Tomorrow Networks has developed a way to measure its pharmaceutical clients’ campaigns that goes beyond traditional digital metrics, which  the company’s executives believes will work in other industries.

The strategy increases the transparency and proves the return on investment using tons of data to measure products and prescription sales while protecting user privacy.

“We’ve been tackling the mobile measurement issue successfully in the healthcare space and think it can work for other markets,” said Patrick Aysseh, president and general manager of Tomorrow Networks, a division of Aptus Health.

Tomorrow Networks’ mobile ad measurement model, which requires the company to connect with 180 million mobile device IDs, analyzes details like competitive information about the marketplace for a specific class of drugs and access to insurance plans. These new steps add to the process of sourcing public information from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and private sources that track how doctors prescribe drugs by brand, for example.

Tomorrow Networks also began developing personas or audience segments from an anonymized pool of device IDs, complete with analysis from real consumer behavior patterns, not just demographics, to pull in a variety of actions.

“We can understand different pools of the population that go to diabetes offices vs. arthritis office and where else they may go,” he said. “We can see the percentage of people who go to a diabetes office and then follow it up with a trip to a fast food restaurant or a gym.”  

The company is following trending patterns and building machine algorithms to find a variety of new personas.

“It’s quite complex,” he said.

For now, Aysseh said, the company’s location-based, hyper-targeted technology connects health care and pharmaceutical companies to mobile consumers more precisely.

The model only targets smartphone users who have opted in to sharing their location via each app’s opt-in policy. All users are completely anonymous and are not served an ad if they turn off the location permission in their settings.

“If we limit ourselves to people searching on health conditions, we’re not capturing all the patient population we need to get the word out about a treatment option,” Aysseh said. “The alternate is a very fragmented view, so we needed to find a way to use that fragmented network.”