Are You Maximizing Your ROI?

As a brand manager, you want to understand the ROI of your marketing efforts. The most robust assessment can only happen after patients see the ad, visit a physician, start therapy, and the data becomes available for measurement. This is much longer than anyone wants to wait to understand campaign performance. In this article, we focus on the three types of interim data that help you understand how your campaign is doing and can guide optimizations before you can see those ROI results.

Operational Metrics

First, you can use operational metrics related to execution, such as impressions delivered and click rates for digital campaigns, and impressions/views delivered and video completion rates for video/TV. We believe these are only useful to ensure the media is delivered as contracted.

Overall, impressions only tell you that the ad has been displayed on the site, not if the viewer has actually seen the ad. Adding viewability requirements does ensure the ads are viewable, which is important, but it does not mean the ad is seen by your target patients. Although clicks can provide more information on the engagement with the ad, our internal research has shown that it also doesn’t tell you how successful the ad was in reaching your target patients.

Additionally, while some marketers may want to use actions taken on a site, such as clicks on a copay card link on Brand.com (e.g., cost per action or CPA) as a measure of campaign success, our data has shown little correlation between CPA and audience quality (AQ) or ultimate brand lift. These on-site behavioral metrics therefore have limited utility in predicting ROI and should only be used to ensure your vendor is fulfilling its contractual obligation.

Leading Indicators

Second, you can optimize media by leveraging leading indicators that connect campaign audiences to offline prescription and medical claims data. Through this process, you can ensure your message is reaching patients with relevant medical history (e.g., AQ), and that these patients are taking actions (e.g., physician visits) that lead to prescriptions. Your measurement partners need to be transparent on sample sizes and statistics around these estimates to ensure the results are reliable. Reaching the right patients and having them see relevant specialists are necessary steps to getting a prescription filled for your brand.

Conversion to Brand

The third and most important metric is conversion to your brand or to the category. Some platforms report gross conversion, which provides minimal information on campaign performance because there is no control comparison. But other measurement partners can provide estimates of net conversion and ROI while your campaign is in market. In addition, you should also obtain a net conversion analysis using a well-matched control group to calculate your ROI. Although the most rigorous methodology for ROI, it is also the last one observable because it is only available months after the campaign has started.

As a marketer, you need to ensure that everything you do in a campaign is driving towards ROI. Working with a partner that understands media intimately and can connect your campaign to claims data will allow you to optimize the campaign and ultimately deliver a strong ROI. The Medicx Health AdLift Rx platform does just that.

To learn more about how AdLift Rx can help you understand your campaigns better, contact your Medicx representative or use our contact form.