The online marketing space offers a number of strategies for delivering direct to consumer drug advertising. Banner advertisements are familiar to everyone by now, as are the newer rich-media advertisements embedded in many consumer healthcare sites. Full-page sponsorships and branded pharmaceutical mini-sites are also common on popular consumer portals such as WebMD and iVillage.

Less familiar to many in the pharma marketing community is a set of online pharmaceutical marketing concepts collectively referred to as SEM or Search Engine Marketing. Search Engine Marketing is based on the utilization of existing search engine traffic to present a precisely targeted advertising message directly to consumers. As such, search engine marketing offers a unique and powerful marketing opportunity in which for example a patient searching for disease-state information on a search engine such as Google can be automatically presented with information on an applicable pharmaceutical therapy. Since the patient is already actively searching for related information, the response rate of this type of marketing is often several times greater than other forms of online advertising.

The 2002 Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 81 percent of online healthcare consumers use a search engine to find the information they need. For pharmaceutical manufacturers, search engine marketing provides a scalable and cost-effective means to directly target these patients. Search engine marketing is a complex process, so an explanation of the strategies utilized is a prerequisite to any further discussion. Search engine marketing typically involves two main techniques; search engine optimization [SEO] and pay-per-click search advertising [PPC].