Case Study · Clinical Trial Media
Ten days after our knee study went live, CTM asked us to pause it. Their call center couldn’t keep up.
Clinical Trial Media recruits patients for drug trials on behalf of pharmaceutical sponsors. In November 2018 they gave Sociallyin one study to see what Facebook could do. Twelve months later we had run recruitment for more than 60 studies and brought in 102,880 patient leads from Facebook.
Illustration: the lead counts and costs are the study’s own, the queue is drawn.
- 102,880patient leads from Facebook in the first 12 months
- 60+studies recruited in year one
- $1.81Min ad spend managed in year one
Leads from Facebook · Spend on Facebook and Google · December 2018 to November 2019
01 · One Study, November 2018
The first brief was one memory-loss study and $15,000.
CTM has worked for clinical trial sponsors since 1995. A trial lives or dies on enrollment: every site needs a steady line of people who fit the protocol, live within driving distance and are willing to make the first call. CTM bought most of that attention the traditional way.
Our first proposal, in November 2018, was small on purpose: one memory-loss study, a $3,500 setup fee and up to $15,000 in ad spend. The ads went live on November 21.
While you were out
First proposal · November 2018
- Study
- one memory-loss study
- Setup
- a $3,500 setup fee
- Ad spend
- up to $15,000
- Ads live
- November 21
What a trial needs is the right person near the right site filling in a pre-screen this week.
02 · Thirty-Three Sites
We ran the knee study as 33 local campaigns.
The test that changed the account came in January 2019: osteoarthritis of the knee, 33 trial sites across the US, $20,000 over 21 days. That is about $606 a site.
Each of the 33 sites got its own audience, 25 miles around its address, and its own Google Sheet, so every lead landed with the site that could call it back. We made a 37-second video for the study and ran it next to still ads, and we reported leads site by site and ad by ad.
- Site 01
- Site 02
- Site 03
- Site 04
- Site 05
- Site 06
- Site 07
- Site 08
- Site 09
- Site 10
- Site 11
- Site 12
- Site 13
- Site 14
- Site 15
- Site 16
- Site 17
- Site 18
- Site 19
- Site 20
- Site 21
- Site 22
- Site 23
- Site 24
- Site 25
- Site 26
- Site 27
- Site 28
- Site 29
- Site 30
- Site 31
- Site 32
- Site 33
- 33 trial sites
- $20,000 over 21 days
- about $606 a site
03 · February 4, 2019
885 leads in three days, at $3.41 each.
The knee ads launched around January 25. By January 28 the study had 885 leads at $3.41 each, and CTM’s lead-routing account hit its 3,000-task monthly limit and had to be upgraded. By January 31 the count was 1,321 leads at $3.24. The cheapest site was getting them for $1.59.
- Jan 25LaunchKnee ads launch, around January 25
- Jan 26
- Jan 27
- Jan 28885leads at $3.41 each. 3,000-task monthly limit hit
- Jan 29
- Jan 30
- Jan 311,321leads at $3.24. Cheapest site $1.59
- Feb 1
- Feb 2
- Feb 3
- Feb 4PauseCTM asks us to pause
On February 4, CTM’s senior media buyer wrote to us:
“You’re doing an awesome job on this campaign; however we need to pause the campaign for a day or two until the call center can catch up on the leads being generated!”
We paused.
Three days before that email, CTM had raised the knee budget from $20,000 to $50,000 and added sites. Across all its studies, CTM’s Facebook spend with us went from $16,638 in January 2019 to $53,756 in February and $72,369 in March.
Knee study budget
CTM’s Facebook spend with us, all studies, 2019
04 · Sixty Studies
The knee study set the pattern for the studies after it.
Over the next two and a half years we ran recruitment for knee osteoarthritis, hives, eczema, psoriasis, acne, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, migraine and memory loss, among others, for sites in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Europe. Some ran in Spanish and French as well as English.
- Sponsored
Hives, Instagram ad, 2020. No face shown.
Psoriasis, the ad as it ran in the Facebook feed, 2019.
- Sponsored
Hives, recruitment video, 2020. Stock models.
- Sponsored
Recruitment portrait, 2020. Stock model.
Each study got several ads, and the budget moved toward the sites and ads that filled forms. The spread between ads in one study can be enormous. By April 2021, on one treatment-resistant hypertension study, a hard population to find, the best ad was bringing in sign-ups at $55.86. Others in the same study ran from $92.88 to $1,951.96.
Cost per sign-up by ad, one hypertension study, April 2021
05 · December 2018 to November 2019
The first twelve months, from our December 2019 review with CTM.
- 102,880 leads from Facebook ads
- 518,937 clicks on Facebook ads
- 162,873 clicks on Google ads, at an average of $1.74 a click
- $1,526,120 in Facebook spend and $284,040 in Google spend: $1.81M in allFacebookGoogle
- 60+ studies
A lead is a person who saw an ad for a study, recognized themselves in it and filled in the pre-screen. Turning that person into an enrolled patient happened in CTM’s call center, the part of the process we kept filling up.
The account ran until the summer of 2021.
06 · What the Phones Taught Us
Moving money between sites as well as between ads.
The knee plan set a rule we kept: seven days in, budget moved from the sites that weren’t filling to the sites that were. In the same study, one site filled for $1.59 a lead and another for $6.08. A national average would have hidden both.
Cost per lead at two knee study sites
The campaign that taught us the most was the one the client asked us to pause.
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