Today’s economic turmoil is forcing many companies to trim their advertising budgets. With fewer resources it is becoming even more critical for marketers to be able to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. This is one reason spending on search marketing – the most quantifiable channel – is continuing to grow despite the downturn.

As we do each quarter, we’ve just analyzed how well the top eleven pharmaceutical companies ranked in Q4 2008 on the Search Engine Results Pages of the major sites. We were curious to see if the current climate would be reflected in our results.

We applied basic search marketing analysis to brands that exist in the highly competitive and intensely regulated pharmaceutical industry.

We looked at the top five brands of each company (based on revenue) and searched for four keyphrases for each brand: “[indication]” and “[indication] treatment” and “[indication] medication” and “[indication] symptoms.”

Then we recorded each brand’s website rankings for each keyphrase on Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask. (You can see the complete process below). Their scores indicate whether a brand appeared on page 1, 2, 3 or lower when a searcher specifically looked for their indication.

Our goal with this quarterly analysis, as with most SEO campaigns, is to find out which pharmaceutical companies are claiming valuable marketing “real estate” and sustaining these high rankings over time. Our results, consistent with previous analyses, show a big gap in rankings between those at the top and those lower results. The economy hasn’t made a dent in their successful SEO.

Here are our results:

• The same three companies have kept their top scores since we began this analysis in January 2007: Novartis, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline. But for the first time, this quarter Pfizer (1.27) has edged out Novartis (1. 20) for the #1 spot.
• Although it appears these three have mastered the art of producing superior SEO rankings, keep in mind that a perfect score is a 7.0. There is plenty of SEO opportunity even for the leaders.
• Pfizer leads with brands Lipitor, Lyrica and Viagra posting strong results, including nine results in the Top Five.
• Novartis has four out of five brands posting strong results on all search engines, including seven rankings in the Top Five. For some reason their breast cancer drug Femara is not ranking well.
• GSK (.71) is #3 with Advair, Avandia and Valtrex ranking well and five Top Five rankings.
• For the third quarter in a row Roche (.56) holds the #4 spot with one strong brand, Rituxan, that scores well to bump it into the top 4.
• Johnson & Johnson (.52) is only a few points behind at #5.
• AstraZeneca (.32) leaps into #6 this quarter with Sanofi Aventis (.26) close behind.
• Merck (.28) falls to #8 with only its cholesterol drug Vytorin ranking.
• Bristol-Myers Squibb (.17) is in position #9.
• Wyeth (.05) and Eli Lilly (.01) continue to trail, with virtually no web presence at all for their top five brands.

Methodology:

We developed the methodology below.

• Compiled data between January 5-9, 2009
• Examined top 5 brands produced by top 11 companies based on revenue from financial statements provided by each company
• Searched four keyphrases for each brand: “[indication]” and “[indication] treatment” and “[indication] medication” and “[indication] symptoms”
• Recorded each brand’s website rankings for each keyphrase on Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask
• Assigned each ranking a point value based on Search Ranking Score: Top 5 Ranking = 15 points; First Page Ranking = 10 points; Second Page Ranking = 3 points; Third Page Ranking = 1 point; Not Listed on First Three Pages = 0 points
• Identified each search engine’s market share based on HitWise November 2008 U.S. Search Engine Rankings
• Calculated each company’s index score using Index = (Search Ranking Score * Search Engine Market Share)/11
• A perfect score = 7.0

Evaluate this methodology are there any lessons to be learned here