9 RTB (Real-Time Bidding) Strategies to Optimize Health Campaign Performance

What is Real-Time Bidding (RTB)?

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is a programmatic process that enables brands to automate ad delivery to specific users or sites across all ad spaces at the same time. Using real-time bidding in an open exchange, brands can efficiently achieve campaign goals, optimize ad spend, and fulfill desired engagement with relevant, high-quality audiences.

Marketers often define the campaign goal at launch and refine strategy mid-flight as changes in budget pacing, ad engagement, and conversion rates occur. They must be able to turn the dial and quickly make adjustments based on real-time results. Beyond conventional real-time bidding strategies like CTR or CPM, when choosing a DSP it's important to consider unique solutions that can get you closer to audiences ready to convert. PulsePoint’s bidding optimization strategies span every stage of the health journey, from top-funnel brand awareness to low-funnel conversion, allowing marketers to reach higher value audiences with the greatest cost efficiency.

PulsePoint’s RTB Marketing Advantage

PulsePoint's Ad Exchange provides our analysts visibility to 90% of US consumers’ and HCPs digital movements, exposing their interests and sentiment by examining the context of the content they are consuming. PulsePoint is able to reach audiences visiting related, condition-based content across the internet for 3,000+ health conditions, both in the moment of content consumption and historically. But how does that work?

PulsePoint maps page-level content targeting using a contextual tree published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and person-level content targeting through tokenization, where a consumer’s digital activity and personally identifiable information (PII) is anonymized and replaced by a unique token. By matching de-identified, tokenized consumer populations to browsing profiles, PulsePoint can identify segments that are actively researching a target condition online in a privacy safe way.

With over 20 years of ad technology experience, PulsePoint leverages more than 20 billion daily health impressions to curate real-time, actionable health data that gets smarter over time. The breadth of insights observed gives PulsePoint a better understanding of the health audiences brands want to reach, including how they behave, their attributes, and what they do contextually and clinically—a critical aspect of optimizing RTB marketing performance for health campaigns.

9 RTB Marketing Strategies

From PulsePoint’s menu of bidding options, marketers can select the strategy best aligned to their goals and KPIs to maximize ROI and optimize spend with brand-relevant audiences.

Bid strategies selected at the start of the campaign can be changed at any point within the campaign’s life cycle. For example, once conversion rate goals are fulfilled for a tactic, the bid strategy can be altered to CTR to boost engagement for the particular audience or device that a tactic is targeting.

BUILD AWARENESS

Depending on how the budget is pacing, marketers can leverage reach-based bidding optimizations to maximize impressions with audiences actively searching for brand, treatment, or condition information.

1. CPM (Cost Per Mille): Bid focused on cost reduction for every 1,000 impressions. This is a great option for lowering your cost per impression when the budget is pacing well and will be spent in full, but you might experience lower quality inventory.


2. Flat Rate: Bid with a starting base price defined by the user. When a campaign is underpacing, use this tactic to increase the brand’s chance of winning bids in ad auctions.


3. Tactic Reach: Bid on unexposed, relevant audiences for a single tactic. If you’re experiencing low reach for a defined audience or device, this can increase your reach while reducing cost per exposure.


4. Line Item Reach: Bid on unexposed, relevant audiences within one channel and its tactics. Similar to tactic reach, this strategy works best when you have low reach on a specific channel and are looking to maximize a channel’s reach to unexposed audiences or devices.


5. Campaign Reach: Bid on unexposed, relevant audiences across all channels and tactics. If your campaign as a whole has low reach, use this tactic to achieve campaign reach and impression goals.

INCREASE ENGAGEMENT

Harness CTR bidding to maximize engagement (such as clicks and site visits) with audiences already familiar with the brand.

1. CTR (Click Through Rate): Bid on audiences or devices that are most likely to click an ad. Consider using this tactic when your campaign has low engagement and you are looking to increase clicks for a specific, brand-relevant audience.

DRIVE CONVERSION

If you’re looking to maximize brand-defined conversions with audiences likely to try and develop loyalty to your brand, choose Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Clinical Behavior, or Audience Quality (AQ) as your bidding options.

1. Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA): Leverage CPA to bid on HCP and consumer audiences most likely to perform specific actions on a brand’s website to optimize conversions and campaign efficiency. CPA optimization strategy works for brands with conversion goals focused on automating and optimizing ad spend cost-effectively. CPA is tailored to reach brand-relevant audiences most likely to engage in conversion-based actions on a brand site, such as signing up for a subscription, downloading content, or purchasing a product.


2. Clinical Behavior: For more effective HCP marketing, use this bidding strategy to bid higher on HCPs most likely to prescribe a target script. This bid strategy is suited for HCP campaigns prioritizing clinical activity for brand conversions. Use it to reach verified HCPs by automatically bidding higher on those who have historically prescribed or researched a target script and/or a competitive drug, reducing wasted spend on low-quality HCPs and impressions.


3. Audience Quality (AQ): Bid higher on consumer populations with the greatest prevalence to have a brand-defined condition diagnosis.* This bidding strategy works for DTC campaigns that prioritize clinically relevant brand conversions. Use this bid strategy to automatically bid higher on consumer populations with the greatest condition prevalence, reducing wasted spend on low-quality audiences and impressions.

Real-Time Bidding Optimization in Action

It might seem overwhelming to choose the most effective bidding strategy for your campaign, but with PulsePoint’s real-time health insights and mid-flight optimization capabilities, you can make changes as needed to meet all of your campaign goals. Whether you’re looking to build awareness, maximize engagements, or drive conversions for your brand, PulsePoint’s unique bidding menu can get your health-centric campaign off the ground with the right tactic to meet your KPIs and budget.

Get your RTB marketing strategy started today by partnering with PulsePoint. Reach out to info@pulsepoint.com for more information.

*Consumer populations are at a zip code level and determined based on de-identified data for percentage of condition prevalence. We take into consideration the zip codes that have previously filled prescriptions (30 days +) as a part of our modeling; we do not base this on the individuals, but rather where there is a greater prevalence filled historically as determined through de-identified claims data from various zip codes. All claims data used is de-identified in accordance with HIPAA, as confirmed by expert determination. The aggregated information provided through claims data is used to determine prevalence in a given geographic area for bid optimization only, and no claims data is used for targeting on a 1:1 basis.