This is a blog by Mark Verzijl, Consultant at Sciential.

An advertisement on ResearchGate, Nature, Google Scholar, PubMed and Elsevier, sometimes feels like the holy grail for life science marketers. I often wonder why. Advertising on these platforms is extremely costly – out of proportion in my opinion. Although the umfeld feels relevant, the targeting opinions are often less specific than you would have expected. Additionally, I always wonder to what extent people are really open to commercial messages when doing research on these platforms.

As a tip, I can recommend just using custom affinity audiences in Google Ads and running display campaigns based on keywords centred around relevant authors and article titles. Sure, people navigate to Scholar and search for information within that specific platform. However, there are also plenty of prospects that go for a Google search e.g., “Bayley, nanopore sequencing” without browsing these publication websites. Since this data is captured by Google, it becomes targetable. Therefore, marketers should create a long list of relevant studies and articles in their field and make a custom audience out of it. This way, you are able to target prospects with interest in these titles and show them banners of your company while they are browsing the internet. And for a fraction of the price (e.g., €1 per thousand impressions instead of €20). Easy math! 🙂