Healthcare Advertising Ad Quality: Why It Matters

In healthcare and pharma advertising, trust isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the foundation of every marketing decision. Whether engaging healthcare professionals (HCPs) or consumer audiences, brands must ensure their messages appear in credible, visible, and compliant environments. As digital media grows more complex, maintaining that trust means looking beyond simple ad quality to understand measurable visibility and gain confidence that every impression truly counts.

In this article, you’ll get an in depth look at how to improve ad quality in healthcare advertising, including best practices for ad viewability and fraud prevention. Let’s dive in.

What Is Ad Quality in Healthcare and How Does Viewability Tie In? 

Healthcare ad quality refers to how safe, accurate, relevant, and compliant an advertisement is when it promotes medical treatments, products, or services. Ad quality is defined by a variety of factors, including patient-centricity, accuracy, strategic targeting, and a positive user experience. Ultimately, poor ad quality can lead to distrust from HCPs and patients.

So how does ad viewability fit into the ad quality equation? Well, ad viewability is a component of overall ad quality in programmatic media. A high-quality ad isn’t just relevant, safe, and trustworthy, it also needs to be visible. Ad viewability ensures that an add is truly seen by real humans.

Trust Starts with Ad Quality and Transparency

For healthcare brands, trust begins long before an impression is served. It starts with knowing that every ad opportunity has been vetted for safety, integrity, and authenticity.

PulsePoint applies a layered healthcare brand safety and ad quality framework designed specifically for the rigor of pharma advertising. This framework includes:

• Always-on Invalid Traffic (IVT) protection, which inspects 100% of incoming traffic to detect and block both general and sophisticated Invalid Traffic before it ever reaches a campaign.
  
• Bidirectional fraud protection, combining HUMAN’s pre-bid MediaGuard (blocking IVT before it enters our ecosystem) and post-bid FraudSensor (providing real-time feedback to improve protection accuracy over time). Learn more about our HUMAN fraud protection partnership.
  
• Platform-level quality oversight, including multi-vendor protections, industry-standard blocklists, and continuous human review to maintain a future-ready, healthcare-optimized supply environment.

These layers ensure that before we optimize for ad viewability, we first ensure ad quality. By blocking invalid traffic and unsafe environments at the source, PulsePoint gives marketers a more  trustworthy foundation on which to build highly visible campaigns.

The Importance of  Ad Quality and Viewability in Healthcare

While ad viewability and fraud are concerns for all paid media professionals, the impact is magnified in healthcare. An unseen ad is wasted in any vertical, but in health, the cost may be more than a lost impression. 

Consider a real-world scenario: A parent searching online for treatments for their child’s newly diagnosed condition. In this scenario, that parent may only be exposed to your brand’s relevant treatment information once. If an educational pharma ad fails to render in-view or is delivered to a bot instead of a real caregiver, that opportunity for awareness is lost. The parent may miss learning about a possible treatment, a clinical trial, or a symptom checklist that could meaningfully impact their child’s care journey.

That’s why, in healthcare, ad quality and visibility matter. It isn’t just about performance metrics. It’s about getting lifesaving treatments to the people who need it most. 

That’s why PulsePoint, the leading DTC and HCP advertising platform, is consistently focused on improving ad visibility and ad quality for our clients.. PulsePointrecognizes that delivering ads to human audiences in high-quality environments is essential to move healthcare forward.

Raising the Bar: PulsePoint’s Viewability Optimization

PulsePoint recently introduced our Viewability Optimization, a new capability within the PulsePoint Platform that helps marketers achieve improved ad performance.

Unlike standard viewability thresholds which operate as strict rules that exclude any impressions falling below a set percentage, our Viewability Optimization offers a flexible, algorithmic approach.

Instead of outright blocking inventory, with this capability PulsePoint can dynamically adjust bids to favor viewable impressions. This gives marketers the ability to maximize ad visibility without sacrificing scale, allowing programmatic media campaigns to adapt intelligently rather than rely on rigid filters.

PulsePoint’s Viewability Optimization is powered by real-time data from DoubleVerify and the system evaluates each impression before a bid is placed, assessing factors such as placement, device type, and page position to estimate its likelihood of being seen.

Here’s how PulsePoint’s Viewability Optimization for healthcare works:‍

• ‍Pre-Bid Scoring: Every impression is scored for predicted viewability based on historical performance and contextual factors.
• ‍Dynamic Bidding: The algorithm raises bids for inventory likely to meet or exceed a campaign’s viewability goal and lowers bids for underperforming placements.=
• ‍Continuous Optimization: As campaigns run, the system learns from outcomes, refining predictions to deliver better visibility and performance over time.

