Sohail Kasmani. Brand and marketing strategist in London: pharma brand management at Cipla and Alembic, now marketing strategy and AI adoption at ACTAsia. MBA, Brunel University London.
How to measure ROI on pharma marketing in a regulated market
To measure ROI on a pharma marketing campaign in a regulated market like the UK, you compare the change in prescribing in the places your campaign reached with the change in comparable places it didn’t, value that difference at net price, and divide by the full cost of the campaign, including field time, agency fees and the medical and legal review. Everything else is a supporting indicator.
The main thing to expect is a modest number. A meta-analysis in the International Journal of Research in Marketing by Sara Kremer, Tammo Bijmolt, Peter Leeflang and Jaap Wieringa pooled 781 effects from 58 studies of pharmaceutical promotion and found the elasticities were “modest in size”, that promotion aimed at doctors outperformed promotion aimed at consumers, and that studies which controlled properly for endogeneity found lower effects. Translated: the more carefully you measure, the smaller the number gets, which is not the energy most brand reviews are hoping for.
Why is ROI harder to measure in pharma marketing?
In most categories the person who sees the ad is the person who buys the product. In prescription medicines the doctor decides, the patient takes it, the NHS pays, and a formulary committee or NICE may have decided long before any of them whether the medicine gets a look in. Your campaign touches one link in that chain, so a sale is several steps removed from anything you did.
The rules then remove the most measurable channels. Clause 26.1 of the 2024 ABPI Code of Practice says “Prescription only medicines must not be advertised to the public”, and Clause 26.2 bans statements made to encourage the public to ask for a specific prescription only medicine. So the click-to-purchase path that every ecommerce dashboard is built around simply doesn’t exist for a branded prescription medicine in the UK. (If you need the full picture, I’ve written up the UK pharma advertising rules separately.)
Testing is slower too. Under Clause 8 of the Code, promotional material can’t be issued until its final form has been certified by a registered doctor or UK pharmacist who didn’t write it, and material still in use must be recertified at least every two years. You can A/B test a subject line, but each variant is a certified item, so the casual “let’s try five headlines this afternoon” approach of FMCG marketing becomes a fortnight of review queues. We then wonder why nobody runs experiments.
And the audience is harder to reach. Veeva, whose Pulse data covers more than 80% of commercial biopharma field teams worldwide, reported in its May 2024 Pulse Field Trends Report that 45% of healthcare professionals were accessible to pharma reps, down from 60% eighteen months earlier, and that half of the accessible ones engaged with three or fewer companies. Veeva’s July 2024 European analysis put access across European specialties at 53% in the first quarter of 2024. When half your target list won’t see anyone, “calls made” stops being a proxy for anything.
What data can UK pharma marketers use to measure campaign impact?
This is where UK marketers have an advantage: a lot of NHS prescribing data is public. The question is whether it covers your product.
Primary care: the English Prescribing Dataset
The NHS Business Services Authority publishes the English Prescribing Dataset, which covers all prescriptions issued by NHS primary care prescribers in England and dispensed in the community, at GP practice level, every month. It runs two months behind (January’s data appears in March) and excludes hospital prescribing, dental prescriptions and medicines supplied under Patient Group Directions. OpenPrescribing, run by the Bennett Institute at the University of Oxford, puts the same data into a searchable interface with five years of history, which is the quickest way to look at a molecule by practice or ICB without touching a spreadsheet.
For a GP-prescribed brand this is gold: you can see prescribing in exactly the practices your reps visited, or the area your webinar series targeted, and compare them with practices you didn’t touch.
Hospitals: the Secondary Care Medicines Data
Hospital brands have a harder time. The Secondary Care Medicines Data (SCMD), published by the NHSBSA on behalf of NHS England, holds monthly pharmacy stock data from NHS acute, teaching, specialist, mental health and community trusts in England. As the Bennett Institute explains, it records medicines issued by trust pharmacies rather than actual prescribing, has no patient, prescriber or indication data, and is recorded at Virtual Medicinal Product level with no manufacturer information. So for a molecule with several suppliers, SCMD tells you the market moved but not whose product moved it. Commercial data from vendors fills that gap, at a price.
