The Challenge with Specialty Targeting in Canada

HCP marketing in Canada has long required balancing clinical relevance with platform requirements.

Because specialty populations are naturally smaller than in the U.S., marketers have historically been required to expand or bundle audiences simply to meet activation minimums. This often meant adding adjacent professions or related specialties, even when they were not the primary prescribers for a therapy.

The result was broader reach, but weaker clinical alignment.

That constraint has now changed.

Why This Matters for Canadian Healthcare Marketers

Many therapies are prescribed by a narrow group of specialists.

For example, a brand promoting a highly specific oncology treatment might have access to only a few hundred relevant oncologists nationwide. Under the previous 1,000-user minimum, that audience could not be activated on its own.

To reach scale, planners often combined oncologists with oncology nurse practitioners or specialized pharmacists. After match rates were applied, the expanded segment frequently still fell short of platform requirements. Even when it met the threshold, the message was no longer reaching a single, clinically aligned group.

With Google’s lower audience minimum, this dynamic changes.

Specialty audiences of 500 HCPs or more can now be activated independently, allowing campaigns to remain focused on the clinicians most relevant to the therapy without inflating audience size or diluting clinical context.

This does not replace profession-level targeting. Broad and profession-based audiences remain essential for OTC products and widely prescribed therapies. What changes is flexibility for treatments that require a more precise clinical audience.

What This Unlocks for Campaign Planning

With smaller specialty audiences now eligible for activation, marketers gain greater control over how closely media execution aligns with the therapy being promoted.

In practice, this means:

  • Specialty audiences can be planned and activated on their own
  • Messaging can remain specific to a clinical use case
  • Media investment can stay focused on the specialists who treat the condition

Profession-level targeting continues to play an important role for broad-market therapies. Specialty targeting becomes viable when clinical precision is required.

The Takeaway

Google’s reduced audience minimums expand what is possible for specialty HCP marketing in Canada.

Brands promoting low-incidence or specialist-led therapies no longer need to broaden their audience simply to meet platform requirements. When precision matters, it is now achievable without compromise.

Connect With Our Team Today

Whether you are planning a broad-market therapy or a more specialized treatment, our team can help you understand how this update fits into your Canadian HCP strategy.

Book a demo with our team to learn more about our audience catalogue and activation services.