Using Data Analysis to Shape Your Media Strategy

My colleague Don recently wrote a blog post about the importance of doing reporting and analysis throughout the course of a patient recruitment campaign for a clinical trial. As a data analyst, I could not agree more!

One of my first enrollment campaign analyses illustrated the importance of analyzing enrollment data. As part of this final analysis of a recruitment campaign for a clinical trial involving patients with multiple sclerosis, we compared advertising costs per referral in different-sized markets.

Historically, when it comes to broadcast media advertising, we have seen the best return on investment in mid-sized markets. This makes intuitive sense: The effort (i.e., cost) needed to turn up patients with a rare condition in a city of 100,000 can be enormous. Planning a media buy in large markets, such as the New York metropolitan area, in order to recruit for a study site on Long Island can be equally expensive.

For this particular multiple sclerosis trial, a first look at media advertising costs showed a fairly linear “dose-response” relationship between market size and costs per referral:

Cost per referral - Offline advertising only

However, when digital advertising referrals and costs were added in to the analysis, the relationship between cost per referral and DMA population weakened considerably:

Cost per referral - Both online and offline advertising

This indicated that digital advertising tactics were very cost-effective for the enrollment campaign, regardless of the target markets’ population size.

Looking exclusively at cost per online referral by population size confirmed that digital advertising yielded a fairly consistent cost per referral regardless of market size:

Cost per referral - Online advertising only

This small analysis confirmed that digital advertising can be a smart advertising choice for very large markets, not only for multiple sclerosis, but also for a variety of other therapeutic conditions. All the more reason why incorporating data analysis into your decision-making process leads to more cost-effective enrollment campaigns!