From Targeting to Adaptive Optimization™: A Smarter Approach to DTC Healthcare Marketing

More than 72% of pharma and healthcare ad budgets are now allocated to digital channels, reflecting a clear industry-wide shift away from traditional media.¹ But increased spending hasn’t automatically translated into better outcomes. In fact, 45% of pharma marketers say that even with high digital investment, they struggle to achieve meaningful ROI.²

For years, direct-to-consumer (DTC) healthcare marketers have been told to focus on audience targeting. Build the right segment. Define the right profile. Layer in behaviors and geographies. Hopefully, pepper in the right digital and clinical context. If you found the right audience, the rest would follow.

But if you've done all that and still aren’t seeing the outcomes you expected—lower CPAs, better audience quality scores, higher conversion rates, or better consumer engagement—it might be time to reframe the question. Because in today’s privacy-first, value-conscious landscape, using real-time health data for consumer targeting must be inflated with ‘noise’, i.e., people not relevant to your audience, to be in line with industry standards. You simply can’t target people one-to-one when it comes to using DTC health signals. 

So, how do we maximize the impact of clinical relevance and real-time health signals when integrity and compliance are non-negotiable? Enter the difference between healthcare audience targeting, media optimization, and Adaptive Optimization™, PulsePoint’s newest AI-backed solution to improve DTC healthcare campaign performance.

Step 1: Audience Targeting (Who to Reach)

This is the foundational first step. In DTC pharma marketing, audience targeting means defining consumer populations based on demographic, behavioral, or contextual signals that suggest potential relevance to a brand’s message. With HIPAA and other privacy law constraints in place, the ability to target using clinical data is necessarily broad. You can't simply target individuals based on real-time health data on a one-to-one basis.

Instead, brands use proxies, such as interest in related topics, visits to health content, or modeled behavior. And while these proxies and models are helpful, they create something most marketers don't talk about: noise.

Noise is the difference between a consumer who appears to be relevant and one who is. In healthcare, the stakes are too high—and the costs too significant—to waste impressions on the "maybes."

And yet, the industry still struggles to bridge the gap between intent and precision. According to a 2024 McKinsey study, 77% of healthcare advertisers say reaching consumers based on real-time health signals is a top priority, but 43% report their current tools fall short of effectively delivering on that goal.³

PulsePoint has an impressive audience targeting suite to improve consumer health marketing. Our DTC targeting solutions are purpose-built for healthcare, enabling brands to reach high-quality audiences with precision,  without compromising privacy or compliance. We combine clinical modeling with a variety of targeting types, including:

• ‍Health Populations+ is a suite of offerings that uses contextual signals from pages and articles related to specific health conditions or treatment pathways.
• Bespoke Audiences are customized models curated with any combination of diagnosis, drug, or treatment claims, along with real-time digital insights, to reach audience deciles most relevant to a brand.
• Lookalike Audiences leverage past campaign engagement to find new customers that look and behave like your best ones.

But even the most refined audience segments aren’t perfect, because DTC campaigns can’t rely on clinical data in a one-to-one way. That’s where the challenge of noise comes in: the difference between consumers who appear relevant and those who truly are. And that’s exactly why PulsePoint goes a step further—with Adaptive Optimization™. But before we can make that leap, we need to ensure that our media delivery strategies are just as efficient as our targeting.

Step 2: Media Optimization (How and Where to Reach Them)

Media optimization builds on targeting. Once you've defined your audience, media optimization helps you engage them efficiently. This includes:

• Choosing the right channel mix (display, video, native, etc.)
• Adjusting bid strategies to hit performance KPIs (like CPM, CTR, or CPA)
• Setting frequency caps, dayparting, or device targeting

PulsePoint’s media optimization strategies enable marketers to optimize across every stage of the journey—from broad awareness to conversion—using over 20 billion daily health impressions and access to 90% of U.S. digital health behavior. Whether you’re focused on maximizing impressions, driving site traffic, or improving cost-per-acquisition, PulsePoint’s flexible, health-specific bidding options help you engage the right audiences at the right cost.

It’s a critical lever for performance. But traditional media optimization doesn’t account for clinical nuance or noise. It optimizes for media metrics, not moments of real-world health relevance. That’s why optimizing for media metrics is not the same as optimizing for healthcare outcomes.

Step 3: Introducing Adaptive Optimization (When It Matters Most)

This is where the game changes. Adaptive Optimization™ is PulsePoint’s proprietary  AI-powered audience optimization strategy for health brands that introduces a new level of intelligence into DTC campaigns. Adaptive Optimization™ works alongside your existing healthcare targeting parameters and media optimizations, but also layers in real-time digital and clinical signals to continuously prioritize the consumers most likely to matter in that moment. Its purpose is simple but powerful: to improve ROI by removing the noise baked into audience targeting and help brands show up when it truly counts.

Because of privacy constraints, DTC audience targeting will always have gaps—people who look like they fit the profile but don’t. Adaptive Optimization™ fills those gaps with clinical intelligence, helping you move beyond assumptions and toward real, timely signals of health intent. It helps marketers stop wasting impressions on the “what ifs” and start delivering value to the people actively seeking care, answers, or support.

Adaptive Optimization™ leverages PulsePoint’s premium data foundation—including over 5 billion de-identified claims and real-time digital behaviors—to power proprietary AI models that score and prioritize audience segments based on:

• Clinical prevalence by geography
• Engagement patterns in health content and depth of research
• Audience Quality to determine high-value consumer populations 
• Likelihood to act based on dynamic, inferred health signals

With Adaptive Optimization™, you’re not guessing who might convert. You're focusing your spend on consumers who align with condition prevalence patterns right now, reducing noise and increasing signal, in a privacy-focused, human-centric manner.

Why Adaptive Optimization Matters for Healthcare Marketers

In a recent rare disease campaign, PulsePoint’s Adaptive Optimization™ AI solution helped a healthcare marketing brand increase diagnosed patient reach by over 1,000% while lowering acquisition costs by 85%.⁴ That’s not media magic. It’s  Adaptive Optimization™ AI in action. Learn about it here.

With Adaptive Optimization, DTC marketers finally have a way to go beyond proxies and impressions—to safely and intelligently prioritize the audiences that matter most, in the moments they’re most likely to take action.

In healthcare marketing, the right audience is only part of the equation. If you're not optimizing when and why they see your message, you're leaving outcomes on the table.

Ready to reduce noise and maximize impact?

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Let us show you how Adaptive Optimization can transform your next campaign.

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