Most pharma campaigns are built to reach the entire market of potential prescribers. They use broad audience catalogues, which capture every health care professional (HCP) who prescribed in their pharmacological class in the last two years, regardless of whether they have a relevant patient today.

At best, the result is diluted impact. At worst, this leads to massive budget waste. 

By analyzing electronic health record (EHR) and claims data, Wrango enables pharma marketers to reach HCPs who are actively managing therapy-relevant patient cases. Instead of targeting everyone who has prescribed in a category, marketers can focus on physicians currently diagnosing and treating qualified patients through Soon-to-Prescribe Audiences.

What are Soon-to-Prescribe Audiences? 

Soon-to-Prescribe Audiences identify healthcare practitioners (HCPs) who are likely to prescribe a specific therapy class in the near term based on recent clinical activity from patients under their care.

These audiences are built using real patient-level clinical signals (recent diagnostic tests, procedures, and diagnoses) that indicate active management of conditions associated with a given pharmacological class. By analyzing the recency, combination, and clinical relevance of these events, patterns emerge that are strongly correlated with near-term prescribing behavior.

By linking these clinical signals directly to the treating provider, Soon-to-Prescribe Audiences surface HCPs who are actively managing patients whose clinical profiles align with the use of specific therapies. This shifts targeting from historical prescribing patterns or broad specialty assumptions to present clinical momentum.

This distinction becomes clear when you look at real-world prescribing volume. For example, we witness over 3,000,000 GLP-1 claims every month across our dataset. This is the outcomes data from which we reverse engineer Soon-to-Prescribe Audience targeting.

More than 3 million GLP-1 claims are processed monthly. By reverse engineering claims data, we identify the behavioral patterns and patient signals that precede prescribing decisions.

Why Historical Prescribing Data Falls Short

Prescribing behavior is uniquely event-driven. Contrast this with other types of consumers: someone who’s purchased running shoes from Nike before is likely to purchase from them again next time they’re in the market. But a physician doesn’t prescribe because they did so 18 months ago. They prescribe because a patient sitting in front of them today has a specific clinical need. 

Take GLP-1 therapies as an example. Patients with overlapping aspects of metabolic syndrome—such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, obesity, and insulin resistance—have a strong association with GLP-1 prescriptions. A physician treating patients who exhibit several of these signals is significantly more likely to initiate GLP-1 therapy in the near term.

Timing sharpens this further. If a patient’s most recent Hemoglobin A1C is greater than 9.0%, they are, on average, roughly 45 days away from a GLP-1 prescription.

The result is an in-market audience built around current clinical momentum. Soon-to-Prescribe Audiences enable pharmaceutical brands to prioritize the HCPs most likely to prescribe next—improving campaign efficiency, accelerating therapy adoption, and driving measurable impact.

AI reveals strong overlap between metabolic syndrome indicators and GLP-1 prescribing. Hypertension, Type 2 Diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and obesity consistently lead confirming that prescribing is driven by active clinical signals, not historical scripts.

AI also surfaces non-obvious signals, like sleep apnea, that correlate with GLP-1 prescribing beyond traditional metabolic indicators.

Elevated A1C levels signal immediate treatment momentum. Patients with A1C ≥9.0% are significantly closer to GLP-1 initiation, allowing models to prioritize HCPs at the point when prescribing decisions are actively forming.

Why Soon-to-Prescribe Audiences deliver measurable impact

Soon-to-Prescribe Audiences fundamentally change how pharma marketers engage, measure, and scale. Key benefits include: 

• Engaging prescribers at the moment of opportunity. Reach HCPs who are actively treating patients whose clinical profiles align with your therapy class during the window when treatment decisions are forming.
• Improving efficiency and relevance. Focus investment on providers with current clinical signals indicating near-term prescribing potential, rather than broad historical segments.
• Accelerating adoption among new prescribers. Identify future prescribers before the first prescription is written by analyzing the clinical patterns that precede therapy initiation.
• Powering targeting and measurement from the same source of truth. In pharma, claims data is outcomes data. By building audiences and measuring performance directly against real-world prescribing activity, campaigns are optimized to the business results that matter.
• Moving faster with centralized intelligence. When outcomes data is native to audience modeling, insights can be refreshed and distributed across channels without manual stitching or delayed validation.

