7 Healthcare Programmatic Advertising Best Practices

As a healthcare marketer, you’re constantly juggling multiple campaigns, tight budgets, and the pervasive need to reach the right audience with pinpoint accuracy. The digital landscape is like a bustling hospital—chaotic, ever-changing, and full of people needing your attention. Healthcare programmatic advertising has become a cornerstone for marketers aiming to reach their target audiences effectively because it allows for precise targeting and efficient ad spending by leveraging automated, data-driven techniques.

However, to maximize the impact of healthcare programmatic advertising campaigns, it’s essential to follow best practices meticulously. This guide delves into critical strategies for optimizing your healthcare programmatic advertising efforts. Whether you’re looking to boost patient engagement, increase provider awareness, or maximize your ROI, Adfire Health has the insights to take your programmatic advertising to the next level.

Effective Strategies for Healthcare Programmatic Advertising

1. Ensure Data Freshness

Data freshness refers to current and up-to-date data at a given time. Guaranteeing data freshness in programmatic advertising is crucial for targeting the right audience and making accurate, timely decisions and analyses. Regularly update and clean your data sets, focusing on:

• Keeping Data Current: Continuously monitor and update data related to NPIs, professionals changing jobs, retirements, new doctors entering the field, and other career changes.
• Tools and Methods: Utilize advanced data management platforms and tools that automate data cleansing and updates to maintain high data integrity.

2. Find the Right Audience Size & Reach

Finding the right audience size and reach in programmatic advertising is a balancing act. Too small an audience limits your reach and creative variety, while too large an audience dilutes your messaging. Here’s how to find the sweet spot:

• Impact of Small Audiences: Limited creatives and ad spend potential.
• Impact of Large Audiences: Diluted messaging and decreased resonance.
• Optimal Strategies: Use data analytics like conversion rates to segment your audience effectively, ensuring your messages are specific and far-reaching. Adjust your targeting parameters to reach potential patients or healthcare providers while maintaining strong engagement and conversion rates.

3. A/B Test Creatives

A/B testing is a powerful tool for determining which creatives perform best, such as headlines, images, calls to action, and messages. This strategy involves running slight variations of your ads to see which ones resonate more with your audience. Changing only one element at a time is essential to identify what drives better performance when conducting these tests.

• Why A/B Test? It helps identify high-performing creatives and optimize campaigns for better ROI, patient education, and more effective communication of critical health information.
• Recommended Approach: Test minor variations and analyze performance metrics such as click-through and conversion rates to make data-driven decisions.

4. Create a User Journey

Designing a cohesive user journey is essential for effectively engaging your audience. This tactic involves sequencing multiple creatives to guide the user through a logical and compelling path. By carefully tailoring content to the user’s stage in the decision-making process, healthcare marketers can create a more engaging and practical advertising experience.

• Sequencing Creatives: Arrange your ads in a way that tells a relatable story or leads the user toward a desired action.
• Designing the Journey: Ensure each touchpoint is relevant and adds value to the user’s experience with more specific information and clear CTAs.

5. Use Creatives in Proportion to Ad Spend

Balancing the number of creatives with your ad spend is crucial for effective campaign management. The key is to develop a range of creative assets tailored to different audience segments, platforms, and stages of the patient journey. For instance, you can create separate ad sets for patients seeking preventive care, those managing chronic conditions, and healthcare providers looking for new treatment options. 

Keep these points in mind when strategizing proportional ad spend in programmatic advertising:

• Balancing Creatives and Spend: More creatives with less spend can dilute data and insights.
• Small Budget Example:  For smaller campaigns, which might be around 0.01% to 0.05% of your company’s annual revenue, limit yourself to a few creatives to maximize impact. This approach helps guarantee that your ad spend is used to convey the most effective messages to your audience. 
• Large Budget Example: For larger campaigns, which could be around 0.1% to 0.5% of your company’s annual revenue, you have the flexibility to run a diverse array of creatives. As you scale your ad spend, incrementally expand your creative library to ensure your target audience consistently encounters engaging, personalized content.

6. Apply View-through Tracking

View-through tracking measures the effectiveness of your ads by tracking users who saw your ad but didn’t click immediately yet converted later. This metric is essential for understanding the broader impact of your ads by assessing the entire customer journey and the true ROI of your ad campaigns.

• Setting Up: Ensure view-through tracking is enabled in your DSP. You may need to set appropriate attribution windows and define what constitutes a conversion (e.g., when an HCP fills out a demo request form). 
• Monitoring: Regularly check and analyze view-through metrics such as view-through conversion rate, the time lag between ad view and conversion, and the most effective channels to inform decisions about ad placement, creative design, and budget allocation.

7. Layer Lead Gen with Programmatic

Programmatic advertising should be integrated with lead-generation efforts to maximize its effectiveness. This multi-channel approach allows for nuanced targeting, where programmatic ads can retarget users who have shown interest through other interactions.

• Integration with Lead Gen: Combine programmatic with search, social, and other ads where there is clear buyer intent. For instance, while a user might first encounter a healthcare service through a programmatic display ad, they may later seek opinions on social media.
• Upper Funnel Role: Use programmatic to attract and nurture leads before they convert through other channels. For example, a campaign may educate users about specific symptoms of the condition, encouraging them to seek more information or take a health assessment. As users engage with the content, they can be segmented and targeted with more specific messages through other channels, gradually moving them towards conversion.

From Strategy to Success: Your Roadmap to Healthcare Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising has become indispensable for reaching and engaging patients, providers, and other stakeholders. But simply adopting programmatic advertising isn’t enough. It’s crucial to implement proven strategies explicitly tailored to the healthcare industry to harness its power and drive meaningful results. Incorporating these best practices in your healthcare programmatic advertising campaigns will help you reach your target audience more effectively, optimize your ad spend, and achieve better results. Regularly monitor and adapt your strategies based on performance data to maintain a competitive edge in the dynamic healthcare marketing landscape.

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At Adfire Health, we work with healthcare marketers to create optimized, highly effective, data-based digital engagement strategies. With Thumbprint™, our segmented data ecosystem of over 8.2 million healthcare professionals, we can offer direct access to healthcare professionals nationwide. We bring our years of hands-on experience to every new campaign and work with you to get the best results possible. Contact us to learn more about what we can do for your business.

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