Live From ePharma Summit 2008: Benchmarketing e-Marketing

This afternoon at ePharma Summit, ComScore Vice President Carolina Petrini (right) explained how to measure the impact of online branding. Her company tracked the online behavior of patients and prospects, examining whether they interacted with Rx Web branding.

The bottom line:

• e-marketing tactics (display ads) work best for awareness
• Web sites work best for adherence and new patient starts

Here are some key benchmark figures from ComScore’s study:

• When a prospective consumer is exposed to a banner ad, the campaign gets a 5.7 percent boost in aided awareness. Rich media and interaction with the ad increased the boost to more than 7 percent.
• Simple exposure to a banner or rich-media ad doesn’t lift new patient starts. Web visits, however, were associated with a lift of 4.9 percent.
• Driving patients to a Web site was associated with a 19.7 percent lift in compliance.
• When ComScore compared patients who arrived at a Web site through search with those who were driven there by media, it found that the organic search traffic tended to be more qualified and converted at a higher rate of 26 percent.

Does this mean banner ads are a dead issue? Hardly, according to Petrini. “You absolutely have to have banners, because they have a latency effect on getting people to recall,” she said. “Even if they didn’t click through on the spot, people who have been exposed to display banners are likely to search for a drug at a later time.”