The result is a marketing strategy aligned with real prescribing behavior, engaging the right HCPs, at the right moment, with measurable clinical impact.

In our GLP-1 example, a two-year prescriber lookback yields ~435,000 HCPs. That audience includes many physicians who simply do not have a patient need right now.

We tested applying:

• Recent patient-level clinical signals
• Diagnosis overlap and comorbidity patterns
• Severity indicators (e.g., elevated A1C levels)
• Recency-based timing windows
• New prescriber definitions tied to therapy initiation

In doing so, we reduced that pool to ~118,000 HCPs actively treating patients likely to initiate therapy in the near term. In this case, that meant avoiding approximately $285,798 in monthly spend directed at physicians who were not in-market..

Without patient-level signal refinement, most budget goes to historical prescribers. Using real-time diagnosis triggers shifts spend toward physicians actively managing therapy-relevant cases.

The Takeaway

Audience-based targeting flips the model.

Stop doing this:

• Targeting everyone who prescribed in the last two years
• Refreshing audiences twice a year
• Measuring CTR as a proxy for success

Start doing this:

• Defining audiences based on real-world clinical timing
• Modeling severity and recency signals
• Refreshing segments automatically
• Aligning spend to who is in-market now

The difference between “the market” and “in-market” is the difference between waste and efficiency.

Learn More

If your display budget is fixed each month, the question isn’t how many HCPs you can reach, but whether you’re reaching the right ones at the right moment.

Connect with our team to explore in-market HCP modeling powered by real-world claims data.

While every search campaign leverages keywords to reach relevant audiences, in the case of pharmaceutical advertising, keywords alone may lead to false positives. In practice, keyword targeting captures interest, not identity. 

Patients, caregivers, students, and researchers all search the same terms as prescribers. When campaigns are built around keywords alone, pharma marketers aren’t targeting health care professionals (HCPs), but rather anyone who happens to type the right words into a search bar.

Audience targeting is a much better way for pharmaceutical marketers to reach the individuals making prescribing decisions.

Why Audience Targeting Is Not Widely Used in Pharma Search

Keywords have long been pharmaceutical marketers’ only lever to pull in search campaign targeting. Up until very recently, it was the only targeting option Google provided for “sensitive category” advertisers like pharma.

Over time, this structural constraint became the operating default. Despite the fact that Google has rolled out new targeting capabilities for HCP campaigns, many pharma advertisers are still stuck with tools that adhere to outdated, keyword-only targeting in search. Worse, they aren’t aware that there is a more effective way to find HCPs via search.

Why This Is a Pressing Problem For Pharma Advertisers

While Google now allows advertisers to build and certify a unique ad account specifically for HCP campaigns and enable custom match audiences, too few pharma advertisers activating search campaigns on Google are using this functionality. As a result, only a fraction of a brand’s current paid Google traffic to HCP domains actually reach HCPs. 

To illustrate the problem, we recently audited a brand’s website. For the sake of anonymity, we are going to obscure some numbers but keep the integrity of the analysis as a demonstration. 

Within a one-month period on this brand’s HCP domain, 18,177 visitors arrived via UTMs tagged as Paid Search. Of that traffic, only 312 visitors (1.7%) could be verified as healthcare professionals. Among those verified HCPs, just 167 (54%) were core prescribers, defined as physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and pharmacists, meaning that less than 1% of total Search traffic ultimately reached the intended prescribing audience.

