Facebook Strategy for Patient Recruitment for Clinical Trials
There’s no doubt about it – Facebook is an extremely valuable medium for promoting your clinical trials to an audience of potential participants. And my experience over the last few years has convinced me there is no more effective method of attracting registrations than targeting people with your message using Facebook advertising.
But how should you go about devising and implementing your strategy for maximum returns? Here’s an outline of the process I recommend.
1) Facebook Ads Campaigns Structure
Facebook has 3 component levels in the way each account is set up – Campaign, Ad Set, Ad.
i) Campaign level is the top of the tree and is where you set your Campaign Objective.
For clinical trials patient recruitment this is likely to be registrations – whereby you receive people’s contact details in order to get back in touch with them to assess their suitability for specific trials. This can be achieved through sending traffic to a webpage on your site where they can fill in a form. In Facebook’s terms, this Campaign Objective is called ‘Conversions’ – where you track an action that people take on your site and can cross-reference it back to an individual ad.
Another possible Campaign Objective for generating registrations is what Facebook calls ‘Lead Generation’ – being based on using Facebook Lead Ads in which people can fill out their details on a form directly from Facebook itself, without having to leave the site. (More on this method of recruiting patients – https://www.rossjackson.co.uk/using-facebook-lead-ads-to-recruit-patients-for-clinical-trials/).
I recommend a combination of both webpage form Conversions and Facebook Lead Generation conversions until such time as you can determine which works best for your particular trials. (With Lead Ads often performing better after a while).
You will also set your Campaign Budget at this level – with Campaign Budget Optimization being the default setting within Facebook from September 2019 – as well as the Bid Strategy. I’ve found it generally makes sense to keep the Bid Strategy as the default Lowest Cost setting for as long as possible – though you may wish to experiment in a split test between different types of Bid Strategy if you feel confident to do so.
ii) Ad Set level is where you define your audience. For clinical trials we usually have certain characteristics that will be important for targeting:
– Age and gender (eg males aged 40+, males and females aged 25 – 55)
– Location (eg within a 30 – 50 mile radius of the trials site, for ease of travelling)
– Condition (eg asthma, Alzheimer’s)
Targeting your audience by the first 2 elements above is simply a matter of choosing the options from within the Ad Set settings. In order to try and target people with a specific condition, you’ll want to look at more detailed targeting by Interest.
For example, while Facebook doesn’t include Interests such as ‘People with Alzheimer’s’ – it does utilize its behavioural targeting capabilities to enable you to show your ads to people who are interested in such things as: ‘Alzheimer’s Society’, ‘Alzheimer’s Research UK’ etc. (Behavioural targeting essentially being based on Facebook’s knowledge of the websites people have visited and the Facebook Pages they have interacted with).
Be careful when specifying by Interest in too narrow a fashion, though. I’ve found that having Ad Sets based on simple demographic and location targeting can often outperform Ad Sets that include more detailed targeting by condition-based Interest – which you might expect to work best.
iii) Ad level is where you develop the actual Ads (or ‘creative’ as people in the marketing world like to call them).
It’s always best to have a range of different headlines, body copy, ‘Calls To Action’ and images that you can ‘mix and match’ against each other to determine which combination works best for your audience.
A couple of things you’ll come up against in the clinical trials sphere are:
– Ethics Approval. Whereby you need to gain approval from your Ethics Committee for the specific phrases and imagery you are allowed to use to promote your trials.
– Facebook Approval. Which is often more strict than an Ethics Committee (somewhat surprisingly, given how ‘anti-marketing’ most Ethics Committees appear to be!). Facebook has lots of regulations you’ll need to adhere to in the medical and health market – with different interpretations often being made by different reviewers. Such that you can find your previously-approved ads being disapproved during a re-review some days or even weeks down the line from them first going live. (Which happens more frequently than you’d expect or desire).
One key factor for ad content copy to get it through the Facebook approval process is to make sure you’re talking in general terms and being non-specific about any health issues that may affect the specific individual who’s viewing the ad.
For example, you should use a phrase such as ‘We’re looking for people diagnosed with asthma’, rather than ‘Do you have asthma?’. You should also steer clear of phrases such as ‘If you have asthma, we’re looking for you’.
2) Pixel Tracking
Having the Facebook Pixel setup correctly is one of the elements of Facebook advertising that can cause the biggest headache for people managing campaigns.
Ensuring that the Pixel is correctly in place on your website’s pages is the key to tracking registrations made on your site and where they came from. (The Pixel isn’t so important if you’re only going to be running Lead Ads – but it’s certainly a good idea to have it setup on your site correctly anyway).
More on setting up the Facebook Pixel here – https://www.facebook.com/business/help/952192354843755.
Despite what developers will tell you about utilising their fancy form submission code, I’ve found that the single most effective means of tracking registrations back to the advert that delivered the traffic is to make use of a Success Page. This is a page on your site that successful registrants are diverted to once they’ve filled in the form. (For obvious reasons, this type of page is also known as a Thank You Page – on which you thank people for registering their interest).
