Building Social Audiences To Improve Clinical Trial Recruitment

The Challenge

An innovative pharmaceutical company collaborates with ADM on clinical trial recruitment campaigns for an investigative condition-specific medication. Clinical trial recruitment requires a large volume of high-quality leads, and Meta advertising is often a valuable tool for bringing in the trial subjects that healthcare companies need. In the first half of 2022, however, the pharmaceutical company’s Meta campaigns were under-pacing. Cost-per results were high, leading them to fall slightly short of their goal of 70 connect to site (CTS) conversions per month. With a capped budget, spending our way to more conversions would not be an option.

The Solution

Needing to increase efficiency, ADM’s solution was to “stack” audiences that had proven fruitful in past testing in order to create a larger audience that gave Meta more information to optimize from. The audience was created by stacking past website visitors, page viewers, and social media engagers into a single audience. While segmenting these audiences can give more granular control of the budget or messaging each receives, in a post-iOS-update world, finding ways to broaden targeting often leads to better results.

By stacking effective retargeting audiences atop each other, Meta’s machine learning was given more data to quickly and accurately learn the user tendencies that would best predict a fit for the program. This allowed them to spread awareness to potential patients about a clinical trial that may prove beneficial to them.