The Hidden Cost of Keyword-Based Targeting

When a majority of the search budget intended for HCPs doesn’t actually reach providers, it unintentionally slips from a specialized snipe to a broad DTC play.

Let’s go back to this same brand website example. If 18,177 visits came from Paid Search and the average CPC in the pharmaceutical category ranges between $6 and $8 USD, the brand likely spent approximately $109,062–$145,416 per month. Of that spend, only about $3,876–$5,168 reached verified HCPs, and even less, approximately $1,722–$2,296, reached core prescribers.

The consequences of this are multifold:

• Massive budget wasted on the wrong audience and expensive pharma keywords
• Performance is judged without knowing who was actually reached
• Learning cycles may reinforce campaign elements that work on consumers, but don’t move the needle on HCPs

By ensuring your search budget is truly reaching HCPs, advertisers can properly allocate budgets, trust their insights, and optimize campaigns based on reliable signals.

How Audience-Based Targeting Changes the Equation

Audience-based targeting flips the model.

Instead of guessing based on keywords, marketers start with verified prescribers. They learn the searches, phrases, and paths physicians, nurses, physician assistants, and other HCPs actually use, and how those journeys differ by role.

In the Wrango platform, HCP audiences are built using real-world claims and EHR data tied to persistent identifiers like hashed email and MAID. That makes it possible to:

• Understand whether that exposure influenced prescribing behavior
• Confirm impressions were delivered to licensed HCPs
• Measure clicks and website interactions by profession and specialty over time

The Takeaway

Do this: 

• Start with verified prescribers, not keywords, when your goal is to reach HCPs. 
• Target all active prescribers and guide users to the right resources, even if they aren’t in a predefined match list.
• Use audience-level verification to understand who actually saw an ad and whether it influenced prescribing behavior. 

Don’t:

• Lock campaigns into slow, manual processes that hide wasted spend and delay insight. 
• Assume that bidding on HCP keywords means you’re reaching healthcare professionals
• Rely on clicks and site visits as a proxy for prescriber reach or impact

Connect With Our Team Today

If you’re questioning whether your search budgets are actually reaching prescribers, it may be time to rethink how precision is defined.

Book a demo with our team to learn more.

The Challenge with Specialty Targeting in Canada

HCP marketing in Canada has long required a tradeoff between clinical relevance and 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. Google has reduced its Customer Match activation minimum in Canada from 1,000 users to 100, making it possible to activate smaller, more precise HCP segments that were previously unreachable.

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.

Reach and Engage Every Decision Maker

Treatment decisions involve more than prescribers. Physicians, nurses, NPs, PAs, pharmacists, and other clinicians influence diagnosis, therapy selection, patient education, and follow-up care. Targeting only a narrow specialty list overlooks important contributors who shape real-world clinical behavior.

Engaging the full care team builds alignment, reduces uncertainty, and ensures that every clinician involved in the patient journey has the information needed to understand your therapy. This leads to clearer communication with patients, more confident adoption, and a consistent understanding of your treatment across clinical roles.

With deterministic and consented data now available in Canada, marketers can build accurate HCP audiences that reflect the real decision-making network while maintaining full compliance.

With Wrango you can reach:

To explore additional professions and niche specialties, view our complete audience catalog.

Maximize Opportunities With Omnichannel Delivery

Clinicians use many different environments to stay informed. While clinical platforms remain valuable, HCPs also search online, watch medical videos, read articles, and engage with peers across digital channels. Campaigns limited to a single environment miss key learning moments and opportunities to reinforce your message.

An omnichannel strategy ensures your brand is present throughout the HCP learning journey. This increases familiarity, strengthens recall, and improves the likelihood that your therapy will be considered during treatment discussions. When your message appears consistently across search, social, video, and clinical environments, it becomes more credible and easier for clinicians to reference.

Comscore data supports this behavior:

• 94% of HCPs use Google Search
• 92% watch YouTube
• 80% use Facebook or Instagram
  
  

Patterns vary by specialty, but the need for omnichannel presence remains consistent.

