How to enhance engagement, improve monetization and maximize ad revenue: The health care publishing playbook

With programmatic marketing taking center stage in health care today, the landscape of the industry has changed dramatically over the past few years. From helping marketers enhance the effectiveness of their campaigns to significantly improving their ad spend and utilization strategies, programmatic marketing has successfully resulted in enhanced medicine affordability, spurring improvement in patient outcomes and the quality of health care professional (HCP)-marketer conversations.

For health care publishers, who are an integral part of health care marketing efforts, programmatic strategies have also proven to be absolute winners. By allowing publishers to precisely target highly relevant audiences within their niche market, programmatic marketing is helping them crucially increase their revenues.

Yet, there remains much scope for health care publishers to enhance engagement, improve monetization and maximize ad revenue. But before addressing the how, let’s first understand the why.

Challenge of efficiently engaging HCPs

One of the most significant challenges that health care and life science publishers face is the ongoing struggle to accurately identify and target HCPs relevant to the messaging campaign. The inability to precisely reach HCPs results in ineffective targeting, leading to marketing expenditure. As a result, publishers experience diminished revenue and lower overall campaign performance. Without access to robust data and advanced targeting capabilities, publishers find it difficult to maximize the value of their inventory and provide pharma brands the return on investment they expect.

Engaging HCPs with relevant content and messaging presents an additional challenge due to the unique nature of health care audiences and the strict regulatory requirements governing medical marketing. Publishers often struggle to accurately identify, segment and target HCPs based on their specialty, practice setting and professional interests. Without advanced targeting and personalization strategies, marketing messages are often shown to the wrong audience, including non-HCPs who have no use or interest in the messages being shared with them. This ultimately leads to a decline in engagement rates, leading to reduced campaign effectiveness and lower satisfaction rates for pharma brands who are spending big money on these marketing efforts.

Lack of specialized ad management

Another critical pain point for small and medium-sized health care and life science publishers is their difficulty in attracting and managing health care-specific campaigns while relying on generic ad managers. Most mainstream ad management platforms lack the sophisticated targeting, compliance controls and industry-specific insights necessary to execute high-performing campaigns for health care audiences. As a result, these publishers often struggle to compete with larger platforms that offer more tailored messaging solutions, making it harder to grow their businesses and sustain long-term relationships with pharma brands and their marketing partners.

While unfortunate, these challenges highlighted above are quite understandable, as managing multiple partners, integrations and platforms is a challenge on its own. And to then have the burden of maximizing revenue per impression by delivering highly relevant ads to health care professional audiences and increasing CPMs through targeted campaigns that resonate with HCP interests and specialties can end up being an unsurmountable challenge for any publisher.

Need for health care-exclusive ad management solution

While identifying this challenge is an important part of the puzzle, arguably more important is figuring out how to overcome these challenges and removing the bottlenecks along the way. As it’s evidently clear, for health care publishers, maximizing growth potential is clearly proving to be an issue, and the bottleneck here appears to be the use of outdated and generic ad management solutions that are ill-equipped to handle the unique needs of health care publishers. Generic ad management platforms offer limited health care-specific features and, as such, also offer limited value to health care publishers when it comes to maximizing growth potential.

Thus, the need of the hour for health care publishers — looking to enhance engagement, improve monetization and maximize revenue — is a dedicated ad management tool that can make use of forward-looking technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and a rich feature set that is designed specifically for publishers operating within the health care sector. Unlike generic ad management solutions that provide only basic targeting and limited health care-specific features, a dedicated ad management tool for the health care sector can address the unique challenges and requirements of health care marketing.

Any such ad management solution would first be backed by a platform that offers advanced HCP targeting and be powered by a system of identity graphs enabling publishers to reach validated HCPs with precision, ensuring that the right messages are delivered to the right audience at the right time. By leveraging comprehensive audience insights, a dedicated ad management solution for health care marketing will help publishers make data-driven decisions, improving engagement rates and campaign effectiveness.

The ideal ad management solution would also offer features like dynamic floor optimization, allowing publishers to set different floor pricing based on the specialties being targeted for maximizing revenue. Apart from this, the ability to provide an HCP consent framework for publishers who do not know how to identify HCPs visiting their sites, or provide detailed viewability and IVT metrics at an ad slot level for publishers so they can further optimize their inventory and increase revenue, as well as provide block lists for certain advertisers if they have certain restrictions, can prove to be good value additions that health care publishers can gain access to when they switch to the ideal ad manager.

Secure and easy-to-integrate solution

In addition to precise targeting, the ideal solution would also put a strong emphasis on compliance with regulatory standards, including General Data Protection Regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act, System and Organization Controls 2, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. These stringent compliance measures ensure that publishers and marketers can operate within legal and ethical frameworks, reducing risks associated with data privacy violations.

Overall, a dedicated ad management solution crafted to suit the needs of health care marketing helps simplify the workflow by consolidating essential ad management functionalities into a single, user-friendly platform, thus reducing the need for multiple third-party integrations and minimizing operational complexities, allowing publishers to streamline their processes and improve efficiency.

To further enhance revenue potential, a dedicated ad management solution such as this is able to employ AI and ML to implement dynamic floor pricing. This feature optimizes inventory monetization by automatically adjusting floor prices in real time based on demand and market conditions. As a result, publishers can maximize marketing revenue without manual intervention.

Suffice to say, by combining advanced targeting, compliance adherence, streamlined workflows and AI-driven pricing strategies, the ideal ad management solution ensures that high-value ads reach the right HCPs at the right time while driving superior monetization outcomes. As such, for a health care publisher in health care marketing, making the switch from a generic to a dedicated health care ad management solution is of the utmost importance.

Vijay Adapala, MBA, is executive vice president for supply partnerships for Doceree. With a reputation for taking the company to new heights, he is a seasoned executive with 25 years of experience in health care marketing, ad tech, digital media and consumer tech. At Doceree, he oversees the end-to-end global supply partnerships with health care platforms and publishers. Prior to joining Doceree, Adapala worked at Amazon Publisher Services for web and mobile app publishers, where he led the strategic vision, successfully launched and scaled Amazon’s ad tech solutions, and spearheaded global expansion strategies. Prior to Amazon, he held leadership positions at Yahoo and Motorola.