Have you ever found yourself struggling to justify your results? Having to explain that the engagement you generated is actually really great?
Benchmarks give you a target to aim at, a guide to know if your campaigns are succeeding or failing.
However, digital marketing can provide a LOT of metrics and numbers and not all of these numbers are equally valuable.
It’s important that you define what success looks like for each campaign. For example, the success of a branding campaign will look quite different to one targeted at engagement or education.
Let us help you prove your campaigns are successful. Or, why you might need to pause and review the campaign to improve results.
Defining Success – the Main benchmarks by channel
Within each channel, there are several metrics to define success. Our article gives you some of the main benchmarks to look at for different channels, but you need to make sure you are focusing on the ones that align with your campaign goal.
Here are some of the main metrics in this article:
| Click Through Rate (CTR) | The percentage of users who click on an ad or link out of the total number of users who view the ad or link (impressions) |
| Cost Per Click (CPC) | The amount of money an advertiser pays for each click on their ad. It is a common metric in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising models |
| Cost Per Lead (CPL) | The cost incurred to generate a lead, where a lead is typically a potential customer who has expressed interest in the product or service |
| Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) | The cost associated with acquiring a new customer or completing a specific action, such as a purchase or sign-up. It measures the total cost of acquiring one customer (similar to CPL, but further down the funnel) |
| Cost Per Mille (CPM) | The cost per thousand impressions. It measures the cost of showing the ad one thousand times to potential customers. |
| Engagement Rate | The level of engagement that a piece of content receives from an audience, expressed as a percentage. It includes actions such as likes, comments, shares, and clicks – depending on the platform |
| Conversion Rate | The percentage of users who take a desired action out of the total number of users who see an ad. This desired action can be a purchase, form submission, download, etc. |
Emails
Email is a channel that is welcomed by the HCP and salesforce alike! It is one of the most important channels pharma companies can use to engage with HCPs!
The following benchmarks are related to your own direct emails. eBlasts from larger providers (eg EMJ or congress marketing) may have different metrics based on their own branding.
Many pharma companies still don’t utilize the channel to its maximum potential. Discover how to exploit the full potential of email marketing
Google Ads
Display Ads
Display ads (mostly banner ads) are shown to users across 2 million+ websites, videos and apps that are part of the GDN (Google Display Network).
If you aim to increase brand awareness, then banner ads, particularly in industry-specific locations (like medical websites) can be helpful. However, as you will see with the benchmarks, numbers are low for engagement (clicks).
Google Search Ads
With a highly defined target market searching for industry-specific keywords Paid Search can be a cost-effective way to drive traffic.
In our opinion the CTR mentioned above seems low. We would expect a correctly set up PPC (where you have top position) to have a CTR around 10%. Perhaps this just shows how many poorly set up Google PPC campaigns there are?
Medical Journals
Important: While banner ads on medical journals are the old reliable of pharmaceutical marketing, benchmarks are very difficult to get. The reason is that these medical journals are not part of the GDN and advertising options are usually discussed directly with the journal or with specialised platforms such as PubGrade.
Below are a few benchmarks that we gathered from our experience with medical journal ads, for standard banners such as “landscape” or “MPU”. Results are usually higher with interstitial ads, but few medical journals offer those.
Note: As the ad formats offered by these journals are similar to the ones from Google Display Ads, you can also refer to the benchmarks listed above to get an idea of what to aim for.
Benchmarks based on our experience:
Due to the fast pace of the platform, Twitter (X) posts generally get low engagement. But keep in mind that Twitter (X) is the favourite platform of HCPs to interact with patients. It offers a unique opportunity for pharma companies to get involved in “three-party” conversations with them.
Organic Posts
As with all things, the post format makes a significant difference. Posts with photos have the highest engagement rate on Twitter.
Paid Posts
With paid/sponsored posts you define an audience for your posts while organic posts rely on the interest of your existing audience. It is also usual for a paid/sponsored post to reach more users than an organic post. It is, after all, in Twitter’s interest to show paid posts.
When it comes to targeting specific professions and specialities, no public social network offers the level of precision of LinkedIn, which allows for very targeted and personalised ads (eg. You can easily target dermatologists in France).
Aside from targeted ads, LinkedIn is definitely not the platform of choice to reach patients, but it is a top network for B2B communications and generating organic HCP engagement.
Engagement
Once again we see a wide variety of engagement rates depending on ad format. As with many social media networks, videos are becoming increasingly popular.
Paid posts
Average:
Single image ad:
Video ad:
Carousel ad:
Message ad:
Often neglected by pharma marketers, Instagram and its visual power is a great platform for content that should connect on an emotional level, storytelling and infographics. It is also a powerful tool to humanize a brand, by sharing behind-the-scenes stories, for example.
Facebook used to be a great platform for paid advertising as it offered good targeting features. But while targeting capabilities are still powerful, it got worse as, in 2022, they removed some detailed targeting options, including “health causes” (eg. “Lung cancer awareness”).
Nevertheless, Facebook still offers unparalleled reach as it remains the most “popular” social network with more than 3.065 Billion monthly active users.
Traffic ad:
Lead ad:
Webinars
We love webinars at phamax Digital. Despite hearing a lot about “webinar fatigue” among physicians, we believe it is an under-utilised tool with plenty of potential for engagement and lead generation.
Interesting fact: The pharmaceutical industry is a leading player with the highest webinar attendance rate (people who watch the webinar after signing up)!
Live vs On-demand
For time-poor HCPs it’s also important to look at the difference between Live webinars (with the benefit of interaction) vs on-demand webinars which can be watched at a more convenient time.
With 55% of the attendees only watching on-demand webinars, you should definitely offer an on-demand replay of your webinars.
Videos
Okay, this is more a support than a channel, but videos are increasingly used to reach prospects (video creation increased by 178% in 2021 – with a dip in 2023, probably due to tighter budgets).
But in a world where viewers are increasingly busy, marketers must understand that viewer engagement (in this case, retention) isn’t going to be the same if the video is 1 minute long or 20 minutes long. The same logic applies for the runtime of the video since retention decays as the video goes on.
Video production
Video Engagement and attention span
The main benchmarks to look at for your video content is the engagement for different lengths of video.
Note: In this case, the engagement rate refers to the percentage of a video that a viewer watches.
These benchmarks are important not only to understand how your video content performs, but also to create better videos and ensure the key elements you want to communicate reach the highest number of viewers.
Engagement rate:
Average time watched:
Go and prove your success!
With clearly defined benchmarks you can adapt your digital marketing campaign to focus resources and budget on those channels which are succeeding and reduce spending or modify where campaigns aren’t working.
Make sure the benchmarks you’re using apply to your market and geographic area.
Generally speaking, when targeting HCPs, your target market will be small and specialised. So your benchmarks need to be appropriate for your audience size in your target region on that particular platform.
Now you have the facts and figures you can review your quarterly reports and quickly see what’s working and what isn’t. So you can review and respond to double down on your success.