Your own data, and Disclosure UK
CRM records (calls, emails opened, content viewed, meetings booked), webinar attendance, medical information enquiries and website analytics for your HCP portal are leading indicators. They tell you whether the activity happened and whether anyone engaged, which is useful, but none of them is a prescription.
On the cost side, remember that some of your spend is public. The ABPI’s Disclosure UK figures for 2025, published on 30 June 2026, show £929.6 million in transfers of value from the industry to UK healthcare professionals and organisations, of which £282.3 million was non-R&D and £134.2 million was fees for contracted services. With 93.6% of HCPs now named against non-R&D payments, your advisory boards and speaker fees can be seen by anyone, including your competitors’ analysts.
How to measure ROI on pharma marketing campaigns: a step-by-step method
This is the method I’d use for a single campaign. It isn’t sophisticated, which is the point: it can be explained to a finance director and a compliance signatory in the same meeting.
- Write down the decision the number will inform. “Should we renew the webinar programme next year?” leads to a different design from “Was the launch a success?”, and a measurement plan without a decision tends to produce a deck nobody acts on.
- Choose one outcome metric the data can actually show. For a primary care brand that’s usually items or new patient starts in target practices. For a hospital brand it may be trust-level volume of the molecule plus your own share from commercial data.
- Pick the comparison before you launch. Split practices, territories or ICB areas into a group that gets the campaign and a matched group that doesn’t, matched on baseline prescribing, list size and trend over the previous 12 months. If you can’t hold anyone back, compare against your own forecast and say so plainly when you report.
- Cost everything. Agency and media fees, field time (calls multiplied by a loaded cost per call), HCP fees for speakers and advisory boards, and the internal hours spent in review and certification. The review hours are the line people forget, and on a small campaign they can be the second biggest cost.
- Set the read-out window. Two months of data lag plus however long prescribing takes to respond. For a chronic medicine, read it at three or six months and again at twelve, because the value builds as patients stay on treatment.
- Calculate incremental value. The change in the test group minus the change in the control group, multiplied by net price per item (use margin if finance asks for profit rather than revenue).
- Report a range, with the leading indicators alongside. If engagement went up and prescribing didn’t, that’s a finding about the message or the market, and it’s worth more than a polished ROI figure from a model nobody can audit.
A worked example (illustrative figures)
The numbers below are invented to show the arithmetic. They aren’t from any real brand.
A UK team promotes a GP-prescribed inhaler with rep visits and a certified email series in 60 practices across two ICB areas, and holds back 60 practices matched on the previous year’s prescribing. Over six months, monthly items in the test practices rise from 700 to 800, while the control practices rise from 700 to 720 (the whole category is growing a little).
| Line | Figure | How it’s calculated |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly uplift, test practices | 100 items | 800 minus 700 |
| Monthly uplift, control practices | 20 items | 720 minus 700 |
| Incremental items per month | 80 items | 100 minus 20 |
| Net price per item | £30 | Assumed |
| Campaign cost | £16,000 | £8,000 agency and email, £6,000 field time, £2,000 review and certification time |
| Value over the next 12 months if the uplift holds | £28,800 | 80 items x £30 x 12 |
| ROI on that basis | 80% | (£28,800 minus £16,000) divided by £16,000 |
Two things the table shows. First, without the control group the team would have claimed 100 extra items a month, a quarter more than the campaign earned, and nobody would have noticed because the category was growing anyway. Second, the result depends heavily on whether the uplift holds: if half those patients drop off after three months, the ROI falls sharply. So persistence belongs in the plan, and so does a twelve-month re-read.