Create Impact With Valuable Content

Reaching the right clinicians is only the first step. The content they encounter determines how they engage with your therapy and whether they return for more information. Clinicians prioritize resources that are clear, credible, and practical for real patient interactions.

Across campaigns, HCPs show strong interest in:

• trial updates
• patient summaries
• side-effect and safety information
• printed materials
• treatment guides

These resources help clinicians stay current and support day-to-day patient conversations. When campaigns lead HCPs to meaningful and evidence-aligned content, brands build trust and encourage repeat visits. High-value content also creates alignment across the care team, since clinicians in different roles reference the same consistent information.

The Takeaway

To build effective HCP campaigns in Canada:

• Reach every decision maker: engage the full care team to improve understanding and support confident adoption.
• Think omnichannel: meet HCPs where they learn and research, not only within clinical platforms.
• Lead with value: Share content that is timely, useful, and clinically meaningful.

Wrango enables these best practices through deterministic, consented data and cross-channel activation that connects you to verified Canadian HCPs throughout their learning journey.

Connect With Our Team Today

Whether you are launching your first Canadian HCP campaign or planning ahead for 2026, Wrango supports every stage of your strategy, from audience development to activation and reporting.

Book a demo with our team to learn more.

Key Takeaways

The four components below are essential for campaigns designed to influence prescribing behavior:

• The Right Audience: Use prescribing, diagnosis, and procedural data to reach providers actively treating your condition.
• Reach: Most impressions occur on mobile, in-app, and across display, video, and native channels.
• Insights: Go beyond clicks by using pixel data to track return visits and link engagement to NPI-level activity.
• Time: Plan for 12 to 16 weeks to build frequency, retarget effectively, and drive measurable script lift.

1. Start with the Right Audience

Many campaigns begin with targeting, but static specialty lists often fall short. They miss the nuance of real-time clinical activity and fail to capture true prescribing intent. To drive meaningful change, targeting must reflect what HCPs are doing, not just who they are.

High-performing campaigns focus on HCPs who are:

• Actively treating patients within the relevant therapy area
• Writing prescriptions or making diagnoses that align with your brand
• Performing procedures connected to your treatment pathway

The chart below shows how behavioral filters refine a broad HCP pool into a high-intent audience. From 100,000+ potential HCPs, layers of clinical activity narrow the group to those most likely to engage, based on recent treatments, prescribing history, and procedure data.

This approach ensures your media budget reaches the most relevant HCPs, improving campaign precision and impact.

The most effective strategies use multi-payer claims data to build dynamic, NPI-level segments that are refreshed regularly to reflect evolving clinical patterns.

When audiences are based on real-world activity, campaigns deliver stronger relevance, higher engagement, and more measurable outcomes.

2. Plan Channel Mix to Maximize Reach

Maximizing reach and frequency requires more than just increased spend. Campaigns must be planned around how HCPs actually consume content across devices and platforms.

Trade Desk data (Q2 2025) shows that over 50 percent of impressions are served on mobile, and 84 percent appear in-app. Most inventory is split across display (55 percent), video (20 percent), and native (16 percent) formats.

To reach HCPs effectively, campaigns should:

• Use at least five formats to diversify delivery and increase touchpoints
• Prioritize mobile-first and responsive creative
• Include display banners, short-form video, and native formats
• Optimize placements for in-app environments
  

Source: Addressable media mix for 1.3M U.S. physicians via Trade Desk, Q2 2025.

This approach ensures content appears where and how HCPs are most likely to engage, resulting in better delivery, stronger frequency control, and higher overall impact.

3. Track Behavior Beyond the Click

Click metrics only capture surface-level interaction. To influence prescribing decisions, campaigns must measure how HCPs engage after exposure.

That begins with a website pixel.

