Bid by NPI: A Smarter Way to Reach Healthcare Professionals Based on Their Value to Your Brand
Why pay the same price to reach every healthcare professional when every HCP has a different potential value to your brand?
Healthcare marketing has traditionally relied on broad targeting methods such as medical specialty, professional designation, geography, and audience segments. While these approaches remain valuable, they overlook an important reality: not every healthcare professional (HCP) represents the same opportunity for every pharmaceutical brand.
A high-prescribing physician treating hundreds of patients with a particular condition may represent substantially more value than a physician who rarely treats that condition. Similarly, a nurse practitioner (NP) or physician assistant/associate (PA) may influence treatment decisions and represent an important opportunity, even if their individual prescribing volume is lower.
Bid by NPI changes the economics of HCP advertising by allowing marketers to assign a unique cost-per-click (CPC) bid to each healthcare professional based on their predicted value to the brand.
Rather than treating every HCP equally, advertisers can prioritize the professionals who matter most, allocate budgets intelligently, and compete more aggressively for audiences most likely to generate meaningful business outcomes.
From Broad HCP Targeting to Individual NPI Bidding
Every eligible healthcare professional has a National Provider Identifier (NPI), a unique 10-digit identification number. By using NPIs as the foundation for campaign bidding, pharmaceutical marketers can develop sophisticated strategies based on prescribing behavior, patient volume, specialty, treatment history, and other relevant data.
Consider a pharmaceutical company launching a treatment for a chronic condition. Its marketing team has identified 15,000 physicians and classified them into prescribing deciles, with decile 10 representing the highest-value prescribers and decile 1 representing the lowest.
Instead of bidding the same CPC for every physician, the company can assign different bids according to each HCP’s potential value.
Example: A Pharmaceutical Bid by NPI Campaign
| HCP Segment | Estimated HCPs | Maximum CPC Bid |
|---|---|---|
| Decile 10 MDs | 8,400 | $75.00 |
| Decile 8–9 MDs | 5,400 | $60.00 |
| Decile 5–7 MDs | 8,200 | $40.00 |
| Decile 3–4 MDs | 5,800 | $25.00 |
| Decile 1–2 MDs | 33,200 | $15.00 |
| Targeted NPs | 5,300 | $23.00 |
| Targeted PAs | 4,500 | $21.00 |
Illustrative bids only. Actual bids should reflect brand economics, campaign objectives, competition, and available inventory.
The power is in breaking the limiting belief of “decile marketing.” Once you re-explore the economic reality that your top decile 10 physician is worth a lot more than your bottom decile 10 physician, and recognize that deciles were simply convenient segments to market to in a world that didn’t yet support individual physician bidding, you quickly realize that EVERY NPI should carry its own unique bid price.
Your second major revelation will be that when you can literally set your own price, you can, and should, greatly expand your target list. Are you not bidding on deciles 1–4 today because the price premium makes ROI elusive? Then set your own price. Control your own ROI.
What about non-prescribers you think you have a chance to convert? Set a low price and test that market. Think bigger.
Every HCP becomes an individual investment decision rather than simply another impression in a broad audience segment. The result is a smarter allocation of advertising dollars across the entire HCP audience.
Reaching HCPs Within the Medical Content They Consume
Bid by NPI becomes particularly powerful when combined with native advertising placements embedded directly within professional medical content.
Healthcare professionals regularly visit medical websites to research conditions, review clinical developments, explore treatment options, and stay informed about their specialties. These environments create natural opportunities for pharmaceutical brands to communicate with HCPs while they are actively consuming medical information.
Instead of interrupting their experience, native advertisements can appear within relevant articles, alongside the information HCPs are already reading.
A physician researching a treatment category might encounter a sponsored message about a new therapy, clinical study, prescribing information, or educational resource. These in-content placements help brands deliver relevant messages during moments of professional engagement.
In-content native advertising introduces healthcare brands to healthcare professionals on a 1:1 basis while they engage with relevant medical information.
Real-Time PLD Reporting: Understanding Exactly Who Engaged
One of the most valuable features of Bid by NPI is real-time, person-level data (PLD) reporting.
