The placement of the related disease searches on the page is prominent 

In February Google announced a new enhancement to their search results for health symptoms. We have known for a long time that Dr. Google is one of the first places people go to investigate whether a symptom is worth a trip to the doctor to investigate or not. This change in how the results are displayed tries to use the data from the National Institutes of Health, Wikipedia, and others, to determine the most common diagnoses that are associated with their symptom.

“Our data shows that a search for symptoms is often followed by a search for a related condition. To make the process easier, now when you search for a symptom or set of symptoms, you’ll often see a list of possibly related health conditions that you can use to refine your search,” writes Roni Zeiger, MD, Google’s Chief Health Strategist, on their blog.

Read More

Recently there has also been an integration of Google+ content into search engine results pages 

Google has been an important part of the health research process for patients and healthcare providers for many years. This year Google is shaking things up with a list of new products and innovations that will affect both the paid and organic search strategies of pharmaceutical companies.

Google+
Google started allowing businesses to create Google+ pages/profiles and visitors to opt into specific “circles” in order to receive specific posts and updates. An example might be using circles to customize messages for patients, healthcare providers and caregivers. The Google+ platform could integrate well with a segmented marketing strategy, and Google+ now has a network of 100 million users worldwide.

However, one reason for pharma to wait to create Google+ pages is because the commenting capability cannot be suppressed or controlled the way it can be on YouTube. Note that just like Facebook (850 million users), a Google+ page requires resources to add content, monitor comments and interact with users. Roche is the only biopharmaceutical company we have seen who has taken advantage of Google+ with placeholder company and career pages.

Read More

We have yet to see how much data will be lost; Google suggests it should be a minority 

This week Google announced that it is making a change to how Google Analytics (GA) reports keyword level data. Google announced this as a change intended to protect the privacy of the user data of people who are logged into their tools while searching.

Basically, Google explains the change as separating the keyword level data from searches into two groups: one for those who are not signed into Google’s universal login for all its products and one for those who are logged in. Google will remove/suppress/protect the keyword level data from the search results pages for those people who are logged in, and those keywords will be listed within the organic search reporting of GA as “not set” or “not provided.” Everything else from searchers who are not logged in will still be reported, as will all data from paid search campaigns.

Read More

Rare disease patients and caregivers are the epitome of long-tail searchers 

Although the vast majority of time spent online is spent on long-tail sites — or sites with an overall reach smaller than 1.5% of the internet population — the majority of ad dollars are spent on short tail sites, according to comScore. What an interesting disconnect between audiences and marketers.

A CONTEXTWEB study of 1,000 ad campaigns across 18,000 publisher sites during the second half of 2010 discovered that ads placed on long-tail sites lifted click rates by 24% — a big lift compared with larger web properties. The research identified that “health” had a 43% lift in click-through rates for long-tail ads.

Read More

this may increase or decrease the impressions of your Paid Search ads and the resulting the Click-Through-Rate 

On September 8, Google Instant was launched, showing search results as the user types the query. You don’t have to finish typing or hit enter to see results. In fact, after typing one letter, results appear. This predictive search tries to anticipate what users are looking for and save time.

If you haven’t already tried it, go to Google.com to see how it works (it hasn’t been rolled out to the Google search boxes in toolbars). You can turn off Instant search – which I did after a few days since I found it to be distracting. Some industry pundits are predicting that this is the future of search and in a few years we won’t remember searching any other way. However, others are skeptical. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Impact on Paid Search
It’s interesting to start to type in a search query and as you continue, see the different Paid Search ads appear. According to Google, a Paid Search ad impression is counted in three different ways:

• Any click on the page: If a user begins typing, then clicks anywhere on the page (whether that’s for an ad, a spell check or related search), an impression is counted.
• Search selection: If a user clicks the search button or presses enter or selects one of the predicted queries, an impression is counted.
• Three-seconds: If a user stops typing and does nothing for three seconds, an impression is counted.

Depending on how your campaign is set up, this may increase or decrease the impressions of your Paid Search ads and the resulting the Click-Through-Rate (CTR).
Read More

Spelling diabetes is one thing. Spelling immune thrombocytopenic purpura is something else altogether. 

Pamela Todd, Content Strategist at Siren Interactive, contributes this post:

Search matters — especially when it comes to healthcare.  The PEW Internet Project reports that 75%-80% of Americans have searched for health information online. And significantly, this information-seeking usually begins at a general search engine.

Among the most active searchers are those with a disability or chronic disease, who have a continuing need for information and support — like those with rare disorders. Why is search so important to patients and caregivers in the rare disorder community?

Read More

In an October 6th Advertising Age article titled “Small Brands Could Be J&J’s Next Big Thing,” the journalist reported that in the past year J&J has quietly ramped up a major assault on direct-response skin-care powerhouse Proactiv with the SkinID brand.

The SkinID push, moreover, looks to be the start of something bigger at J&J. Recent job postings for the company indicate it’s preparing a host of niche brands and initiatives in the U.S. Selling big, heavily extended brands at large retailers has been a cornerstone of success for the personal-care marketers for most of the decade. But as that business model shows signs of fraying, $61 billion J&J increasingly is trying something a lot more entrepreneurial.

It’s about the Dialogue

“We’re revolutionizing skin care through questions to our consumers,” said Cal Schmidt, VP-sales and marketing for J&J unit McNeil Nutritionals, referring to the early stages of SkinID in a talk at an Advertising Research Foundation forum in April. “We are offering our customers specific products tailored to them. …And then you have this ongoing dialogue.”