A well-placed pixel allows marketers to monitor:

• Page views, scroll depth, and time spent on key content
• Return visits across multiple sessions
• View-through conversions that occur without direct interaction

When paired with NPI-level targeting, this behavioral data becomes actionable. Marketers can link activity back to individual HCPs, identify high-intent behaviors, and optimize messaging accordingly.

Wrango’s data shows that desktop users are twice as likely to return to site content compared to mobile users. This trend is especially strong among physicians and nurse practitioners, indicating deeper research behavior on desktop.

By focusing on meaningful signals, not just clicks, marketers can make better decisions and strengthen campaign performance throughout the HCP journey.

4. Give it Time to Work

Prescribing behavior evolves gradually. It is shaped through repeated exposure, message reinforcement, and trust over time. Short campaigns often underperform because they do not align with how HCPs make clinical decisions.

To drive measurable script lift, campaigns must be given enough time to build frequency, sequence messaging, and re-engage interested HCPs.

Running a campaign for 12 to 16 weeks allows for:

• Sequenced messaging across the decision journey
• Strategic retargeting of engaged NPIs
• Sustained exposure that builds familiarity and recall

When combined with intent-based targeting and omnichannel media, longer campaigns show compounding effects. Over time, consistent engagement strengthens brand perception and increases the likelihood of influencing prescribing choices.

Giving a campaign time to run its full course ensures alignment with real-world clinical decision-making patterns.

Final Thoughts

When campaigns are grounded in real-world behavior, delivered through relevant channels, measured with purpose, and given time to resonate, influencing prescribing becomes a repeatable outcome.

By applying these principles, marketers can move beyond impressions and begin shaping the decisions that ultimately improve patient care.

Data Transparency

Trust Starts With Accuracy

In healthcare marketing, data accuracy is the foundation of effective engagement. Without clean, verified, and compliant audience data, brands risk delivering misleading insights, which can weaken communications and reduce engagement with HCPs. Ensuring that data is reliable not only improves targeting but also fosters trust between brands and healthcare professionals.

How Wrango Ensures Data Transparency:

• Built on Real-World Data (RWD): We leverage medical claims, pharmacy claims, and EHR event data from verified sources to ensure precise audience segmentation.
• Patient-Centric Insights: By integrating patient journey data, Wrango doesn’t just identify prescribers—it provides context around how many patients an HCP treats, payer type composition, and estimated adherence rates.
• HIPAA-Compliant & SOC 2 Type II Certified: We prioritize non-PII, anonymized insights, ensuring full compliance with industry regulations while maintaining audience accuracy.
• HCP-Level Engagement Tracking: Our platform connects HCP interactions across campaign signals, website activity, and survey insights, creating a more complete view of engagement while adhering to strict data privacy protocols.

Transparent data fosters credibility and stronger HCP engagement, enabling brands to deliver accurate, data-backed insights that drive better decision-making.

Measurement Transparency:

Proving Real Impact

Healthcare advertisers invest heavily in campaigns, but without clear measurement, understanding real-world impact can be challenging. Traditional metrics like clicks and impressions only tell part of the story, often lacking visibility into how HCPs engage beyond the ad.

Wrango provides full-funnel measurement, ensuring brands gain deeper insights into HCP engagement across multiple touchpoints.

• Beyond Clicks: Track how HCPs move from ad exposure to deeper engagement on branded content.
• Cross-Channel Attribution: Identify which media—programmatic, search, social, endemic—drives meaningful engagement.
• HCP Journey Analysis: Measure real-world behavior across digital touchpoints to refine targeting and messaging.
• Predictive Insights: Use historical data to identify high-intent HCPs and optimize outreach.

With Wrango, brands don’t just measure engagement—they understand what drives action and optimize campaigns with confidence.

Pricing Transparency:

No Hidden Costs, Just Clear Value

Pricing in healthcare marketing is often complex, with varying costs for audience targeting, media buying, and measurement. Without clear visibility, advertisers may struggle to allocate budgets effectively.

