There were two goals: bring quality traffic to the website through Meta advertising and increase reach on Instagram.
The category is a difficult one. A pharmacy customer rarely searches for a brand. They search for a solution to a symptom, and at that moment they choose between whatever the pharmacist recommends and something they have already heard of. So the job of advertising is not to catch the person at the moment of purchase but to be a familiar name before they reach the counter. That changes what the campaign needs: not a click at any price, but cheap and broad contact.
We rewrote the messages in the buyer's language. Not the properties of the product, but the situation a person recognises themselves in. Pharma is sensitive to tone: a promise to cure pushes people away, a calm explanation works.
We built a visual style around trust. The creatives were made to suggest care rather than selling. In this category the image carries half the decision.
We went beyond social media: alongside Meta we used YouTube and search on symptom-based queries. A person with a symptom searches in their own words, not by the name of a medicine.
We set up geotargeting on shoppers near pharmacies and, separately, on an e-commerce audience. Two different purchase scenarios mean two different campaigns.
We optimised the whole funnel, from first touch to purchase, rather than only the top of it.
On a budget of $4,250 the campaigns produced 3,600,533 reach and 180,016 clicks. The cost per click was $0.025, CTR was 5% and CPM was $1.18.
A click price like that usually invites disbelief. It comes not from a clever setting but from three things coinciding: a broad and relevant audience, a creative that does not look like advertising, and modest competition for impressions.
The cost per click and the CPM do not transfer. In a category with dense competition for impressions the same actions will produce different figures.
The measurement logic transfers. If your product is bought on the advice of a pharmacist, a doctor or a shop assistant, advertising works on recognition at the moment of that advice rather than on a direct sale. Measuring it by enquiries makes no sense: the right metrics are reach and cost of contact. And symptom-based queries are almost always cheaper than brand ones, because nobody competes for them.
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