A quick guide to campaign benchmarking in pharma
Are you struggling to understand what media budget you need for your paid campaign? Proper benchmarking is the key to assessing and optimising your pharmaceutical campaigns.
5 mins | 26/09/2024Key takeaways
- By collecting the right metrics for your campaigns over time, you can create predictable and achievable benchmarks
- Benchmarking can be used to both assess and forecast campaign performance
- Be sure to track the right metrics per channel, and remove outliers from your benchmark calculations
What is a campaign benchmark?
As the world of digital healthcare communications shifts to omnichannel, it can be hard to determine which ads and channels are driving the most value, and how to split your budget accordingly. That's where campaign benchmarking comes in.
A campaign benchmark is a metric by which you can predict and judge the performance of your future campaigns.
Benchmarking is all about collecting the right metrics for your campaigns over time. This data will allow you to create predictable and achievable benchmarks, by which you can optimise your campaigns and plan budgets to help you hit your goals.
What benchmarks should I track per channel?
In the pharmaceutical space, marketers use different channels for different purposes.
For example, you might place a leaderboard or MPU ad on a medical website purely for awareness and recognition purposes. You want your audience to see and absorb your message, but you don't necessarily need them to click through to further content for your ad to have been a success.
A third-party email designed to drive traffic through to a webinar sign-up page might be designed solely around maximising click-through.
Tracking benchmarks and measuring success will look very different for these two channels, even if they both feed into the same campaign, or contribute to the same overall goal of raising disease awareness.
So, here's our list of the key metrics to track for each channel in your pharmaceutical marketing toolbox:
| Campaign objective | Scenario example | Channel | Metric (These need to be consistently tracked to start to create benchmarks) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness / in-channel engagement | Challenge: Establishing credibility and trustworthiness within the CRM (cardiorenal metabolic) space Solution: Position company as leaders in collaboration/partnering, with particular focus on CRM | Paid media Paid social (Meta, LinkedIn, X, TikTok) Paid Google (YouTube) HCP display / email HCP programmatic HCP ePDFs Earned media Peer advocacy | Impressions / Cost (CPM) Video views / Conversion rate / Cost Ad engagement / Conversion rate / Cost |
| Drive traffic and engage in content | Challenge: Delayed diagnosis due to lack of disease awareness Solution: Increase awareness of disease signs and symptoms and educate audiences on importance of diagnoses and referral | Paid media Paid social (Meta, LinkedIn, X, TikTok) Paid Google (Search, display, YouTube, PMax) HCP display / email HCP programmatic HCP ePDFs Owned media Head Quarter (HQ) emails Rep / field team emails Earned media Peer advocacy | Traffic Open / Conversion rate / Cost Link clicks / Conversion rate (CTR) / Cost (CPC) Engagement Viewed key content / Conversion rate / Cost Visited 2 or more pages / Conversion rate / Cost Visited 3 or more pages / Conversion rate / Cost 2 mins or more onsite / Conversion rate / Cost 3 mins or more onsite / Conversion rate / Cost Scroll 90% depth of page / Conversion rate / Cost File download / Conversion rate / Cost Site search / Conversion rate / Cost |
| Increase event sign-ups / eConsent | Challenge: Limited access to target HCPs Solution: Increase and accelerate the number of omnichannel customer relationships (eConsents) | Paid media Paid social (Meta, LinkedIn, X, TikTok) Paid Google (Search, display, YouTube, PMax) HCP display / email HCP programmatic Owned media HQ emails Rep / field team emails Earned media Peer advocacy | Registrations / Conversation rate / Cost HCP verified registrations / Conversation rate / Cost eConsent gathered / Conversation rate / Cost Attendance / Conversation rate / Cost (The above further segmented by job title) |
How to benchmark your campaigns
Benchmarking is an ongoing process. To set yourself up for success, we recommend creating a benchmarking template in Excel that will be quick and intuitive to populate after every campaign.
Your Excel workbook should contain a tab for each campaign objective you want to track, such as lead generation or traffic-driving.
Within each tab, populate your spreadsheet with your historical campaign data, and apply filters that will allow you to segment your area by campaign-defining factors like therapy area, market, and target audience. For example, your filters should allow you to see only data for neurology campaigns targeting GPs in the UK.
Bonus tip: To more easily visualise your campaign performance and benchmarks, ditch Excel and ask your tech department to develop a custom dashboard!
Once you've finished inputting the results from all your previous campaigns into your spreadsheet, you can use this data to work out average performance across your campaign activity.
By adding performance data to this spreadsheet regularly, you can establish a living document that allows you to set attainable goals for your future campaigns based on previous performance.
How does benchmarking differ from rolling averages?
Great question! Benchmarking differs from rolling averages in a couple of key ways. As benchmarking is primarily used to measure or forecast campaign performance, marketers should be careful to remove outlier results from previous campaigns.
We recommend removing the bottom 5% and the top 5% of all campaigns you use. Be careful to use enough campaign data to take reliable averages as well – a minimum of 10 relevant historical campaigns should go into a benchmark calculation.
Skewed or insufficient data could result in future campaign over-spend, so keep a close eye on the data you're inputting in your calculations!
Using benchmarks to understand campaign performance
After you've completed a campaign, check your performance report data against the benchmarks in your spreadsheet. How well did you perform against your objectives? Record your latest results in the spreadsheet, and note down any learnings for future campaigns.
Also, don't just wait for your campaign to finish before you open your spreadsheet. During a campaign, use your benchmarks to continuously optimise your campaign and make adjustments.
For example, if your campaign's click-through rate (CTR) falls significantly below the benchmark (e.g. 0.3% vs 1%), you may need to enhance the value proposition or creative.
Don't forget! Optimising on the go helps you to make the best use of your budget, and without benchmarks, you may not know when to jump in and make changes.
How benchmarks can forecast campaign performance
Benchmarks aren't just useful for contextualising campaign performance. They can also help you to plan and budget your next campaigns.
How is this done? Let me tell you.
Start by selecting the metrics you want to track for your new campaign. The metrics chosen will differ depending on the objectives. For example, a webinar campaign might aim to increase event registrations and attendance, as well as eConsent, so these will be the main metrics you'll want to track, alongside impressions and ad clicks.
Next, look at your spreadsheet to identify benchmarks for these metrics based on previous campaign performance. To do this, take averages of your performance metrics from previous similar campaigns, accounting for outliers of course.
Our example webinar campaign benchmarks might look a little something like this:
- Media budget: £5,000
- Impressions: 1,000,000 (benchmark cost per 1k impressions: £5)
- Clicks: 10,000 (CTR benchmark: 1%)
- Registrations: 500 (conversion rate [CR] benchmark: 5%)
- Verified HCP registrations: 210 (CR benchmark: 42%)
- eConsent: 105 (CR benchmark: 50%)
- Attendance: 63 (CR benchmark: 30%)
Let's say your objective for your next webinar campaign is to deliver a minimum of 100 attendees and secure 200 eConsents.
Simply use the benchmarks above to work out how much you need to spend to secure these results. If a media budget of £5,000 secured 105 eConsents in the past, then to secure 200 eConsents, you'll need a budget of £10,000. It's as simple as that.
Benchmarking can help you save money, time, and anxiety when planning and predicting your campaigns. If you don't currently benchmark, now is the time to start.
