Google has implemented a new policy affecting Internet pharmacies, HMO pharmacies, chain drugstores, and mass retailer pharmacies. Such companies must now be certified by The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) through its Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites (VIPPS) program in order for Google paid search keyword campaigns to be approved. This policy extends to keywords associated with any merchandise on a website that sells pharmaceuticals – not just pharmaceutical products.
For those still awaiting VIPPS certification, Google shut down all keywords across all campaigns beginning last weekend. Many companies were affected by the policy and few were prepared. The implications of what Google would do and when they would do it were not clear enough. A week later, many of these companies remain dark on Google paid search. A great deal of revenue has been and continues to be lost while these pharmaceutical companies scramble to rectify the situation.
Prior to the new policy, Google, Yahoo and Bing all used the same company to verify that the pharmacy codes associated with a given marketer were legit: PharmacyChecker.com. For whatever reason, Google switched to VIPPS, but the transition process has been flawed. Affected companies received minimal notice (10 or so days), and it was unclear that all campaigns would go dark right away without the new certification.
Also troubling is that the cost of using VIPPS is incremental to what pharmaceutical companies will still have to pay for PharmacyChecker.com to cover Bing and Yahoo. Plus VIPPS is more expensive. With a $5,000 application charge applied to the first year plus a $3,000 survey fee, VIPPS costs nearly seven times more than the $1,200 annual for PharmacyChecker.com.
In the past, Google has allowed merchandise that was outside of special policy areas to remain live with only the special policy keywords brought down (this was the case with ammunition and tobacco, for example). But in the case of pharmaceuticals, all keywords across all campaigns came down — not just the keywords related to pharmaceutical products.
At present, there are many companies who sell pharmaceuticals online who are scrambling to get certified since their Google campaigns went dark. Most have applications pending with VIPPS, but in the pet pharmaceutical category, for example, only one company has received certification thus far. While everyone else is in limbo, this approved company is buying up the trademark terms for those companies that are down. It’s a wide-open playing field for those with early accreditation while companies still awaiting VIPPS certification are losing sales every day. For small companies, it is hard to sustain this type of hit on revenue and one wonders whether NABP has any sense of moving the smaller guys to the front of the line.
I don’t know why Google opted to replace PharmacyChecker.com with VIPPS as their certification provider of choice, but there’s no question that the idea of requiring online pharmacies to be certified is sound. It’s important to ensure that medications sold online are safe for those purchasing them.
The online pharmacies we’ve spoken with don’t object to the certification per se, but they would have preferred that the new policy be implemented on a level playing field. Pharmaceutical companies should have been given the same amount of time to get their paperwork in order (and certainly with more than 10 days). The implications should have been clearer. All companies either should have been able to stay live for a period of time while they got everything in order, or everyone should have gone dark for the same period of time on a defined set of keywords.
The current VIPPS process seems to be putting companies back up on a rolling basis as applications are processed. I’m sure the NAPB is inundated at present. But processing requests in an unclear order and within an unspecified amount of time is giving a clear advantage to those who have already made it through the VIPPS process. As many of these still-unapproved pharmaceutical marketers wait in limbo and watch competitors squat on their trademark terms, large amounts of revenue are being lost by some and taken by others.
