Can creative analytics solve your D2C paid search headache?

Digitalisation has forever changed how we engage with healthcare. With information, advice, and support now just a click away, we are better informed, more able to self-diagnose, and able to access treatment more easily than ever before.

For pharma companies, this has meant embracing digital transformation projects - and implementing change at pace - in order to ensure that they are able to effectively communicate with patients, as well as HCPs. And, while your product may be beautifully designed, with customer-centricity at its heart, new digital products can only be successful if people know about them.

With so much information - and misinformation - out there across news, blogs, and social media, marketing digital products and services is challenging, especially given that many pharma brands rely on third-party retailers. As a result, most companies have little to no data that can be used for media attribution and analysis, which often means that their paid search is less effective than it could be.

Without this data, many companies struggle to secure reliable and accurate data to illustrate results and ROI on their paid search activity. This data can also be used to test new campaigns or content and identify the most effective strategy to meet your objectives. At a time when most departments are under increased scrutiny due to the economic climate, being able to demonstrate quantifiable results also makes it easier to secure budget.

Bringing creativity into analytics

There is always pressure to enhance performance, and insights from fifty-five’s latest project with Bayer, for example, suggest that marketers could be looking in the wrong place. Traditional analytics methodologies for evaluating campaigns are becoming obsolete. While digital media reports have always offered extensive metrics on media channel and placement performance, they have struggled to provide convincing insights about creative performance.

As a result, marketers have typically overlooked and oversimplified the contribution of creative results in campaign insights: strategy over content. Understanding not only which websites offered the best value for money, but also which creative elements worked best on those sites, and why, is critical to gain an accurate picture of a campaign’s success and to identify areas for optimisation and improvement.

Evolving and modernising marketing by shifting to audience-first advertising and creating personalised experiences for a target audience can drive higher engagement and deliver better results. But don’t forget the importance of analytics. By using a cloud-based aggregation of marketing and creative data, leveraging the AI-based capabilities of Google’s GCP toolset, for example, fifty-five created a range of business intelligence (BI) suites that deliver actionable data. After all, effectiveness comes from an understanding of the dynamics between creative work and the media environment, providing direction for improvement.

Sharing insights for optimisation

For creative analytics to truly be effective, it is important to ensure that the data is constantly updated via automation – and, more importantly, the data must be applied to ongoing and future marketing campaigns. In a large organisation, every brand in every market should be able to benefit from the insights gleaned from others - both successes and failures - so that performance can be improved across the board.

A new platform for creative analytics means that global and local teams, along with media and creative agency partners, have access to global shareable insights across DV360, YouTube, and Meta. An automated dashboard also provides a comprehensive view of the display and video creatives used, and insights into additional KPIs such as Brand Uplift and CreativeX scores. With clear, data-driven feedback, teams can identify best practices and improve performance.

Having a platform available for teams means nothing if they do not know how to use it, though. Building in time for training and onboarding, so that teams know how to leverage the insights, is therefore essential for the success of a project, and to further improve campaign performance from both a media and creative perspective.

Training delivered as part of a project means teams are able to hit the ground running, and start evolving their strategies in line with the insights gleaned.

Don’t underestimate the impact of creativity

The role of the creative in delivering results cannot be understated - but until recently it has been challenging to prove that personalisation or tailoring makes a difference. With the AI-based analysis companies can receive via creative analytics, they can revolutionise their marketing campaigns, and put data at the heart of digital marketing investments.