Which metrics matter at each stage?
| Activity | Leading indicator | Outcome measure | What to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Field force calls | Reach and frequency in target HCPs | Items or new starts in visited practices against matched practices | Reps naturally visit the friendliest prescribers, so “visited” practices were often growing anyway |
| Certified HCP email | Opens, clicks, content views | Prescribing in clicking practices against non-clicking ones, with caution | Treat opens as a weak signal; clickers are self-selected enthusiasts |
| Webinars and meetings | Attendance, questions asked, follow-up requests | Prescribing change in attendees’ practices | Speaker fees appear in Disclosure UK, so cost them properly |
| Disease awareness (public) | Symptom checker use, GP appointment intent | Diagnosis or referral rates, not brand share | The campaign must not steer people towards a specific medicine |
| Market access work | Formulary decisions, ICB guideline inclusion | Time from guideline listing to uptake | Often the biggest driver, and the hardest to credit to marketing |
In my view a lot of what a pharma brand team calls “campaign ROI” is really the effect of a formulary listing or a NICE recommendation landing in the same quarter, and we’re very happy to take the credit. If access is the bottleneck, the work in market access strategy for a new drug in the UK will usually do more for the number than another email wave.
Measuring ROI in pharmaceutical marketing campaigns aimed at patients
Patient-facing work in the UK is mostly disease awareness and patient support, and it needs a different yardstick. The supplementary information to Clause 26 allows disease awareness campaigns that encourage people to seek treatment for symptoms, but warns that brand names, or describing treatment options so narrowly that they point to one product, can turn a campaign into promotion. That caution is sharper when your medicine is the only one for the condition.
So measure what the campaign is allowed to change: symptom checker completions, consultation or referral rates in the areas you ran it, or diagnosis rates where data exists. If your board insists on tying an awareness campaign to brand sales, be careful what the internal paperwork says, because a document describing a disease awareness campaign as a way to grow a specific brand is exactly the kind of thing that reads badly in a PMCPA case report.
Is marketing mix modelling worth it for a pharma brand?
For a large brand with several years of data across many channels, yes. Marketing mix modelling (MMM) uses regression on historical sales and activity to estimate what each channel contributed. Anup Nair of Ipsos MMA, a vendor that sells these models, argues in an April 2024 piece on MMM in pharma that the models have to work at sub-national level, down to physician tier and sales territory, to be useful to brand planning. That matches the reality of UK planning, where the decisions are about which ICB areas and which practices get field time.
The Kremer meta-analysis is the warning label. Elasticities varied by instrument and disease category, models that included price showed higher effects, and models that dealt with endogeneity (reps choosing to visit doctors who were already likely to prescribe) showed lower ones. Endogeneity is the field force problem in a word: your best reps call on your best prescribers, so a naive model credits the rep for prescribing that would have happened anyway. When an MMM vendor shows you a very flattering ROI on detailing, ask how they handled it.
For a smaller UK brand, or a launch with no history, MMM has nothing to learn from. Matched test-and-control designs using the public prescribing data are cheaper, quicker and easier to explain, and I’d start there.
What compliance traps should you avoid when measuring?
- Market research that is really promotion. Clause 3.6 of the Code says “Materials and activities must not be disguised promotion.” A “recall survey” that repeats your key messages to 400 GPs, with a fee for completion, risks being read as a promotional activity with a questionnaire attached.
- Tracking that outruns consent. Personalised HCP email and portal tracking depend on the permissions you hold under UK GDPR and the electronic marketing rules. Check with your data protection team before building a dashboard that follows individual doctors around the web.
- Incentives tied to prescribing. Measuring prescribing by practice is fine; linking any payment, hospitality or service to it is not. Keep the analytics team and the HCP fee approvals well apart.
- Claiming the result publicly. A press release or LinkedIn post saying your campaign drove a rise in prescriptions of a named medicine is promotional material in its own right, and needs certifying like anything else.
