.73.

That efficiency came from inventory selection rather than from buying cheap remnant placements. Weighted viewability across all measured placements was 99.3%, meaning essentially every impression the firm paid for was actually rendered on screen.

Two things worth noting for any firm evaluating CTV.

First, the volume came from free ad-supported streaming (Samsung TV Plus, Tubi) at roughly $10 CPM, while cable news inventory inside YouTube TV cost 50% more for a fraction of the impressions. Both have a place. News inventory reaches an older, higher-converting demographic; free streaming provides the frequency at a price that makes the math work.

Second, one placement (zeasn.tv, a site-based rather than app-based environment) returned zero measured viewable impressions. It was not necessarily wasted, but it was unverifiable, and it was 3.7% of impressions. Unmeasured inventory is the first thing to cut when optimizing a CTV buy.

This is the finding most law firms will not expect.

Older audiences still watch television as television. They are more likely to complete a video view, more likely to remember a firm name, and dramatically cheaper to reach. For a practice area where grandparents are frequently the people making a call on behalf of an injured family member, that is not a rounding error.

Reach metrics do not pay a firm’s payroll. Calls do.

Read the bottom two rows carefully, because they contain the entire lesson of this campaign.

In July, the firm generated 3 calls in the first 20 days. Three. Any firm reviewing that mid-month report would have concluded CTV does not work and pulled the budget.

On July 21, cumulative household frequency crossed the effective threshold of roughly 2.5 views. Call volume went from 3 in twenty days to 42 in the following eleven days. August then opened at that elevated level and held it, delivering 95 first-time callers for the month.

The campaign did not get better on July 21. It became visible on July 21. Everything before that was the cost of building recognition that had not yet been earned.

The paid search side of the account continued to carry direct-response volume:

For context, cost per qualified case-generating lead in competitive personal injury markets commonly runs $500 to $1,500 and higher. A blended $421 across the full account, in a market where a single click costs $37, is the outcome of the two channels working together rather than either one working alone.

If your search campaigns are converting below this range, the constraint is usually the destination rather than the traffic. We covered that in aligning landing pages with your Google Ads.

Why the two reported call numbers do not match, and why that is a good thing

Google Ads reported 70 direct phone call leads. CallRail reported 95 first-time qualified callers. Those are different numbers because they are counting different things.

Google Ads only counts a call it can attribute to a click on a Google ad. CallRail counts every first-time caller to the tracked number, regardless of how they found it, including the person who saw a television ad on Tuesday, searched the firm’s name by memory on Friday, and called from the organic listing.

That 25-call gap is roughly the shape of the CTV contribution. It is also why any firm that measures connected TV inside the Google Ads interface will conclude connected TV does not work. It cannot work there. Nobody clicks a television.

This is the single most common reason we see law firms abandon a channel that was actually performing. Attribution is not a reporting detail in this category. It is the difference between renewing a campaign and killing it.

What we are fixing next

An honest case study includes what did not go well.

The weekend blackout. Ad scheduling ran Monday through Friday. Call data shows zero weekend calls. Accidents do not observe business hours, and Saturday and Sunday are the highest-consumption days for streaming television. This is unrecovered volume, and extending the schedule is the first change for September.

The second-half softening. August’s back half produced 30 calls against 65 in the first 20 days. Some of that is normal variance and some of it is creative wear at a 2.52 frequency. Creative rotation goes in next.

The unmeasured placement. zeasn.tv took 3.7% of impressions and 2.1% of spend with no viewability verification. It comes out of the buy.

Intake, not marketing. At 95 inbound calls a month, the constraint moves from generating the call to answering it. A missed call in personal injury is not a lost lead, it is a lost case, and the firm that answers on the second ring gets the signature. We have written about this at length in why operations, not marketing, is usually what kills lead generation.

What a law firm should take from this

Frequently asked questions

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39 Celsius Web Marketing has managed paid media for law firms and high-competition local businesses since 2006, with more than $7.5 million in managed ad spend. More about us.