Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting
Date Submitted: Oct 22, 2021
Date Accepted: Feb 27, 2022
Use of a Paid Digital Marketing Campaign to Promote a Mobile Health Application to Encourage Parent-Engaged Developmental Monitoring: An Implementation Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The internet has become an increasingly popular medium for parents to obtain health information. More studies investigating the impact of paid digital marketing campaigns for parents on promoting children’s healthy development are needed.
Objective:
This study explores the outcomes of a paid digital marketing campaign, which occurred from 2018-2020, to promote messages about parent-engaged developmental monitoring and ultimately direct parents to CDC’s Milestone Tracker app, a mobile health (mHealth) application developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Methods:
The paid digital marketing campaign occurred in 3 phases from 2018 to 2020. In each phase, 24-36 marketing messages were created and disseminated using Google’s Universal App Campaigns and Facebook Ads Manager. Outcomes were measured by impressions, clicks, and install data. Return on investment was measured using click-through-rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), and cost-per-install (CPI) metrics.
Results:
The Google-driven marketing messages garnered 4,879,722 impressions and resulted in 73,956 clicks, with an average CTR of 1.52%. From these clicks, there were 13,707 installs of CDC’s Milestone Tracker app in the Google Play Store. The average CPI was $0.93 across all phases. The Phase 3 headline, “Track your child’s development,” generated the highest CTR of 3.23%. The Facebook-driven marketing messages garnered 2,434,320 impressions and resulted in 44,698 clicks, with an average CTR of 1.84%. In all 3 phases, animated graphics generated the greatest number of clicks on Facebook when compared to other types of images.
Conclusions:
These paid digital marketing campaigns can increase targeted message exposure about parent-engaged developmental monitoring and direct a parent audience to an mHealth app. Digital marketing platforms provide helpful metrics that can be used to assess the reach, engagement, and cost-effectiveness of this effort. The results from this study suggest that paid digital marketing can be an effective strategy and can inform future digital marketing activities to promote mHealth applications targeting parents of young children.
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