Importance of OTC brand websites is overestimated
pharma relations, Healthcare Marketing and health.reminder reported on the new Bonsai study.
Over 90 percent of online shoppers of OTC/over-the-counter products do not use their websites at all on the path to purchase. But 93 percent of OTC online shoppers use Google on their Path to Purchase (although only 24 percent report this in surveys). The trade press reports on our new meta-study on the actual behavior of OTC online shoppers.
"The results show: It makes sense for pharmaceutical companies to invest more in search engine marketing," pharma relations quotes Bettina Mertens-Danowski, Head of Bonsai Health: "A lot of budget often goes into optimizing the brand website, which is not found by online shoppers due to a lack of SEO and is therefore not used."
Bettina Mertens-Danowski, Head of Bonsai Health, and Jasmin Pampuch, Head of Bonsai Shopper Research
And Healthcare Marketing writes: "Bonsai had conducted a meta-study to map what online shoppers actually do online. This is based on more than 50 analyses with over 500 million data points from the period 2021-2023. A Bonsai baseline study from 2021 with a survey of OTC shoppers on their online behavior serves as a comparison. Bettina Mertens-Danowski, Head of Bonsai Health, explains the overall approach: "In our baseline study, in addition to an online survey with category shoppers, we also collected their online behavior via metering. Here, the participants were selected based on their online behavior - purchases in the OTC category - and then took part in a survey about the purchase. Part of the survey also involved naming different touchpoints that were used on the path to purchase. This was then compared with the behavioral data measurement of the same people. In the case of advertising, contacts with corresponding online ads were evaluated."
health.reminder emphasizes in its report: "When it comes to the perception of advertising, the actual online behavioral data also differs significantly from survey results (say-do gap)." Only twelve percent of shoppers say in surveys that they have seen online advertising of the OTC product - in reality it is four times as many (48 percent). Jasmin Pampuch, Head of Bonsai Shopper Research, explains in pharma relations: "The reason for the serious differences between what OTC shoppers say and what they actually do is easy to explain. Shoppers of OTC products do so much research online that they are unable to reflect the details of their search in surveys at all or only inadequately."