Search as an Outcome Signal for Pharma TV Campaigns
An analysis of branded search against a drug's own TV spend across 100 advertisers, and the early read on campaign performance it reveals.
In the US healthcare system, the path from symptom to diagnosis to treatment can take months. A patient sees a doctor, gets referred to a specialist, gets tested, and only then might get a prescription, one that depends on the doctor choosing that specific drug and on the patient's insurance actually covering it. Only after all of that does anything show up in the sales data that pharma marketers use to judge whether a campaign worked. That data can also be expensive to access and raises privacy concerns, since it touches real patient records. We wanted to know whether another signal was available.
Search is that signal. People see an ad, and some of them search. Earlier work looked at how people search for symptoms and treatments related to their condition, which suggested search activity could be used to measure upper-funnel campaign success for pharma marketers. For this study, we asked a very specific question: does a brand's own search volume actually move with that brand's own TV spend, not just with time or with unrelated events?
A rise in search during a campaign does not by itself prove the campaign caused it. Search moves for other reasons: a competitor's news, a seasonal pattern, a health scare, plain curiosity. Any credible measure of this relationship has to rule those alternatives out before it can be trusted.
We started with TV spend records covering every pharmaceutical advertiser on television over a six-year window, 223 brands in total. From that group, we removed the small number of advertisers tied to a major outside news cycle, such as weight-loss drugs, a decades-old brand name, or a high-profile recall. Search for those drugs would move for reasons that have nothing to do with their own TV spend, and keeping them in would have distorted the result. From what remained, we randomly selected 100 drugs. We also required at least six months of real TV spend behind each drug, so there was enough data to analyze. For each of the 100 drugs, we compared monthly TV spend to monthly search volume of the drug’s brand name over the period the drug was actually advertising.
63 of the 100 drugs showed search moving closely with TV spend for at least twelve straight months at some point during the campaign. For 20 of those 63, that relationship held for the entire period of the campaign, averaging approximately 2 years and 4 months. For the other 43, it held for at least a full year within a longer campaign that was noisier overall, and about half the time that strong year was the first year of the campaign.
This result shows that the connection between TV spend and search for the medication name holds across most pharma advertisers, and it persists for years, not weeks or days.
The relationship also did not depend on a large budget. Among the 20 drugs where it held for the entire measured period, monthly TV spend ranged from as little as $308K a month to as much as $30.9 million, with a typical campaign in this group spending around $3 million a month. A drug brand spending a few hundred thousand dollars a month on TV showed the same connection between spend and search as one spending tens of millions.
Search moves with advertising for most pharma brands, not just the largest ones. That makes search a cleaner measure of whether an advertising campaign is working than sales or prescription data, which depend on a patient seeing a doctor, the drug being covered by their insurance, and where it sits on the formulary, none of which the ad itself controls.