Butler/Till Delivers 16.7% Cost Efficiency Gains with PulsePoint’s Adaptive Optimization™

In DTC healthcare advertising, even well-targeted audience pools contain significant noise. PulsePoint’s Adaptive Optimization™ addresses this directly.

It is an AI-driven bidding engine that dynamically shifts spend toward the most clinically relevant audience, reducing waste and improving efficiency without manual intervention.

Butler/Till set out to test whether PulsePoint’s Adaptive Optimization™ could meaningfully outperform a standard DTC programmatic control.

Butler/Till ran two identical tactics within an active DTC campaign from September 2025 through December 2025.

One tactic with Adaptive Optimization™ applied, one tactic without. The agency used IQVIA, a third-party measurement partner, to track performance of Adaptive Optimization™ across several key metrics, including spend per target, average frequency and Audience Quality Index.

Together, these metrics help marketers know if the campaign is spending efficiently, reaching the right patients often enough and improving the clinical quality of its audience over time.

Adaptive Optimization™ delivered on all fronts: efficiency, frequency, and clinical audience quality.

During the first month of the head-to-head test, Adaptive Optimization™ delivered

better cost efficiency than the control tactic.

Performance was strong enough that the non-Adaptive Optimization tactic was paused mid-flight. After the pause, Adaptive Optimization continued to improve, widening the gap to 16.7% total cost efficiency gains over the full test period.

Cost efficiency was not the only benefit. Average frequency grew by

meaning the right consumers were being reached more often.

This was a direct result of Adaptive Optimization™ concentrating bids on the highest-value impressions within the audience pool.

One of the most compelling findings from this test was what happened after the control tactic was turned off.

With full budget authority, Adaptive Optimization™ continued to refine its bidding decisions. The AQ Index, which measures how well a campaign indexes on actual diagnosed consumer cohorts relative to the general population, nearly doubled from the head-to-head period to the post-control period, peaking at an index of 4.67 in late November. This demonstrates a core advantage of PulsePoint’s AI-driven optimization: Unlike a static tactic, Adaptive Optimization™ improves over time. The longer it runs, the better it identifies the right consumers within a noisy audience and the more efficiently it reaches them.

TESTIMONIAL

Adaptive Optimization fundamentally strengthens how we optimize our programmatic campaigns. By applying AI to dynamically identify and prioritize the individuals most likely to drive meaningful outcomes, we can shift from static, manual optimization to more intelligent, real-time activation. Early results show clear gains in efficiency and frequency, with even greater potential ahead as we scale into HCP-to-DTC optimization.

– Kristie Murphy, Associate Director, Programmatic, at Butler/Till.

About PulsePoint’s Adaptive Optimization™

Adaptive Optimization™ is PulsePoint’s AI-powered optimization engine designed to help marketers improve campaigns mid-flight using clinical and digital signals in real time without manual intervention. By incorporating proprietary data, Adaptive Optimization™ concentrates spend on the highest-value audience cohorts, reducing waste and improving targeting precision across HCP and DTC campaigns.

*Results for full test period, September 2025 – December 2025. Any data that arrived after the non-AO tactic was turned off was set to zero for these calculations.

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