The Challenge
This clinical research organization was relying entirely on organic and referral channels to recruit trial participants. Traditional patient recruitment through offline channels costs $6,000–$8,500+ per patient. They hadn’t considered digital paid media as a recruitment channel — and were paying the price in both cost and speed.
What We Did
We applied DTC performance tactics to clinical trial patient recruitment — a use case most performance agencies have never touched and that the healthcare industry has been slow to adopt.
The compliance requirements are real: healthcare advertising operates under strict platform policies and regulatory constraints that don’t apply to consumer product advertising. We built campaigns designed to meet those requirements while still performing like direct-response ads — with clear calls to action, precise audience targeting, and continuous optimization against cost-per-application.
Audience targeting focused on reaching people who matched the trial’s eligibility criteria: demographics, health interests, and behavioral signals that indicated potential fit. Creative was designed to be clear, trustworthy, and accessible — not clinical. The goal was to make participation feel approachable to someone who might never have considered joining a trial before.
The result: a $60 cost per qualified application, on a channel that traditional recruitment never accesses, against an industry baseline of thousands of dollars per patient.
The Results
- $60 CPA — per qualified patient application through paid media
- $3.89 CPC — highly efficient traffic acquisition for a specialized audience
- 1.1M impressions — broad reach into populations that match clinical trial eligibility
The Takeaway
Healthcare marketing doesn’t have to be expensive and slow. The same performance principles that make DTC advertising effective — precise targeting, creative that converts, continuous optimization — work in clinical recruitment. The compliance layer adds complexity; it doesn’t remove the efficiency opportunity.