At Wrango, we simplify pricing and eliminate uncertainty by offering:

• Flat, transparent pricing for HCP audiences—no additional costs for refining segmentation.
• No hidden fees for data access, targeting, or measurement—ensuring full budget clarity.
• Flexible service models including self-service and managed service, allowing brands to choose the best approach for their needs.

With a straightforward pricing structure, advertisers can make informed decisions, optimize budgets, and maximize the impact of their campaigns with confidence.

Why Transparency is the Key to Smarter HCP Marketing

Transparency isn’t just a best practice—it’s a strategic advantage. When healthcare brands can trust their data, measure real engagement, and invest with confidence, they maximize both impact and efficiency. At Wrango, we’re setting a new standard for transparency in HCP marketing, ensuring brands can deliver reliable insights that empower practitioners to make informed treatment decisions.

The Challenge:

Traditional targeting is no longer enough

HCP engagement is evolving. Traditional targeting helps reach the right physicians, but truly effective marketing requires understanding how HCPs interact with content, what influences their decisions, and when they take action.

Standard performance metrics like clicks and impressions offer a limited view, while behavioral insights provide a clearer picture—revealing the digital touchpoints that shape prescribing behavior.

The Shift

Use engagement data that goes passed the impression or click to measure intent

Wrango’s HCP Journeys Analytics bridges this gap by combining real-world clinical data with digital engagement tracking. Our approach moves beyond traditional audience segmentation to answer critical questions that influence prescribing behavior:

• Who is engaging? Understand which HCPs interact with content most—not just by specialty, but by behavioral intent.
• Where are they engaging? Identify the channels, content, and messaging that resonate best.
• What drives action? Gain visibility into how engagement translates into real-world outcomes, such as increased prescribing intent.

HCP engagement spans multiple touchpoints. Wrango’s HCP Journeys Analytics enables marketers to track, interpret, and act on these signals in real time.

The Data

What We’ve Learned from HCP Journeys Analytics

HCP engagement is an ongoing process, not a single interaction. Wrango’s analysis of HCP behavior reveals key insights that help brands refine targeting and drive meaningful engagement:

• Engagement goes beyond the ad. HCPs often move from ads to educational content and brand websites, signaling deeper interest.
• Not all engagement is equal. Clicks and video completions don’t always indicate intent—tracking post-click behavior helps distinguish passive viewers from active researchers.
• Website behavior signals prescribing intent. HCPs exploring condition-specific resources and treatment pages are more likely to be in the decision-making process.

These insights reveal that engagement goes beyond clicks—it signals intent. Wrango’s HCP Journeys Analytics helps brands track, interpret, and act on these signals in real time for more strategic outreach.

The Opportunity

Leveraging behavioural data makes your campaign smarter and more likely to succeed

With HCP Journeys Analytics, brands can go beyond traditional segmentation and leverage real-world behavioral insights to enhance their marketing strategies:

• Build high-intent HCP audiences. Move beyond specialty-based targeting by segmenting HCPs based on diagnoses, procedures, prescriptions, and tests for a more precise approach.
• Optimize messaging in real time. Track HCP engagement across campaigns and websites to refine content dynamically and ensure relevance.
• Measure the full HCP journey. Connect campaign signals, website interactions, and survey insights to gain a comprehensive view of engagement from discovery to prescription.

By harnessing behavioral data, brands can create more personalized, data-driven campaigns that resonate with HCPs and drive meaningful impact.

The Future of HCP Engagement Is Here

Traditional targeting and surface-level metrics no longer capture the complexity of HCP decision-making. Wrango’s HCP Journeys Analytics connects digital engagement with real prescribing intent, enabling brands to move beyond visibility to meaningful impact. By tracking how, when, and why HCPs engage, marketers can optimize every touchpoint, refine strategies in real time, and drive smarter, data-backed decisions.