Beyond Paid Search: How DSPs Unlock Full-Funnel ROI in Healthcare Marketing
Digital advertising is a core component of healthcare organizations’ marketing strategies. There are few better ways to attract and convert potential patients at scale.
The majority of organizations invest most, if not all, of their advertising resources at the bottom of the funnel, leveraging paid search platforms like Google Ads to engage potential patients. And for good reason: Google studies have found that 77% of patients use search to research before booking an appointment, and paid search campaigns are easier for marketers to measure and attribute to revenue. But while this focus on paid search makes sense on the surface, it’s a short-sighted strategy for healthcare marketers looking to get the most out of their ad budgets.
As teams scale their digital advertising programs, it’s critical for them to broaden their strategy beyond paid search. By leveraging tech such as Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) alongside PPC to drive engagement throughout the funnel, marketers can increase brand awareness and ultimately improve bottom of funnel performance.
In this article, we’ll walk through how healthcare marketers can utilize DSPs to amplify their digital advertising efforts while also supporting patient privacy regulations.
Misconceptions About DSPs in Healthcare
Let’s start with the basics: What is a DSP? To help clarify, we turned to our friends at StackAdapt, a leading DSP provider, for their definition. Here’s how they explain it: A DSP is an advertising platform that enables marketers to buy ad placements at scale with the help of automation. By simply specifying a target audience, uploading creative, and setting budget parameters, marketers can launch campaigns that connect with millions of consumers across connected TV, native display, mobile apps and more.
Although DSPs are widely adopted across other industries, healthcare marketers have historically been hesitant to incorporate them into their advertising programs. Some common concerns held by healthcare marketers are that:
- DSPs are highly complex
- DSPs don’t drive conversions
- DSPs present a data privacy risk, and healthcare data privacy regulations make it hard to measure and optimize DSP campaigns
While these concerns are valid, with the right strategy and privacy guardrails, they should not be preventative. Because at a certain point, healthcare marketers must expand their digital advertising efforts beyond paid search—or risk experiencing diminishing returns from their ad investments.
As Shilpa Sudarsanam, Group Product Manager at CareSource, puts it: “DSPs actually form the basis for any ad campaigns for us here. Finding the right target population is the key first step that determines the success of any campaign.”
In other words, DSPs aren’t just a “nice to have”—they’re a foundational part of a modern healthcare advertising strategy.
PPC platforms like Google Ads are great for reaching high-intent users, but the reality is that the pool of consumers actively searching for your healthcare services is limited. Once you capture all available intent at your target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), campaign performance often plateaus. At this stage, additional investment in Google Ads typically leads to higher CPA or lower-quality conversions, making it essential to think beyond paid search.
Performance marketing firm Accelerated Digital Media estimates that these diminishing returns begin to occur once healthcare brands exceed $200K ad spend per month. At this threshold, it’s necessary for healthcare marketers to expand beyond Paid Search and develop full-funnel marketing programs.
The Role of DSPs in Full-Funnel Marketing Programs
A full-funnel marketing program is an engagement strategy that aims to reach consumers at each stage of the customer journey through a combination of different channels. DSPs play an essential role in full-funnel marketing programs as they are one of the most effective tools for reaching potential patients at the top of the funnel, when they are blissfully unaware of your brand and services, so that you can improve brand awareness and increase demand over time.
A large healthcare system may, for example, leverage DSP to advertise their expertise in knee replacement surgery to the region. Although someone may not be in urgent need of a knee replacement at this very moment, DSP-powered campaigns will make them aware of the hospital and its speciality. If they do (unfortunately) require a knee replacement at any point in time, this brand awareness can influence them to search for the hospital and book an appointment.
How Do DSPs Work?
DSPs provide an intuitive platform in which marketers can design campaigns to reach their audience at scale. First, marketers define their campaign targeting parameters, such as target audience and budget, in the DSP interface. Next, the DSP uses machine learning and automation to review their publisher network and determine which ad opportunities to bid on based on the defined campaign targeting parameters. After each bid has been submitted, auctions take place against competing bids for each ad opportunity. Finally, the DSP purchases the ad opportunities it has won and ads are displayed across those publishers' websites.
While bottom-of-the-funnel-focused platforms such as Google Paid Search Ads are focused on generating high-intent clicks and conversions, DSPs are focused on generating impressions. For this reason, DSP-powered campaigns are optimized for scale, enabling healthcare marketers to expose their brand to as many potential patients as possible.
DSPs offer a compliment to your paid search platforms, not a replacement. By improving brand awareness, DSP investments often show increases in brand search and conversion volume, as well as decreases in conversion costs. For example, a leading healthcare provider in the Midwest saw a 92% boost in search conversions after they augmented their search programs with an upper-funnel DSP strategy.
Structuring Your Full-Funnel Marketing Program
As you expand your advertising programs beyond paid search, decisions around resource allocation and timing become more important. Leading DSP vendor Basis recommends healthcare marketers keep 60-70% of their budget in the bottom-of-funnel platforms, such as Google Ads, and allocate 30-40% to top-of-funnel platforms, such as DSPs. This will ensure that you have enough budget at the bottom of the funnel to capture all available intent while leveraging top-of-funnel campaigns to develop additional demand.
It’s also important to embrace a full-funnel marketing approach at the right point in your advertising maturity. Before considering a DSP, you should ensure that you’ve maximized the value of your bottom-of-funnel search campaigns for your desired CPA. If your PPC programs are not optimized when you begin running top-of-funnel awareness campaigns, you may fail to convert the demand you create, wasting budget throughout the funnel.
Ensure Regulatory Compliance in Your DSP Programs
Healthcare-specific data privacy regulations, such as HIPAA, make it difficult for healthcare marketers to utilize advertising technology in the same ways that marketers from other industries do. This is particularly the case at the top of the funnel, where marketers benefit from leveraging user-level data for targeting and measurement.
But with the right Healthcare Privacy Platform at the foundation of their advertising stack, healthcare marketers can wield the power of DSPs without compromising on patient privacy.
Freshpaint, for example, is a BAA-supported platform that integrates with leading DSPs such as The Trade Desk, StackAdapt, and Basis. By safeguarding personal health information and connecting privacy-compliant user data to DSPs for measurement and optimization, Freshpaint enables healthcare marketers to utilize DSPs to their full potential while maintaining compliance.
Curious about how you might be able to integrate a DSP into your full-funnel marketing strategy? Request a demo to see how you can enable a DSP while ensuring privacy compliance with Freshpaint.
