A bit of background…
The Lowdown is a women’s health platform helping people understand and access contraception through independent information, community reviews and personalised healthcare services.
The Lowdown engaged Social Medicine (formerly Social Elements) to develop and manage a Google Ads campaign promoting its online contraception service. The objective was to reach people actively looking to access contraception online and convert that demand into new customers, while navigating Google’s strict healthcare and prescription-drug advertising policies.
The initial priority was to secure the necessary healthcare advertising certification and resolve the policy restrictions preventing campaigns from running effectively. From there, the focus shifted to building a conversion-led paid-search campaign capable of generating demand at a sustainable cost per acquisition.
What we did
Social Elements developed a structured Google Ads acquisition programme focused on high-intent searches related to accessing contraception online.
We supported The Lowdown in securing Google certification for online pharmacy and telemedicine advertising in the UK. We also reviewed ads and landing pages, editing terminology that could trigger prescription-drug policies and worked with Google Support to resolve any additional limitations.
Once the campaigns were able to run, we implemented and refined a paid-search strategy aligned with the different ways people search for contraception.
This included:
- Keyword and competitor research to identify high-intent search opportunities
- Campaigns structured around different contraception needs and search behaviours
- Regular search-term analysis and negative-keyword refinement
- Testing of ad messaging, keyword targeting and campaign structure
- Ongoing budget optimisation based on conversion volume and cost
- Landing-page reviews to improve relevance while maintaining advertising compliance
We used cost per recorded conversion as the primary optimisation benchmark.
Underperforming searches were reduced or excluded, while budget was directed towards the keywords generating the greatest volume of conversions efficiently.
And the results?
The campaign improved rapidly after launch, generating strong result:
- 384% increase in website visits to the order page
- 314% increase in orders
- 82% reduction in cost per conversion within the first week alone
- 93% reduction in cost per conversion at peak performance
Testimonial
“Our new contraception service needed to reach a specific audience in an advertising category that is heavily regulated and certification can stall you before a single ad goes live. Social Medicine got our accounts set up, navigated the certification process, and helped us define exactly who we needed to reach. From there we refined the strategy week over week until the campaigns were performing. The results have gone beyond expectations, and the collaborative process has been truly valued. The team brought us into their strategic thinking at every stage and taught us a great deal along the way.”
Ashley Hendricks – Analytics Engineer
"The results have gone beyond expectations, and the collaborative process has been truly valued."