Online Product Promotion: SAMHSA's Experience Using the Google Network to Implement a Targeted Ad Campaign and Develop Best Practices

Background:  SAMHSA’s Center for Substance Abuse Prevention created an innovative health resource titled, Top Health Issues for LGBT Populations Information & Resource Kit.  The kit was designed to educate health professionals, prevention specialists and LGBT audiences on their unique health issues. The challenge to SAMHSA was how to promote usage of this resource quickly to new intended audiences and make them aware of its existence within the SAMHSA Store.  Additionally, SAMHSA wanted to seize the opportunity to learn from this experience and create performance insights and best practices for product promotion.

Program background:  SAMHSA’s Center for Substance Abuse Prevention launched an advertising campaign to promote the kit.  Google was chosen because of its unique reach and ability to target multiple audiences.  The campaign targeted: health professionals, prevention specialists, and LGBT audiences.  The primary objective of the campaign was to raise awareness of and access to the resource among target audiences and understand which tactics offered the best opportunity to engage audiences.  The secondary objective was to test whether educating visitors unfamiliar with SAMHSA (the majority of the audiences the campaign would reach) would increase downloads of the kit more than a direct call to action to download the resource from the SAMHSA Store.  Tactics and approaches were unique to each audience and included: search advertising, contextual targeting, interest-based targeting and site targeting. Landing pages were developed for each audience in addition to the existing SAMHSA Store page.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  Google Networks provided metrics to assess results for advertising impressions and clicks. However, as a pilot test for the promotion of a new product, SAMHSA used the opportunity to test, learn and evaluate multiple program components that could be used for future product promotion. Evaluation set-up was done by coordinating multiple partners.  It required development of landing pages and tracking tools prior to campaign launch. Google analytics was a primary tool for evaluation. Results were collected by target audience and further broken out by tactic. The end result includes two separate actionable materials: 1) A list of three best practices for product promotion destination, e.g. Findings support sending users directly to a product page which increases the likelihood of download, and 2) A collection of six audience-specific performance insights using the Google network, e.g.  Using tailored text ads to reach health professionals resulted in lower cost, higher engagement, and higher product download rates than display ads

Conclusions:  While the product promotion yielded millions of branded impressions, thousands of visits and hundreds of downloads, the conclusions of this campaign are equally focused on the importance of testing and learning.  In today’s economic climate, it’s increasingly important to do more with less and use opportunities to learn about your target audience and apply knowledge to future campaigns.

Implications for research and/or practice:  Results from the SAMHSA campaign (six audience-specific performance insights and three best practices) will be shared. While they are specific to the SAMHSA products, they may be applied to other product promotions or used to apply to similar audiences.