Ambien CR.com the clear winner in the sleep wars on the Web
Nov/03/06 06:30 | Current DTC
Ambien Logo
The Rozarem ads were supposed to be different to get people talking, too bad that did not translate into website visitors. According to the latest website metrics Ambien CR.com is the clear winner in attracting traffic with Lunesta.com a distant 2nd and Rozarem.com not even showing up on the radar.


People just don't have the luxury of time to translate the Rozarem TV spots and could care less as indicated by the website traffic comparisons. What is more troubling is that obviously an executive at AT thought that the DTC campaign would translate into awareness or website traffic. When a new product is approved by the FDA you can bet that the product.com website is going to get traffic as early adopters and HCP's go to the website . The problem of course is to maintain the momentum so that the product can enter the growth stage of the life-cycle. The people at Takeda pharmaceuticals had better believe in the Long Tail because there is no way that Rozarem is going to come close to overtaking either Ambien or Lunesta.

Comparison

As you can see from the website traffic analysis of Rozarem, Lunesta and AmbienCR.com Rozarem does not even show up on the map. Granted this traffic analysis is from Sept 2005 through Sept 2006 but let's look at a comparison to the numbers for September 2006:

Rozerem.com

Rozarem.com had 59,391 website visitors for September 2006 with an average of 3 page visits and an average stay of 4:28.


Ambien CR

Now let's look at Ambien CR; 419,068 website visitors (that is good) but only 2 pages per visitor and an average stay that is only 2:34. However we need to look beyond the numbers; Ambien is a well known brand and one of the top 10 for DTC and they have been promoting Ambien CR as of late (time release). One would therefore expect the page views and average stay to be less than a newbee to the block.

Lunesta

With Lunesta.com (above) we see that they are solidly in 2nd place in website traffic for the month of Sept 06 and have had 3.5 pages per average visitor with an average stay of over 5:00 minutes.

So what does this all mean? Well if you look at the new Rx's for the same time period you will find that indeed Rozarem is in third place far behind Lunesta and AmbienCR. This web snapshot in time is a pretty good barometer of of market share and should have sounded alarms at both Takeda and AT. But at the end of the day AT will still invoice Takeda for their work regardless of whether or not their DTC program helped the brand reach its objectives and that is why the current model is broken.
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