Abstract
Background
Clinical trial recruitment faces significant challenges, with 55% of trials terminated due to low enrolment and more than 80% failing to reach targets on time. While digital recruitment strategies show promise, standardised implementation frameworks using digital health informatics approaches remain underdeveloped. Referral partnerships combined with multi-platform analytics offer potential solutions but lack systematic implementation methodologies.
Objective
To demonstrate a structured methodology for implementing and measuring multi-channel digital recruitment campaigns for clinical trials using integrated analytics platforms and referral partnerships.
Methods
A six-month multi-channel digital recruitment campaign was implemented across seven channels to support two ongoing Phase III clinical trials (EAGLE studies, NCT04020341, NCT04187144), from May to October 2022. The campaign was integrated with an analytics platform to track performance across mass emails, website announcements, browser notifications, Instagram posts and three email automations. The implementation utilised both direct and indirect funnel architectures, with real-time performance optimisation.
Results
The integrated analytics framework successfully tracked 4829 clicks across seven channels, achieving an overall click-through rate (CTR) of 2.79%, substantially exceeding clinical trial banner advertisement benchmarks (0.1–0.3%) and healthcare industry Facebook advertisement standards (0.83%). Website announcements generated the highest volume (52.54% of total clicks), followed by mass emails (28.00%).
Conclusions
This study provides a replicable informatics framework for implementing analytics-driven digital recruitment campaigns for clinical trials. The methodology demonstrates how clinical trial recruiters can integrate analytics platforms and referral partners to optimise outreach and achieve performance substantially above industry benchmarks.