I often speak at pharma conferences regarding the impact of effective search marketing strategies in the pharmaceutical market. In fact, I am speaking again at CBI’s conference, The 7th Annual eMarketing for the Pharmaceutical Industry, March 6th in Philadelphia . A hot topic at these events is the FDA guidelines and how it applies to paid search ads. Pharma search experts, like our friend John Mack, share their thoughts on Fair Balance and pharma paid search ads. Quite often, I find my colleagues views regarding the effective management of pharma paid search ads to be simply……outdated.
In John’s Pharma Marketing Blog he states: “These Adwords seem to violate FDA regulations that require presentation of major side effect information whenever a brand name and its approved indication are mentioned in the same ad”.
This is what I think.
The pharma industry is handling paid search ads three ways:
- the condition in the ad with brand url (Learn about cholesterol. www.Lipitor.com).
- the condition with a vanity url. (Learn about cholesterol. www.LowerMyCholestrol.com)
- no condition and brand url.
The first option is the obvious best choice. The second option creates destination disappointment, a possible bait and switch tactic. The consumer may not want to go to a pharma site and you just tricked them thus deminishing your brand equity. In addition you just paid for it too! The third option is okay but paid search best practices requires you to include the keyphrase the searcher users to improve your quality score.
Some industry marketers believe that the first option - (condition and brand name) violates the FDA fair balance guidelines. If other pharma search experts choose to apply traditional marketing practices to the innovative online marketplace, then I would ask them to consider this; as long as the safety information is on each page of a brand’s website (another best practice) a searcher is always just one click away from safety information - acceptable. To help the traditional marketers relate, just like a magazine ad, one turn of a magazine page and there you see the safety information.
I believe including the condition and brand URL in a paid search ad is not only in accordance to the FDA’s Fair Balance guidelines but also produces a much better consumer experience as well.
What do you think?
