• by Aaron Baar , October 10, 2008

It would seem that online advertising works when it comes to pharmaceutical marketing. According to comScore, the most-visited pharmaceutical brand Web sites during the second quarter of 2008 were also the ones that had large marketing presences as well. 

People are looking online for their health-care needs," John Mangano, senior director of comScore's Pharmaceutical Marketing Solutions practice, tells Marketing Daily. "It's clear the more you market, the more [consumers are] going to your site."

AstraZeneca's Purplepill.com, the Web site for heart treatment Nexium, had the most traffic for the quarter with more than one million unique visitors--an increase of 55% from the previous year. According to Mangano, AstraZeneca ran twice as much online display advertising in the second quarter as its competitors.

"This additional marketing muscle appears to have helped generate strong site visitation, a very important marketing step in the competitive pharmaceutical industry," he says.

Takeda Pharmaceuticals' Actos had the second-most visited site, with 855,000 unique visitors--up from 34,000 in the previous year. Takeda began marketing the diabetes drug in the third quarter of 2007, which carried over to interest in the second quarter of 2008. Merck's diabetes medication Januvia, which also increased marketing activity in the second half of 2007, saw a 329% jump in unique visitors, from 118,000 to 507,000 in year-to-year comparisons.

Similarly, medications such as Pfizer's Lyrica, which treats fibromyalgia, saw a jump of 36% to 501,000 unique visitors in the second quarter on the heels of the company's extensive marketing and public relations effort since receiving FDA approval last year. In addition, Topamax, a migraine treatment nearing patent expiration, launched a significant online ad campaign to bolster awareness. The result was a 38% increase in site traffic during the second quarter, according to Mangano.

Conversely, Gardasil, Merck's HPV vaccine that was highly publicized after its FDA approval in late 2006, saw traffic drop off 21% in the second quarter of 2008, compared with the same period a year ago. However, with 722,000 unique visits, the site was the fourth most-visited site in the quarter.

With the ability to convey deeper and more thorough messages, Mangano says increased Web activity and Web marketing increases sales of specific medications. "We can directly attribute online marketing against increased prescription activity," he says.