Search, Measured and Activated: How Leading Teams Are Closing the Intelligence Loop

PulsePoint’s annual HealthNEXT Summit focuses on the most pressing issues health marketers face today. This year’s summit, hosted 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 and innovation breakouts.

4 Key Takeaways from HealthNEXT’s Breakout Session on Search Campaign Intelligence

Pharmaceutical brands invest heavily in paid search, but there’s a problem: How do you know which HCPs are clicking, and how do you tie their online behavior to prescription writing?

PulsePoint’s Head of Audience Solutions Pete Levin sat down with expert panelists for the breakout innovation session, “Search, Measured and Activated: How Leading Agency Teams Are Closing the Intelligence Loop” to discuss how to turn these signals into meaningful activation across channels. These are the top takeaways.

1. Today’s Search Starts With Strategy & Ends With Data

Search has long been foundational to health media mix, but it looks different today than it did a few years ago. When an HCP makes a search, it shows high levels of intent, but how do marketers today know that the searcher is actually the right audience for them?

• “Search gives us an awesome ability to have a lot of information packed into a small ad unit, whether it be a brand message or call to action, and it’s at a very relevant timely manner in that person’s journey,” said Bill Termunde, Advisor, Media Strategy & Operations, at Anamatics Consulting. “It all starts with strategy and ends with data.”
• “Search became the largest focus group that I could tap into,” said Evan Calafates, Vice President of Paid Search for Omnicom Media. “Depending on budget you could have millions of searches, you know what the hand raise is, what the question is, and you get to supplement thousands if not hundreds of different messaging strategies and what actually resonates.”
• “We previously were making educated hypotheses about what keywords audiences were going to be searching, and now we know what they’re searching and we can target them explicitly,” said Courtney Mullen, Senior Vice President, SEM, Department Lead, at CMI Media Group. 

2. Measurement: Using HCP365 to Make Informed Decisions 

Marketers do their best to target the right HCPs with search data, but sometimes it’s uncertain. That’s where tools like PulsePoint’s HCP365 make a difference.

• HCP365 offers marketers new insight and visibility into HCPs from a search program. For Bill, that helps him and his team answer questions like, “What mindset were [HCPs] in during that type of search? How are our teams looking to enhance or supplement target lists based on what we’re seeing in that search space from the data that’s being unpacked or uncovered through HCP365?”
• “When we’re orchestrating a branded search campaign, getting it into that very granular detailed level to really see and unlock the power of audience identity through the tool has been an absolute game changer to me,” said Bill.

3. Targeting: The Search Landscape Is Always Changing

With this new level of data visibility, marketers now face the challenge of scaling this framework and rallying new users to adopt it. But they’re also facing an evolving search landscape, for example, with Google announcing a change in its customer match policy last year.

• “We all gravitate to tangible measurement—so performance. If someone sees a lift, other brands are going to want to jump on,” said Evan. “But as we know, what was here yesterday isn’t there tomorrow.”
• Keywords continue to be the foundation of search targeting, but Google now allows search buyers to target a first-party audience overlaid on top of keywords.
• “Early on, we had a session with Google where the entire search team was peppering them with questions,” Courtney said. “We needed to make sure internal teams … were all educated on what this was, what guardrails were in place to make sure that they felt their data was safe.”

4. Activation: Building the Intelligence Loop With Today’s Tools

The intelligence loop happens when targeting and measurement are connected, unlocking smart activation. But what does this look like? And how do new technology and tools, such as AI, come into play?

• “They have to connect for there to be progression in how you're evolving your strategy,” Courtney said. “Without the measurement, you’re just observing what’s happening, and without the activation you’re just guessing how your performance is.”
• “Any successful campaign … if you have useful data that you could apply, you could then perfect, improve, and make optimal,” Evan said. “That’s what we need. These LLMs are very different from what we’ve known.” 
• “As we introduce ChatGPT, OpenEvidence, as we feed systems … it’s really about taking a holistic view of what’s in play today,” Bill said. “So thinking about those systems and thinking about how they talk to each other, thinking about what data points you’re going to extract from each of those systems to really create that web to ensure that there’s a continuous data feed and a loop there.”

PulsePoint’s HCP365 helps marketers close the intelligence loop and build a smarter HCP search approach. Try it out for yourself; schedule a demo with us today.

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.