Comprehensive Guide to CPA Optimization Mastery in Healthcare Marketing

Real-time bidding, or RTB, strategies are a hallmark of programmatic advertising and are especially critical to healthcare marketing.

Real-time bidding enables healthcare marketers to automate and place ads across brand-relevant sites, effectively reaching specific audiences at scale. Using RTB, brands can efficiently achieve marketing campaign goals, optimize ad spend, and meet engagement metrics with relevant, high-quality audiences. Bidding optimization strategies exist for every stage of the healthcare marketing journey, from top-of-the-funnel brand awareness to bottom-of-the-funnel conversion, allowing marketers to reach higher-value audiences with the greatest cost efficiency.

Cost per acquisition (CPA) is one of the bid strategies best suited to achieve lower-funnel healthcare marketing campaign goals. Here’s why and when it can help drive the most effective results. 

What is Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) in Marketing? 

Cost Per Acquisition, or CPA, is the cost of acquiring a new customer or a conversion that results directly from a digital marketing effort. Depending on the advertiser’s goals, an acquisition can range from a sale to a form submission. 

CPA can help advertisers assess the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their customer acquisition efforts by providing more insight into how much they need to spend to generate revenue. Knowing the cost of acquiring a new customer helps marketers make better data-driven decisions, with the goal being the lower the CPA, the better. Advertisers can curate more sustainable and profitable customer acquisition strategies with this data.

The Critical Role of CPA in Healthcare Advertising

Successful healthcare marketing requires specificity. Choosing CPA optimization for programmatic campaigns drives conversions for high-value HCP and DTC audiences by automatically bidding on those most likely to convert on a brand website. The desired on-site conversion action can range from signing up for a subscription to viewing or downloading content. 

CPA is critically important in DTC healthcare advertising, given restricted consumer health targeting capabilities that make it difficult to target a brand-relevant audience. CPA helps reach the right DTC audience based on their likelihood to convert on a brand’s website. For instance, CPA can help brands optimize spending toward consumers who engage with relevant site content, such as watching a video about a new drug or treatment protocol, based on their diagnosis stage, in a privacy-safe and efficient way.

CPA optimization is also essential for engaging HCP audiences. It significantly reduces wasted spend on low-quality audiences and impressions while achieving conversion goals, such as downloading a drug information sheet, that ultimately increase scripts written and filled.

Overall, mastering CPA is crucial for achieving better campaign ROI and efficiently targeting brand-relevant audiences. By understanding who engages with a brand website and how, healthcare marketers can follow up with the next best actions on other channels, such as email or social media, to reinforce key brand messages throughout a brand journey.

Considerations for Selecting a CPA Optimization Solution

The four most critical key factors to consider when choosing a technology for CPA optimization strategy in healthcare marketing are:

• Health-forward data: To execute an effective CPA optimization strategy, choose a platform equipped with first-party, addressable health audience data. Combining digital determinants of health and real-world data to produce a multidimensional view of health consumers and HCPs helps you reach the right audience at scale.
• Accuracy: Optimizing towards CPA increases the probability of bidding on the correct impression—an HCP or consumer in the market considering or ready to trial a brand drug. A bidding solution heavily influenced by health-centric audience data and machine learning that gets smarter and more accurate over time at reaching the most relevant audience improves reach accuracy. With these insights, you can adjust bid prices in real time to optimize marketing campaign spend.
• Customization: A tailored CPA optimization strategy allows healthcare marketers to balance multiple conversion goals and spend optimization with brand-relevant audiences, at a campaign tactical level, to maximize audience engagement at each buyer journey stage. Programmatic ad platforms are uniquely positioned to optimize full-funnel conversions and marketing campaign efficiency via omnichannel activation and measurement.
• Measurability: Ensure you invest in real-time technology that can measure conversions and automatically adjust spending to the most cost-effective for increasing conversions throughout your marketing campaigns. 

