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Every pharma brand is assiduously focused on how its digital properties are engaging users, both healthcare providers (HCPs) and patients alike. As the branded pharma experience moves increasingly online, brands’ inquiries into user engagement likewise have turned to website and content analytics.
At Ostro, across hundreds of strategy sessions and analytics readouts with brands and their agencies, we have encountered time and again the received wisdom that the more time a user spends on a brand’s website, the better. Indeed, many agencies serving pharma and life sciences brands recommend specific website features and changes designed to increase the time a visitor spends on the brand’s site. This wisdom rests on the assumption that time on site is a proxy for a user’s depth of engagement, demonstrating increasing interest and understanding or knowledge. Certainly, there are times when this positive correlation between time spent on a website and engagement holds true; but in our experience with brands working across an array of indications – rare disease, oncology, pulmonology, gastroenterology, women’s health, psychiatry, to name but a few – we’ve uncovered plenty of other times when that is simply not the case.
HCPs are enormously time-constrained – imagine, day after day, they have a scant handful of minutes to keep up to date on new therapeutic options, pressed as they are with the demands of an increasingly heavy and administratively complex patient load. Presented with a complex user interface without a consumerized flow, HCPs are left to navigate on their own and, ultimately, many may miss the key information, resources, or action that they need. After all, an HCP can’t unilaterally decide to extend her time searching through a site without sacrificing some other important task ahead, such as the next patient who is already waiting for her. For that HCP, minimizing the time spent on non-patient activities - not maximizing it - is quite clearly the goal. Take, for example, this 2019 study on the impact and efficacy of electronic health records (EHRs) by physicians: “[o]n a zero-to-100 scale of usability – the higher the better – every one-point boost in EHR usability was linked to a 3% lower odds of physician burnout, as measured using the Maslach Burnout Inventory.”
We therefore think time-on-site is a particularly poor metric for life sciences brands to use, particularly on HCP-facing websites. We have found that when pharma websites are designed with the primary aim of driving up user time spent on site, rather than focusing on specific actions that more directly speak to engagement, those sites can turn needlessly complex and confusing. Often it is the resulting complexity – the net result of too many resources, competing and confusing CTAs, and multi-click processes that gate the user’s sought-after key resources – and not a patient or HCP user’s sustained interest that is driving the increased time the user spends on site. Marketing analytics focused too narrowly on time-on-site or scroll rate will give you the same (apparent) data points, no matter whether our HCP user is mindlessly scrolling, lost and increasingly frustrated, or engrossed and moving meaningfully forward in their journey by taking tangible, helpful actions.
So what else – besides the proverbial clock – can reliably tell us whether a user is truly switched on and engaged with a pharma brand’s material?
The key distinction each brand ought to probe is between non-productive and productive engagement. Non-productive engagement describes actions that do not promote brand value and may actually detract from the intended brand experience. These include mindless browsing, overconsumption of content that is not relevant to the user’s journey, and negative interactions with a site. Broadly speaking, productive engagement includes efficient learning, consumption of relevant content, and positive interactions that advance the user journey, such as an HCP requesting to speak with a brand’s rep or a patient downloading a doctor discussion guide in advance of an appointment.
Every brand knows with absolute certainty what its aims are – brands spend significant resources mapping user personas and the “productive” steps that they hope those users take along their journeys – and therefore can deduce what counts as productive engagement, from the brand’s perspective, in each particular digital environment.
Typically, this is a joint exercise between brands, their agencies, and their technology partners – like Ostro – to identify the high-value actions (HVAs) for each user experience. This is a standard part of every implementation for us at Ostro, and across dozens of these implementations, we’ve learned two lessons that are key to this topic:
Armed with this information, at Ostro, we focus on building products that are optimized for a different time-based measurement: time to resource. In addition to supporting our customers’ specific HVAs, we work with brands and agencies to build products and design experiences that minimize the time it takes for the user to move between intention and action. In one use case, we found that in all high-volume HVAs, except one, users reached the key resource or action faster than when they navigated without Ostro’s help, with the time to resource improvement ranging from 17% to up to 76% faster for Ostro users when compared to other website users.
We’ve also done our own independent research, including working with HCPs in our product design process, and learned that for some users – and particularly doctors – a primary aim is speed and ease of access. These doctors do not want to maximize their time on the website; in fact, they want just the opposite. They want to minimize their time spent clicking and scrolling and be delivered as quickly as possible to the specific resource they have in mind so that they can immediately get back to their real work: caring for their patients.
Our friends at Melinta Therapeutics arrived at a similar conclusion when they conducted their own, separate feedback-based study surveying HCPs’ preferences between online and phone. One group of HCPs preferred to call. The reason? They don't have time to be on the site looking for information. The second group was the opposite: they preferred the website, as they didn’t have time to talk to someone on the phone. The clear insight was that both groups wanted their answers quickly. Matt Balogh, Melinta’s Head of Digital Marketing, summed it up: “We are not eCommerce or Social Media, so time on site is a good metric, but you want to keep in a “Goldilocks” zone – not too short that [the HCP] didn't find it useful and bounced, but short enough that your customers find what they are looking for quickly.”
Whether that’s through one-click surfacing of key resources customized by user persona, or intelligent and safe AI search that understands intent and eliminates user frustration, we have found that minimizing the time between a user’s arrival and the moment when they reach what they came there to find is the most successful strategy for boosting the HVAs that really matter. Even if it may come at the cost of a broader metric like overall time on site.
We are fortunate to work alongside peers and partners in life sciences who agree, and together we can sharpen our focus on HVAs and metrics that matter. “Choose your own adventure was a fun game when we were kids,” Derrick Gastineau of Currax Pharmaceuticals offered. “It’s less so when it comes to website user experience. AI capabilities continue to evolve and enable us to direct users to the information they are seeking more efficiently, creating a more positive website experience and increasing the likelihood they will engage in the HVAs that ultimately define success in website performance.” Echoing this sentiment, Genentech’s Justin Molavi envisions more collective effort: “[I]t would be great as an industry to get a solid handle on a well-defined set of HVAs that is a proxy for great engagement, followed by observable next step actions by user types (patient & HCP).”
What do you think – does time to resource resonate with you as a brand leader, a user, or both? And if you think it’s time to take another look at your user engagement, we’d be happy to chat.
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