Google AdWords for Pharma Marketing (Abbvie)
Google AdWords for Pharma Marketing – Case Study Series (transcript below)
Adwords analysis: Abbvie’s Humira and Rheumatoid Arthritis
Today, the disease being examined is rheumatoid arthritis, so we’ve gone ahead and entered that into our search box.
Here, the first Ad is for Abbvie’s Humira and the ad below that is Amgen’s Enbrel. If we look at phrasing and the way the Ads are structured, it’s clear that the first Ad is targeted towards patients while the second one is targeted towards physicians. Amgen has different ad groups for “rheumatoid arthritis,” so while they do have an Ad targeted towards patients, it didn’t show up in this particular search.
We’re going to focus on DTCPA first, so let’s take a closer look at Abbvie’s Ad.
The ad received a relatively high quality score from Google because it provides a lot of useful and relevant information. Google’s Quality score ranges from 1 to 10 and it’s a function of how relevant your ads and site information are to the user. The overall tone of the Ad is good because it’s non-promotional. We see phrases like “get information” and “learn,” which ties in well with the shift towards patient empowerment and the informed consumer.
The first line under the short description contains bulleted phrases. These are called Callout Extensions. They’re mainly used to improve text ads by promoting unique offers or detailed information about products and services. In this case, it’s kind of hard to understand what discussion guide is referring to and there’s a bit of redundancy with RA resources because videos & resources was already listed prior to that.
Right below callout extensions are sitelink extensions. Sitelinks are shortcuts that take people to specific pages on your site. When someone clicks on these links, they skip right to the information that they want to know and this has potential to increase traffic to your site. However, clicking on “RA videos” directs you to patient stories, and clicking on “RA discussion guide” will direct you to a pre-visit questionnaire, so it may be worthwhile to consider either changing the sitelink text or the link itself to something more relevant. If a user lands on a page and can’t find the information they need within 3 seconds they’ll exit the page.
Alternatively, when we search “Humira dosage” a different ad shows up that directs visitors to humirapro, which is the official physician site for the drug. If we examine all the parameters we covered previously, it’s evident this is a very high quality ad. The sitelinks take HCPs to the exact information they care about.
Examining Abbvie’s previous ads we can see that this ad was run between August of 2016 to January of 2017. In February, they decided to test a different ad. They continued this testing process until they finally arrived at the ad that we saw on the previous page and this ad has been on the top of the page-results 80% of the time compared to the previous 54-55%.
How does using Google AdWords for pharma marketing make a difference?
If we look at the current website rankings for “rheumatoid arthritis” Abbvie’s Humira comes in at #37. While #37 may not seem impressive, it’s the first prescription drug on the list. (And in case anyone was wondering Enbrel is #41.)
They’ve been able to establish an association between the treatment and the brand. What they’ve created is an environment where they’re adding value.
While there may still be opportunities for improvement, the bottom line of using Google AdWords for pharmaceutical marketing is to deliver what people are looking for at the right time.