Introducing Pulsepoint’s CPA Optimization Feature

PulsePoint offers bid optimization strategies to help marketers achieve specific metrics based on their marketing campaign goals for awareness, engagement, and intent. The latest addition to our conversion-based bidding suite is CPA optimization.

CPA optimization works by leveraging a proprietary conversion prediction model to adjust bid prices within the client-set CPA spend goal, dynamically modifying spending in real time based on the probability of conversion for each potential ad served. Clients choose the website conversion action to optimize towards via a conversion pixel, allowing CPA optimization to:

• Increase brand-defined website conversions via automated bidding 
• Prioritize conversion goals pre-launch and mid-flight 
• Eliminate wasted spend on low-quality audiences and impressions

Marketers can even choose multiple conversion actions for a single campaign to maximize full-funnel outcomes by applying different conversion goals via CPA optimization across various tactics. Here’s an example of how brands can use CPA optimization to track and drive engagement for multiple stages of the buyer journey across multiple tactics in a single campaign:

• Tactic 1: Triggered after a user views content on the brand website
• Tactic 2: Activated when a user subscribes to the brand newsletter
• Tactic 3: Triggered when a user downloads brand content
• Tactic 4: Activated when the user makes a purchase

Conversions are tracked in real-time, with tactic attribution, allowing users to adjust spending toward high-performing tactics mid-flight and ultimately achieve campaign goals. In beta tests, our clients saw a 60% lower CPA and a 300% higher conversion rate for tactics using CPA optimization.

The Impact of CPA Optimization in Healthcare Marketing

Incorporating a CPA optimization strategy can help healthcare advertisers better target the most high-value audiences intending to purchase most cost-effectively. Instead of wasting marketing budget on audiences not interested in your brand, CPA optimization can help allocate ad spending to the HCP and consumer audiences most likely to engage with your website, driving better ROI and efficiency.

Want to explore how CPA optimization can revolutionize your advertising strategies? Check out our product guide and contact your PulsePoint representative today for more information.

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FAQ

What is CPA (cost per acquisition)?

Cost Per Acquisition, or CPA, is the cost of acquiring a new customer or a conversion that results directly from digital marketing effort. CPA optimization automatically prioritizes ad delivery and spend toward HCP and consumer audiences most likely to perform specific actions on a brand’s website, optimizing conversions and campaign efficiency.

How do you calculate CPA (cost per acquisition)?

CPA is measured by the volume of conversions, tracked via an on-site Conversion Pixel, and the overall campaign spend. As audiences take action and the Conversion Pixel fires, conversions and CPA are tracked in real-time with line item and tactic attribution, allowing brands to adjust spend towards high performing tactics mid-flight and ultimately achieve conversion goals.

How does CPA optimization work?

CPA optimization works by leveraging a proprietary conversion prediction model to adjust bid prices within the client-set CPA spend goal, automatically modifying spending in real-time based on the probability of conversion for each potential ad served. Clients choose the website conversion action to optimize towards via an on-site conversion pixel, such as signing up for a subscription or downloading content. 

What are the most common acquisition types for CPA optimization?

Any brand site acquisition type can work for CPA optimization, including some of the most common below:

• Search
• View Content
• Video Starts
• Find Location
• Contact
• Request Samples
• Subscribe
• Complete Registration
• Submit Application
• Download
• Lead
• Add To Cart
• Initiate Checkout
• Add Payment Info
• Purchase

How does CPA optimization enhance targeting accuracy for healthcare marketing campaigns?

Choosing CPA optimization for programmatic healthcare campaigns drives conversions for high-value HCP and DTC audiences by automatically bidding on those most likely to convert on a brand website. For instance, CPA can help brands optimize spending toward consumers who engage with relevant site content, such as watching a video about a new drug or treatment protocol, based on their diagnosis stage, in a privacy-safe and efficient way. It significantly reduces wasted spend on low-quality audiences and impressions while achieving conversion goals, such as downloading a drug information sheet, that ultimately increase scripts written and filled.