Brand Website and Online Campaign: Prescription Drug Case Study

Challenge

“We still only get 5% of the marketing budget!  We are still second-class to TV and Print!”  While the online brand manager believed that her online marketing was doing a lot for the brand and could do even more with adequate budget, neither she nor her agency could prove it.  Even though they had provided the brand team with many web analytics reports and analysis, this traffic activity simply didn’t show anyone how the site was performing against brand objectives.  Without this proof, they couldn’t get adequate budget, support, and credit for what they believed that they were accomplishing.

Specifically, the online brand manager and her agency needed to:

A)  Know and prove the value of their website and online marketing.

B)  Know which  campaigns accomplish objectives and how to improve them

C)  Know which content and tactics are & are not effective

D)  Know who is visiting, why, and what they need. 

Solution

Our client used KnowClick’s approach to answer these and many other critical questions.  In addition to capturing visitor behavior at the website, we also captured how the site impacted perceptions and offline actions of the different audience segments.  We “closed the loop” between visitor action on the site and their offline actions.

A) Answers for: Know and prove the value of their website and online marketing.

To prove their value, our client needed to show how the site impacted awareness, product perceptions, and offline actions, but their web analytics tools only provided visits, referrers, pageviews, and other onsite behavioral data.    We enabled them to measure directly against their business goals.  The following are highlights:

1. The site really does work… For the target audience, we found that the site was far more effective than expected at changing perceptions and convincing the target audience to act.  See the chart to the right… A visit to the brand website convinced 14% of visitors that the product is very effective (making believers out of these former skeptics).  Also, a surprisingly high 10% of non-users were convinced by their visit to talk to a doctor about the drug. 
2. But it doesn’t work for those already on product… We also found that more than 60% of traffic already had a prescription (which was far more than the client had thought).  One-third of this group just received their first prescription and two-thirds had been taking the drug and weren’t sure if they should keep taking it.  The site was ineffective for both and didn’t help them know why they should start or keep taking the drug. 
3. They are leaving money and visitors’ health “on the table”.  We quantified the missed revenue opportunity at ~$12MM, with an unquantifiable negative impact on the health of visitors.

Actions & Results

1. More budget and appreciation for the website and online campaigns.  This provided the clear evidence that proved the value of the website to the brand team.  Online marketing got >40% more budget, was included in all marketing strategy planning, and got a lot more of the brand team’s attention and appreciation.
2. Enhanced business objectives and website overhaul.  Additionally, the brand changed their business objectives to include persistence (keeping visitors on product) and invested in a site overhaul with their online agency to educate and persuade those with a prescription to fill it and keep taking the product as prescribed (both for business reasons and to help these patients).

B) Answers for:  Know which campaigns accomplish objectives and how to improve them.

While online is extremely measurable, what had been measured wasn’t meaningful.  We moved the client from optimizing campaigns based on pageviews to optimizing based on how each campaign accomplish actual business goals, especially driving visitors to talk to their doctor.  The following are highlights:

1. Actual campaign performance varied greatly at driving the target audience to take action.  This occured despite previous campaign optimization based on engagement (avg pagesviews / campaign).  For example, “unbranded” paid search and display ad campaign #2 performed more than three times better at convincing their traffic to talk to their doctor than many others.  
2. “Pageviews” was poor measure of success at accomplishing business objectives.  Some of the campaigns that drove the most engaged traffic were the least valuable. For example, “branded” paid search had the second highest level of engagement (5.2 avg pageviews/visit) but the lowest impact.  Why?  Because this traffic already used the product.  89% of visitors from branded paid search were already on product and were not impacted by the site.
3. TV ads were driving ~23% of all “non-user” visitors to the site.  They were highly impacted, with 8% of TV ad visitors convinced by the site visit to talk to their doctor.

Actions & Results

1. Reallocated online budget to successful campaigns.  Stopped wasting >$200,000/year on campaigns that didn’t drive visitors to talk to their doctor.
2. Enhanced messaging and creative to drive the target audience.  Refocused branded paid search to focus on driving the target audience, not product users.
3. Brand team  added much stronger calls to visit the website from offline campaigns.  Since we had proven the power of the site at convincing them to act.

C)  Answers for: Know which content and tactics are & are not effective.

Our client used web analytics to see which content is viewed, but it couldn’t tell them whether than content actually worked to persuade its viewers to take action.  We isolated the impact of each page and tactic to see what does and doesn’t work…  Continue >>

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