You should then ensure that the Facebook Pixel is setup to record a relevant Event on the Success Page (or utilise a Custom Conversion for the same effect) – which will then be referenced back to the relevant Campaign, Ad Set and Ad that sent the visitor to the site in the first place.
This is obviously a crucial factor in determining which of your Ads and Audiences are working best, so you can allocate your budget accordingly.
3) Ongoing Updates & Revisions – Split Testing
Also known as A/B Testing, Split Testing is a method for determining which combination of factors within Ads, Ad Sets or Audiences – or a combination of each of these – are delivering the maximum number of registrations.
The idea being to then pause the Ad, Ad Set or Audience which is not performing as well – thus delineating the better performers as the ‘Control’. You then create different Ads, Ad Sets or Audiences to compete with the ‘Controls’ – in a process called ‘Beat the Control’. If the new versions do win out in terms of performance, they become the ‘Control’ and the previous best-performer is paused while you try to beat the new ‘Control’ with another new version.
Repeating this process ongoing should see you deliver the maximum possible returns from your budget, with the best performer (‘Control’) always being live and in competition with a different version to see which comes off best.
Be wary of declaring a winner from your Split Testing too early, though. Facebook is very clever and very good at using its own internal algorithms to deliver best results for your bid strategy – so you should allow a decent enough length of time for the Ads, Ad Sets and Audiences to be live before deciding which are the current ‘Controls’. What constitutes a decent enough length of time will vary from project to project, but my recommendation is to consider 100 clicks as being a reasonable rule of thumb to start off with.
4) Monitoring for Audience Interaction
One of the factors that can affect your campaigns’ performance is the comments that people make on your ads when they see them on Facebook. With clinical trials it seems that many people are keen to proffer their ‘considered’ opinion as to the effectiveness or otherwise of the study being promoted.
For this reason, you may well see comments that reference ‘trials gone wrong’ from several years ago, or that feature anecdotes of disastrous personal experiences on trials that happened to ‘someone I know of’.
Responding to these comments in a timely fashion can help to curtail any potential negative reactions in the minds of others that might see them – which could lead to a downturn in performance for your ads.
My recommended method of responding to this kind of comment is to reply directly with a rebuttal and evidence of how safe and effective your trials process is. (In a friendly and professional manner, of course). This can help build up trust in your audience and lead to enhanced performance for your ads in the future.
Or you can simply use Facebook’s system to ‘hide’ the comments from the ads – meaning only the original commenter and their Facebook friends will be able to see it, which should prevent the vast majority of people you’re targeting from seeing it in the first place.
As well as the negative comments, of course, you may well find that some people are keen to say how marvellous your organisation is and what a great experience they had when taking part in a trial or attending one of your events or clinics.
Getting in contact with these people can help develop relationships with ‘patient advocates’ who may be willing to supply testimonials or share your trials information with other people they know.
Whether the comments are good or bad, however, the only way you’ll know about them is to monitor them ongoing. You can setup your Facebook Ads account to email you each time someone makes a comment on your ads – which you may find to be an effective method for alerting you to something you should respond to.
5) Continual Experimentation
One of the things that is essential for maintaining good results from Facebook Ads is to keep revising, updating and experimenting with different combinations of factors throughout the lifetime of the campaigns.
There are multiple reasons why even successful Ad Campaigns can stop working as well as they used to – so you need to be prepared to mitigate against this eventuality with different Campaigns based on targeting different audiences, using a different bid strategy, delivering different creatives etc.
(An interesting, if somewhat technical, overview of what Facebook calls the ‘Breakdown Effect’ – which is just one of the reasons your Campaigns can stop working as effectively as they used to – can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/business/m/one-sheeters/breakdown-effect).
While it is true that Facebook’s algorithms will work better the longer they are available to gather data, it’s also true that you may well have exhausted the ‘low hanging fruit’ in terms of conversions from your Campaigns early on in the process – thus requiring additional input and management to keep things working well over a period of time.
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen among Facebook advertisers is to ‘set and forget’ their Campaigns – assuming that the hard work goes into setting things up in the beginning. Whereas actually it’s the ongoing experimentation and management process that makes the difference between successful campaigns and those that underperform.
6) Swift and Effective Follow Up of Registrations
I’ve seen it time and time again with patient recruitment campaigns that people fill in the application form, then are left to wait for a follow up phone call for days and even weeks. This obviously doesn’t make for a good experience on the part of the potential patient. Plus it significantly reduces your chances of getting them enrolled onto the trial.
If you don’t have the capacity amongst your own staff to follow up the applications with a phone call – ideally straight away or at least the same day – I recommend you investigate a practice that is common to many lead generation industries. That is utilising the services of a call centre who will be able to handle your follow up calls swiftly and effectively. (Obviously taking account of any requirements you have for specific questions that need to be asked etc).
Facebook Ads Management Service for Patient Recruitment for Clinical Trials
If the steps outlined in the strategy above seem like hard work – get in touch for a quick chat about how I might be able to help generate registrations for your clinical trials using Facebook Ads.