Read More

On Wednesday WebMD Health Corp. lowered its financial guidance for 2008, citing a softening ad marketplace.

Analysts on Wednesday expressed concern over whether WebMD’s preliminary numbers signal trouble for other online health destinations. “The biggest question is whether the slower trends are WebMD-specific or industry-wide,” Goldman Sachs analyst Jennifer Watson wrote in a client note Wednesday.

One take on this announcement is that phama marketers are saying one thing but not following through. Pharma Marketing Blog said:

“Although eMarketer predicts that pharmaceutical companies anticipate spending more in 2008 on Internet advertising (Web sites, search and e-mail marketing) and less on traditional media, the prognosis from WebMD suggests that pharma ad money is NOT where their mouths are. WebMD, after all, relies “heavily” on pharmaceutical advertisers for revenue.”

Or could it be that we are seeing the beginnings of a new trend? Pharma marketers are getting more sophisticated and instead of sending their money to WebMD they are coordinating their own online marketing campaigns using contextual search and direct SEM tied into their overall online strategy. Why use an intermediary? We know from Manhatten Reasearch that search begins with search engines. Algorithms have changed, the internet keeps growing, and niche marketing is everywhere.

Maybe we are seeing the beginnings of a trend.

“Pharma” photo by Steven Brown

Wikipedia is fast becoming one of the top reference resources for many who are searching for information on a particular topic, and it is often one of the first references in a search results list. In fact, Wikipedia receives 54% of its traffic from Google. Furthermore, referring to Wikipedia as “one of the poster children for Web 2.0″, the Pew Internet & American Life Project researchers have noted a sharp increase in the use of Wikipedia. According to Jonathan Hochman, founder and lead consultant at Hochman Consultants, and an editor at Wikipedia, the free traffic driven by Wikipedia often converts better than Google pay-per-click traffic. Despite its current use of no-follow tags for outbound links, Wikipedia’s ability to generate high-quality traffic can be equal to or better than that of most search engines, as stated in a special report given at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.

But there are rules for engagement. Last summer AstraZeneca got in trouble for seeming to minimize the risk of Seroquel to teenagers by removing “Despite a general National Institutes of Health recommendation against its use in children or those under 18, as well as a known risk that teenagers taking the drug may be more likely to think about harming or killing themselves or to plan or try to do so,” from the Seroquel Wikipedia post.

Abbott also got in trouble deleting safety info from Abbott brand entries. According to Patients Not Patents over one thousand edits where made from computers at Abbott’s offices. This in an of itself is not a problem. In an article in the Wall Street Journal Abbott spokeswoman Kelly Morrison told the WSJ’s Avery Johnson that the deletion of the safety material was contrary to the company’s policy. “Abbott does edit very simple factual errors,” she said. “We make edits all the time for Abbott but we say we’re Abbott. We don’t advocate anonymous removal of safety information. We’re looking into this but it’s not our policy and not what we do.”

Wikipedia is not going away and it is not something to ignore. There are ways to respectfully add information into Wikipedia without being shunned by the community for integrating “advertising” into a resource. Pharma has information that is useful to the community and if entered respectfully will only help the resource become better. At the very least every brand manger should monitor their brand’s Wikipedia entry, seeing who is making updates to the brand’s entry by using wiki scanner, and if you or your agency make changes be sure to Play by the Rules.

Back in 2003, Jakob Nielsen was noticing the importance of niche sites. He observed that a niche site might not rank high in the overall Web popularity stakes, “but within their niche they dominate. A site that ranks as number 100,000 in the overall Web universe would still be the fifth largest within its niche: big enough to throw some weight around. Furthermore, niches have their own niches. Focusing on a highly targeted subtopic can make even a tiny site with a few hundred thousand page views stand out.”

For the pharma market, IMS data came out last year that said that overall growth in the market would be 5-6% in 2008. But for the niche therapies and specialty pharma, growth is expected to be 14-15% this year. This trend is likely to continue along with the push toward personalized medicine. More and more of the drugs coming through clinical trials now are not expected to be blockbusters, companies are looking to have three or four more targeted therapies where in the past they might have shot for one size fitting all. Part of the reason for the trend is to lower the risk of adverse reactions by making more tailored versions of each therapy.

Partly because of the vast explosion of information available and more and more new therapies, health care professionals are having a hard time keeping up with new information and applying it to patient care.

Patients are being pushed to take more control of their health care and now have the internet to help them become empowered. (This is a great story about an empowered patient using her librarian skills to find the right therapy for her nephew).

This has created a perfect storm of opportunity for pharma marketers to thoughtfully integrate search into their marketing strategy. Search engines are the #1 resource for those seeking health information. They are the point of entry for patients and, increasingly, for HCPs. Having a great search strategy is especially important for niche therapies who have to compete in a larger market. How do you stand out marketing a therapy for Diabetes type 1 if you have to compete for keywords with Diabetes type 2?

I think an answer can be found in appropriating concepts from The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. The Long Tail refers to a phenomenon caused by the rise of the internet where because the increasing flow of information, along with reduced distribution and inventory costs, a significant profit is possible through selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items.

This same principal can be applied to marketing niche therapies in pharma. So instead of marketing a smaller number of blockbusters through large volume channels like TV, we can use the algorithms of the internet to market niche products to small audiences.

I’m speaking on this subject at the Center for Business Intelligence conference later this week in Philadelphia at the Park Hyatt. Should be interesting.