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PulsePoint’s annual HealthNEXT Summit focuses on the most pressing issues health marketers face today. This year’s summit, which took place August 4 in New York City, was a high-impact, single-day event where the industry’s top doers, thinkers, and innovators came together to discuss how health marketing is changing and what they can do to future-proof their strategies.
This post is part of a series of the top takeaways from each of the summit’s sessions, including expert-led panels, one-on-one fireside chats, and innovation breakouts.
Good Apple’s Adaptive Optimization™ Experiment
Anyone working in marketing for rare disease brands knows the challenges: The audience is small, the targeting criteria are highly specific, wasted impressions and missed opportunities are expensive. As a result, rare disease brands can’t rely on generic media signals for targeting. Good Apple used PulsePoint’s Adaptive Optimization™ to incorporate healthcare signals into the media process and deliver ads to consumer audiences with a higher likelihood of clinical relevance.
In this breakout session, moderated by PulsePoint’s Dylan Eisen, leaders from Good Apple discussed how they aligned media investment with healthcare outcome goals to deliver a 3.6x higher qualified visit rate than their baseline.
The challenge
As moderator Dylan Eisen put it during the panel, “Rare disease targeting is like searching for a handful of superfans in a sold-out arena.” It can be difficult to find the small group of people you’re looking for, especially when using an audience-based DSP that focuses on standard media signs to optimize for clicks and conversions.
George Tarnopolsky, VP of Programmatic at Good Apple, agreed that the audience can be “noisy” when marketers are trying to reach small populations. “You can have a rare disease with a population of only 20,000 patients, but the audience can be hundreds of thousands of IDs. So there’s inherently a lot of waste, and we’ve just gotten used to that as the status quo,” he said.
Another challenge? The time lag between getting data from a third-party measurement source and being able to optimize on that data. Good Apple wanted to find their audience, reduce ad spend waste, and iterate in real time. That’s where PulsePoint’s Adaptive Optimization™ (AO) entered the picture.
The test
Adaptive Optimization™ prioritizes healthcare signals that make audience targeting more intuitive and maximize impact. PulsePoint launched AO in 2025, and Good Apple was one of the first companies to test its functionality. They ran side-by-side campaigns with AO and another DSP, using the same audience, the same strategies, and the same third-party validation.
To measure success without relying on traditional media metrics like CTR, Good Apple used the Crossix targeting multiple to assess audience quality and tracked qualified visits to the brand’s website to measure engagement.
“In the rare disease space, there aren’t always a ton of new-to-brand conversions to work with,” said Lauren Ver Steeg, Associate Director of Programmatic at Good Apple. “The key here was really focusing on the quality of that audience.”
The results
Good Apple’s rigorous test showed that AO delivered on every front: The Crossix targeting multiple was more than double (2.6x) that of the comparison DSP, and the qualified patient visit rate was over three times higher (3.6x).
“This gets to the crux of what the tool is for: Identifying the highest qualified audience and reaching them,” Ver Steeg said.
The Good Apple team also saw AO optimize in real time: 83% of the campaign spend was moved to different ad groups based on likely diagnosis and likelihood to take a qualified action.
Good Apple’s Tarnopolsky said that the value proposition resonated not just with the team at Good Apple but also with its clients.
“So many of our clients are used to measuring performance through a third party, with that time lag in reporting. When we can optimize to more indicators on the front end, on the media side, that really resonates with clients,” he said.
In the rare disease space, it’s essential to cut through audience noise to find that “handful of superfans” you’re looking for. Adaptive Optimization™ uses clinical and behavioral signals that help brands reach the people who need to hear from them most.
Keep an eye out for more posts diving into each of the topics we discussed at HealthNEXT 2026. Want to be involved in our next event? Contact the team here.
