Klick Health & Yahoo DSP: Upleveling Competition in an Increasingly Crowded Category

In pharma marketing, scale alone does not guarantee impact. One mental health brand working with Klick Health was competing in a category where the leading competitor was spending nearly nine times more on TV and CTV. Matching that level of investment was not a realistic path to growth. Instead, the opportunity was to become more precise about who was reached, how campaigns were optimized, and what defined success.

Too often, healthcare campaigns are still measured against media proxies such as clicks, completion rates, or broad reach. While valuable, those metrics do not necessarily reflect whether campaigns are driving meaningful patient action. For this campaign, the focus shifted toward real-world outcomes, such as doctor visits and new prescriptions.

Turning Outcome Data Into Media Intelligence

To achieve that, Klick Health partnered with Yahoo DSP and IQVIA Digital to connect media delivery with real-world consumer signals.

What differentiated the approach was not only the scale and audience capabilities on Yahoo DSP, but the ability to optimize campaigns in flight using outcome-based measurement. By integrating IQVIA data directly into the Yahoo DSP algorithm for optimization, targeting could be continuously refined in real-time around audiences most likely to take meaningful action.

That changed the way the campaign operated and optimized. Audience quality signals from IQVIA fed directly into bidding and allocation decisions throughout the flight, allowing the system to become more selective and more efficient over time without sacrificing scale.

The success of the campaign was clear with improvement across tangible client objectives. The campaign ultimately drove a 23% reduction in cost per qualified patient and lowered costs from $0.53 to $0.41 while maintaining audience quality above the 8.04% national prevalence benchmark throughout the campaign.

Measuring What Actually Matters

The real-world results were the strongest validation. Thirty percent of the target reach converted into doctor visits, contributing to 3.6 million office visits and 14,000 new prescriptions among diagnosed patients.

Those tangible results reinforce an important industry shift: better media performance should ultimately translate into better patient outcomes. When optimization is tied to signals that reflect real behavior, campaigns become more accountable, more efficient, and more impactful.

As Paul Li, Senior Director, Programmatic at Klick Health notes:

"Instead of asking 'did the ad perform?' we asked 'did the patient show up?' Anchoring to real-world outcomes rather than media metrics changed how we made every decision — and ultimately what we were able to prove."

Yahoo DSP helped make that possible by connecting media delivery directly to outcome-based optimization while campaigns were still live. In a category as competitive and sensitive as mental health, that level of responsiveness matters.

More ad spend won’t dictate the future of healthcare marketing, but rather the marketers that can use better signals to make smarter decisions and drive outcomes that matter in people’s lives.

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