PPC vs. buying MVA leads
The honest economics of generating your own accident cases with paid search versus buying exclusive MVA leads — from someone who spent $3.8M running PI ads before building a lead supply.
By Tarun Kapoor, Founder · Published 2026-07-14
The side-by-side
| Dimension | Running PPC yourself | Buying exclusive MVA leads |
|---|---|---|
| Unit cost | $100–$300+ per click; ~$700–$3,000 per raw form-fill after conversion | $320–$550 per screened, exclusive lead — fixed |
| Who carries media risk | The firm — spend is guaranteed, leads are not | The vendor — the firm pays only per delivered lead |
| Time to first signed case | Typically 2–3 months (account learning, funnel iteration) | Days to weeks — supply is already flowing |
| Infrastructure required | Landing pages, tracking, TCPA-compliant consent capture, ad management (in-house or ~10–15% agency fee) | A CRM webhook and an intake desk |
| Volume control | Full — you set budgets, geos, and creative | Bounded — you set filters and caps within the vendor's supply |
| Long-term asset | Yes — account history, brand search, and data compound | No — you rent supply; stopping stops the flow |
| Sensible entry budget | $25,000+/month to learn fast enough to matter | From $3,000/month |
When running your own PPC wins
- You have in-house marketing skill or a trusted legal-PPC agency, and the patience to fund a 2–3 month learning curve.
- You spend $25K+/month — enough for the ad account to exit learning phases quickly and for tests to reach significance.
- You want a compounding owned asset: brand search, LSA reviews, account history, and first-party data.
- You operate in a metro where you can differentiate on brand, not just bid.
When buying exclusive leads wins
- You want a fixed, knowable cost per lead — and therefore a forecastable cost per signed case — from month one.
- You're a solo or small firm without the budget to absorb PPC's variance while it learns.
- Your constraint is intake capacity, not marketing ideas: buying leads lets you scale volume up and down with filters instead of rebuilding campaigns.
- You don't want to own TCPA consent-capture infrastructure — the vendor documents consent on every lead.
The hybrid most mature firms land on
This isn’t really an either/or. The pattern we see across growing PI firms: purchased exclusive leads as the predictable baseline that keeps intake at capacity, PPC and Local Services Ads building owned brand equity on top, and both channels judged on the same scoreboard — cost per signed case, benchmarked in our MVA Lead Cost Report. The firms that get in trouble are the ones comparing PPC’s cost per click to a lead vendor’s cost per lead — different units, different risk, same fee at stake.