For the channel side of this, see how pharma engages HCPs digitally in the UK, and for the content that feeds those channels, UK pharma content marketing. If you’re measuring AI tools rather than campaigns, the approach in measuring the ROI of AI in marketing carries over.
I spent more than three years in pharma brand management at Cipla and Alembic (the Cipla dry eye portfolio is one example), and the first step I’d suggest is small: pick one campaign planned for next quarter, pull 12 months of practice-level prescribing for your molecule from OpenPrescribing, and agree a matched holdout group with sales before anything goes out. The harder conversation is usually not the analysis but persuading the regional sales manager to leave 60 practices alone for six months. Who in your team would have to agree to that?
FAQs
What is a good ROI for a pharma marketing campaign?
There’s no reliable industry benchmark, and you should be wary of anyone quoting one. A meta-analysis of 781 effects in the International Journal of Research in Marketing found pharmaceutical promotion effects were modest and varied by channel and disease area. A better test is whether the incremental value, measured against a matched control group, covers the full campaign cost within the time a patient typically stays on treatment.
Can you use prescribing data to measure pharma marketing in the UK?
Yes, for primary care. The NHSBSA’s English Prescribing Dataset gives monthly prescribing for every GP practice in England, two months in arrears, and OpenPrescribing makes it searchable. Hospital data is harder: the Secondary Care Medicines Data records trust pharmacy stock at product level with no manufacturer, so you often need commercial data to see your own brand’s share.
How do you measure the ROI of a pharma rep visit?
Compare prescribing in visited practices with matched practices that weren’t visited, over the same period, then cost the calls properly. Reps tend to call on doctors who already prescribe the brand, so simple before-and-after comparisons overstate the effect. Research on promotional elasticities found that studies correcting for this kind of selection reported lower effects than those that didn’t.
How do you measure a disease awareness campaign in the UK?
Measure the behaviour the campaign is allowed to encourage, such as symptom checker use, GP consultations, referrals or diagnosis rates in the areas it ran. Under the ABPI Code, disease awareness campaigns must not promote a specific prescription only medicine, so tying the campaign’s success to one brand’s sales, in metrics or internal documents, creates compliance risk.
Does the ABPI Code restrict how pharma companies measure campaigns?
Not directly, but it shapes the method. Clause 26 bans advertising prescription only medicines to the public, Clause 8 requires certification of every promotional variant you test, and Clause 3.6 says activities must not be disguised promotion, which applies to market research that repeats product messages. Payments to HCPs are also published through Disclosure UK.
Sources
- International Journal of Research in Marketing (Kremer, Bijmolt, Leeflang, Wieringa), Generalizations on the effectiveness of pharmaceutical promotional expenditures, December 2008.
- PMCPA, 2024 ABPI Code of Practice, Clause 26: Relations with the Public, Including Patients and Journalists, accessed October 2026.
- PMCPA, 2024 ABPI Code of Practice, Clause 8: Certification and Examination, accessed October 2026.
- PMCPA, 2024 ABPI Code of Practice, Clause 3: Obligations, accessed October 2026.
- Veeva, New Veeva Pulse Findings Show Connected Engagement Creates an Advantage as HCP Access Drops, 23 May 2024.
- Veeva, Expand HCP Access with Connected Engagement: Veeva Pulse Data Europe, 4 July 2024.
- NHS Business Services Authority, English Prescribing Dataset (EPD) with SNOMED Code, accessed October 2026.
- Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, University of Oxford, OpenPrescribing FAQs, accessed October 2026.
- NHS Business Services Authority, Secondary Care Medicines Data, accessed October 2026.
- Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science (Fisher, Black, Speed), Understanding the Secondary Care Medicines Dataset, 25 February 2025.
- ABPI, Disclosure UK 2025: the 11th year of Disclosure UK data, with industry transparency continuing to grow, 30 June 2026.
- Ipsos MMA (Anup Nair), Marketing Mix Modeling in Pharma: At the Intersection of Strategic & Executable Insights, 16 April 2024.