About Novartis Live Hub Magazine
Novartis is one of the most advanced medecine companies in the world. In 2025, the company started a Live Hub Magazine : a digital place where you can read about new medical as well as scientific discoveries and the people who made them.
Context
The aim of this new magazine was to create a space where science and stories about it could meet, bringing together research, learning, and emotional connection in one place. But even if your content is great, it can be difficult to be seen in today’s crowded online world. Novartis needed a plan that would help doctors, researchers, and health-conscious readers find the platform and keep using it. This plan needed to be able to reach more people, get them more involved, and show real results in every market.
As a digital agency focus on performance marketing, SEO, and digital advertising strategy, Eminence supports them in this challenge. The goal of the partnership is to get more people to read Live Hub Magazine online, bring in high-quality readers, and make Novartis the best company at talking about health online.
Goals and Issues
The goal is to keep Live Hub Magazine in the public eye and make sure that every visit led to real interaction. But in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, success means coming up with answers to problems that aren’t the same as those in other fields:
Barrier to visibility: Even big names like Novartis have trouble getting health-related search queries to show up in results from publishers, medical portals, and government websites.
Audience accuracy: The goal is not to reach a lot of people, but to get people who are really interested in science and medicine.
Regulatory sensitivity: The pharmaceutical industry has strict rules about how to talk to and market to people, so it’s hard to use messages that are too salesy.
Tracking and protecting data: The data collection has to follow European and Swiss privacy laws (GDPR/nLPD) to make sure the measurement is fair and open.
Pressure to do well: The strategy has to show that spending money on media lead to more traffic, engagement, and awareness in order to show a measurable return on investment.
The goal is to find a balance between visibility, compliance, and relevance—getting results without losing the work’s authenticity.
Market complexity
The online pharmaceutical advertising market is one of the most competitive and complicated when it comes to algorithms.
Many people want to know about health, and Google’s E-E-A-T rules (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) have a big impact on these searches.
In this area:
- Health and medical topics (YMYL = Your Money or Your Life), Google overwhelmingly prioritizes sources that demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and especially Trustworthiness, meaning the content must align with established scientific and medical consensus to achieve and maintain a high organic ranking.
- Paid campaigns have to follow strict rules about who they target and what they say.
- People are looking for health information in new ways by using AI-generated search results like Google’s “AI Overviews.”
- People are also acting in a different way. Doctors and scientists are more picky, but regular readers like stories about people that are short.
Eminence comes up with a two-part plan that used the long-term power of SEO optimization and the growth potential of AI-powered Google Ads Performance Max (PMAX) to make sure that every interaction, from clicking on an ad to reading an article, made Novartis look more trustworthy.
Business pressures
Because it is a global company and very well-known, Novartis has to deal with a lot of business stress.
- Expanding around the world while keeping costs low.
- Setting up a system that will help with future projects, such as activating data across channels, retargeting audiences, and gathering first-party data.
Every decision, from the creative to the bidding strategy, has to be in line with the business’s goals for performance and have a real effect on how people consume, engage with, and become aware of content.
Our approach
1. Paid traffic
Eminence run a Google Ads Performance Max campaign in the main North American and European markets.
The goal is to use Google’s automation to reach as many people as possible, but still have people check the quality of the audience and the direction of the creative work.
This is how the campaign is planned:
Audience segmentation: putting people into groups based on their interests. For example, health professionals, scientists, and people who are just curious about health.
Custom creatives: pictures and messages made just for each group to make sure they are relevant.
Continuous learning loops: using GA4 performance data, engagement metrics, and user behavior to make changes.
The campaign started slowly in late May 2025, but it picked up speed quickly.
Visibility went up by 229%, from 216,000 impressions in the first week to 1.97 million impressions in August. There were 210% more clicks.
The campaign got 3.7 million views and 124,705 clicks in three months. The click-through rate (CTR) is 3.37%, which is much higher than the average for the medicine fields, which is 1.5% to 2.5%.
The average cost per click (CPC) between CHF 0.32 and CHF 0.43 showed that costs are well monitored. There are 30,028 page views, and the conversion rate is 23%.
2. Improving the basics of SEO
At the same time, Eminence’s SEO experts workes on the project’s SEO pillar.
There are four main parts to the SEO roadmap:
- Crawlability & Performance: Ensure Technical Excellence by resolving all indexing errors, optimizing the crawl budget, and achieving optimal Core Web Vitals scores to guarantee seamless access and a fast user experience.
- Authority & Direct Answers: Enhance Content Depth and Utility by expanding topic clusters, implementing relevant Structured Data (Schema Markup), and integrating FAQs to efficiently and directly address the full spectrum of user intent.
- Video Discovery & Visibility: Maximize Multimedia Visibility by fully optimizing video pages and integrating media-specific schema to enhance search engine discovery of audio and video files. Since June 2025, this has made things 200% more visible.
- Trust & Authority Signals: Solidify site Trustworthiness and Authority (E-E-A-T) by executing a targeted link-building strategy focused exclusively on acquiring high-quality, relevant backlinks from established, authoritative sources.
In three months, visibility as a whole went up by 53%.
3. Making it easier to use and improving the UX
SEO performance got even better when the technology changed a lot:
– The Speed Index for the website dropped from 2.4 seconds to 1.4 seconds.
– Since 80% of sessions came from smartphones, making the mobile experience better was a big way to keep people interested and coming back.
These changes not only made the site rank higher, but they also made it easier to read, scroll, and use.
4. Combining media and organic synergies
Synergy is when paid ads help organic growth. The project worked best when this happened. People often went back to Live Hub on their own after seeing ads for it.
On the other hand, optimized organic content made landing pages more useful and raised the quality scores of ads, which made it cheaper to get new customers.
This circular model, where traffic fed visibility and visibility fed traffic, created a growth engine that kept going even after the campaigns were over.
Tools & technology
To get measurable results based on data, you needed a strong tech ecosystem. Eminence used its own digital intelligence tools as well as Google’s AI and analytics tools.
This data infrastructure would let Eminence keep an eye on performance in real time, track quality metrics beyond clicks, and improve targeting based on what users really wanted.
Google Ads Performance Max
to automate bidding, placement optimization and make multichannel advertising.
Google Analytics 4
to analyse website qualified traffic generation.
Google Search Console
to see results on the SERP.
Looker Studio
to have a quick overview on all channel performance.
UX tracking tools and heatmaps
to see how people read, scroll, and use your site.
Screaming Frog
to perform deep technical SEO audits by crawling the website, identifying broken links (4xx), redirect chains (3xx), analyzing metadata (titles/descriptions/H1s), and checking indexation directives.
Results
The partnership has a big impact on Novartis, not just in terms of numbers:
AI-powered ads, smart SEO, and human creativity help Novartis and Eminence make Live Hub Magazine a great place to find science accurate content online.
The project not only makes things easier to see over the course of three months, but it also changes how people think about what real, data-driven healthcare communication can do.
When data meets purpose, it shows that even the hardest subjects can get people interested, teach them, and get them involved all over the world.
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