Traditional advertising reports typically focus on aggregate metrics such as impressions, clicks, CTR, and total spending. NPI-level reporting adds another dimension by allowing advertisers to understand which identifiable healthcare professionals engaged with their advertising, where supported by the platform’s identity and reporting capabilities.
Imagine discovering that 125 decile 10 physicians clicked your campaign, along with 300 decile 5–7 physicians and 175 NPs.
This information helps marketers evaluate whether they are reaching their most valuable audiences, identify opportunities to improve engagement, and adjust individual bids based on actual campaign performance.
It also creates opportunities to coordinate additional educational outreach and, where appropriately authorized, connect advertising engagement with downstream business outcomes. Note the conversion tracking column. This indicates the HCP has preformed some pre-set downstream action such as watching a video, making it to the end of an educational session, filling out a request form, downloading patient materials or any trackable web action. The report is searchable and downloadable.
Physician-level reporting provides visibility into HCP engagement and helps marketers evaluate campaign performance across individual NPIs.
Uploading Your NPI Bidding Strategy Is Simple
Creating a Bid by NPI campaign does not require complex integrations or advanced technical knowledge. Advertisers simply upload an Excel spreadsheet containing two columns. The first contains the healthcare professional’s unique 10-digit NPI number, and the second contains the maximum CPC bid the advertiser is willing to pay for a click from that individual.
For example this is your excel file:
| NPI Number | CPC Bid |
|---|---|
| 1234567893 | $75.00 |
| 1245367890 | $52.00 |
| 1987654320 | $28.00 |
| 1098765432 | $15.00 |
Once uploaded, the platform processes the list and applies the advertiser’s individual bids when eligible advertising opportunities become available across the network. Advertisers can adjust bids, add new NPIs, remove existing targets, or modify their strategy as campaign performance evolves. This makes it possible to manage highly sophisticated HCP targeting strategies through a remarkably simple process.
The next evolution of Bid by NPI is an intelligent dashboard that helps advertisers determine how much they should bid for each healthcare professional. Rather than requiring marketers to estimate every bid manually, the system can recommend CPC bids using two important signals: how frequently an individual HCP has been reached across Tap Native’s network and the historical bidding competition associated with that HCP’s NPI.
For example, a frequently reachable cardiologist with relatively limited bidding competition might receive a recommended CPC of $22. A highly sought-after specialist who appears less frequently and attracts significant competition might receive a recommendation of $65. These recommendations give advertisers a practical starting point for developing their bidding strategies, balancing potential reach, competition, and cost while retaining complete control over their maximum bids. It’s also worth noting that ad platforms like Tap Native have a strong incentive to recommend attractive, competitive bids for lower-tier HCP targets. By making these audiences more affordable to advertisers, the platform can increase demand, fill more available ad inventory, and create additional value for both advertisers and publishers.
The dashboard can also provide visibility into campaign delivery, spending, engagement, and opportunities to optimize individual HCP bids. As more campaign data becomes available, marketers can continuously refine their approach.
The Bigger Picture: Reaching the Professionals Who Influence Patient Care
Physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants are on the front lines of modern medicine. Collectively, they diagnose, treat, and manage care for tens of millions of patients every month. These professionals evaluate clinical evidence, consider treatment alternatives, prescribe medications within their scope of practice, and make thoughtful recommendations that patients frequently rely upon.
For healthcare marketers, ensuring that these professionals know about their brands, understand what those brands are indicated for, recognize which patients may benefit, and are familiar with the supporting clinical evidence is an important marketing objective.
A decile 10 physician may represent exceptional commercial opportunity, but a decile 3 physician, NP, or PA may also be responsible for diagnosing and treating patients who could benefit from learning about a particular therapy.
The objective should not simply be to reach the most valuable HCPs. It should be to reach every relevant HCP at a price that reflects their predicted value to the brand.
Bid by NPI makes that possible by transforming HCP advertising from broad audience buying into a more precise, economically intelligent strategy built around individual healthcare professionals.
Ultimately, effective marketing is about delivering relevant, accurate, balanced information to the professionals who make treatment decisions every day. Bid by NPI helps brands accomplish that objective while making every advertising dollar work strategically.