This means advertisers can focus on impact rather than impression volume. Every dollar spent is optimized toward delivering real, viewable exposures, helping healthcare brands reach their audience with greater precision and integrity.

And the payoff is meaningful: industry benchmarks consistently show that higher viewability correlates with stronger downstream performance. Advertisers have indicated that high-viewability inventory in brand-safe environments can boost conversion rates by up to 57%. Plus, campaigns optimized for viewability often see improvements across other key metrics like engagement rate, branded search uplift, and overall ROI. For healthcare marketers, that means ad viewability translates into more qualified audience awareness, stronger HCP engagement, and more efficient media spending. 

3 Ways to Achieve Ad Visibility and Performance Goals on PulsePoint

With the launch of our Viewability Optimization, PulsePoint users have three powerful tools within the Life Platform to reach their visibility and quality objectives.

1. Pre-bid segments powered by DoubleVerify: Best for simple, turnkey protection with advanced layering capabilities

DV pre-bid segments act as a plug-and-play option for improving viewability and overall ad quality. These segments screen inventory before a bid is placed, filtering out impressions that don’t meet standards for brand safety, invalid traffic,, or attention. Because they can be combined with other optimization tools, including Adaptive Optimization, they’re ideal for marketers who want a straightforward starting point that can scale into a more advanced strategy.

2. Targeting rules based on viewability thresholds: Best for strict, guaranteed minimum viewability

Marketers can set hard viewability thresholds within the PulsePoint platform, ensuring ads only serve on placements above a specific percentage. This is the most deterministic approach. It guarantees a baseline level of visibility, but it may reduce available scale since it will filter out inventory that falls below the threshold. This solution is best for marketers who prioritize certainty and control over flexibility.

‍3. Viewability Optimization (New bid strategy): Best for flexible, performance-driven optimization at scale

Viewability Optimization uses real-time impression scoring and dynamic bidding to maximize the likelihood of meeting viewability goals without enforcing a hard cutoff. Unlike threshold-based rules, this approach adjusts bids up or down depending on predicted viewability, giving campaigns room to scale more efficiently. This is  the most adaptive and automated of the three options because it is continuously learning from campaign performance. 

The Bottom Line: How Ad Viewability Drives Outcomes

For healthcare marketers, success isn’t measured by impressions served; it’s measured by meaningful visibility and outcomes. When ads are seen by real people, in credible environments, the result is that you build trust and more patients get the lifesaving medications they need.

That’s what PulsePoint’s suite of ad quality and brand safety solutions aims to deliver: a transparent, fraud-resistant, and performance-driven ecosystem.By pairing brand safety safeguards with viewability intelligence, PulsePoint helps ensure that healthcare advertisers can invest dollars with confidence, knowing their campaigns are truly seen in quality environments.Ultimately, brand safety will always be a vital safeguard in pharma advertising, but ad visibility, transparency, and integrity are also imperative to sustain HCP and DTC trust. For pharma and healthcare advertisers, that trust isn’t just part of the strategy. It is the strategy that leads to success.

FAQs About Ad Quality and Ad Viewability

Here are a few of the most asked questions about healthcare ad viewability and healthcare ad quality.

1. What’s the difference between brand safety and viewability?

‍Brand safety focuses on where your ads appear, ensuring they’re shown in suitable, credible environments. Viewability as a subset of ad quality that  focuses on whether your ads are actually seen. Both are essential for maintaining trust and maximizing campaign impact in healthcare advertising.

2. How does PulsePoint’s Viewability Optimization work?

‍Viewability Optimization automatically adjusts bids based on the predicted likelihood that an ad will be viewable. Using real-time data, it increases bids for high-quality placements and lowers bids for underperforming ones, helping marketers achieve their viewability goals efficiently.

3. Should I use Viewability Optimization along with other brand safety tools?

‍Yes. While Viewability Optimization ensures your ads are seen, it doesn’t determine where they’re seen. Combining it with pre-bid verification and brand safety controls helps ensure impressions are both viewable and contextually appropriate.

4. How do DoubleVerify pre-bid segments support these efforts?

‍DoubleVerify pre-bid segments filter inventory before a bid is placed, screening for brand safety, fraud, and invalid traffic (IVT) as well as engagement potential. This ensures that ads only run on quality, viewable, and brand-safe placements, creating a stronger foundation for trust and accountability.

5. Can I use Viewability Optimization and Targeting Rules at the same time?

Yes. For example, if you set a targeting rule of minimum 70% viewability, the system will not bid on any traffic below that threshold. With Viewability Optimization also enabled, it will still avoid traffic under 70%, but will actively increase bids on inventory above 70% to drive better performance.