The Future of HIPAA-Compliant Marketing Analytics with Heap

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Rich Briddock: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Ignite podcast. I am your host today, Rich Brita, the Chief Strategy Officer here at Cardinal. Today, we’ve got no Alex. He’s out on other duties, but we do have a very exciting guest. We have DJ Johnson here with us from Heap. He is a solutions consultant. We’re going to be talking about analytics and MarTech in the healthcare industry and what the HHS Bulletin of December 22 has really done in terms of leading to a rethink of the analytics MarTech stack in healthcare as GA forward better Google would flag this not necessarily being HIPAA compliant and that framework that we’d use for measurement and understanding the efficacy of our digital marketing efforts was really shook up.

DJ works for Heap. They are a digital experience analytics solution that’s part of the Contentsquare group. He’s really going to help us understand how marketers are adapting through privacy-first analytics challenges. We’re going to explore a little bit of why Heap is more than just a GA4 replacement, as well as the importance of end-to-end marketing attribution and best practices for adopting new tech and managing change. DJ, welcome to the pod. Tell us just briefly for people who may not have heard of Heap, tell us a little bit about Heap as a platform and how you are implementing it as a solution to help healthcare marketers measure their campaigns, measure their digital performance, and really get the most out of the things that they’re doing in terms of patient acquisition, et cetera.

DJ Johnson: As you mentioned, Heap is an experience measurement platform. We work in the first-party world, so that helps a great deal when complying with any regulations including HIPAA. The innovation that Heap came out with going back about 10 years now, is a concept of capturing every interaction first, right up front, and then using tools to retroactively look at those events so you can see the true user journey. We’ve added data science to this as well so we can see if you’re given a four-step funnel, there’s steps in between that may be missing or unaware of.

It’s a very robust toolkit to get up and running quickly and get really good insights into visitor behavior. As an added bonus, we recognize things like UTM parameters. All the referral information and advertising signals we’re able to consume as well and able to show that impact to either large conversions like booking an appointment or smaller micro conversions. Are they using certain features and does that differ by channel? It’s the general summary of Heap and how it works.

Rich: That idea of understanding the micro conversions or some of these other data points that you may not necessarily look at by default as marketers that comes from your beginning point as a product analytics solution. Essentially you come from a different world where you’re looking at even more data points, those product analytics is all about, looking at huge numbers of lead metrics that may be influencing those lag metrics you mentioned and user behavior across the entire spectrum of the product, which is great for marketers nowadays to understand how they’re engaging with people throughout the patient journey on the healthcare side to really make sure that they’re saying the most useful things, providing the education, giving the right experiences.

DJ Johnson: Yes, exactly right. It’s interesting. I’m a web analytics old hat and it used to be you could get away with just looking at page analytics. It was really content analytics back in the day. That’s more often to things are more complex. There’s more services that you want information on where a manual tracking model like a GA4 falls apart pretty quickly. You can’t track everything. You don’t have the time or resources. You don’t have the tools as well. If you feed a ton of data into these traditional programs, it’s not really easy to access them and make sense of them.

You’re in this quandary of what to track and you’re not informed. You have some guesses as to what’s important, but the users know what’s important. They know what they’re struggling with. They know what they like about your given flow or application. That’s more from the product analytics now to more general-purpose marketing analytics or experience analytics is something that’s really exciting to see. It’s really expanded the audience of people that can take advantage of Heap.

Rich: It’s funny. It’s obviously with HHS Bulletin and everything that’s happened with Pixels, there’s almost been a pushback against data. In reality, the data march continues. We’re leveraging more data points than we ever have done before, but now we’re just having to do it using a tech stack that is compliant and respects privacy and isn’t providing any information to a third party that potentially could use it for all kinds of reasons to improve algorithms or to resell to other companies.

DJ Johnson: It’s interesting to see that this focus of more data, but definitely a shift towards first party data. More in our control, we’re collecting it for the use of– as a healthcare provider say, and I’m using it to improve the experience that my visitors have, which is it’s a noble cause. It’s what you should be doing if you’re running these programs, but shying away or moving away from just the sort of shotgun blast of let’s share this behavioral data with tons of ad networks and try to optimize and move the needle using that method. You have to be just way more careful about what data you’re sharing with who, especially in light of the Bolden.

It really clarified some things, which is great, but it also added some confusion and a little bit of trepidation of– it seems like it says I can do this, but I don’t know if I still can. More likely my lawyers have an opinion that I can’t. When legal gets involved, things get interesting.

Rich: Absolutely. For a lot of folks out there, I think we’ve spoken about some of the benefits of Heap, one of those being this auto event capture that you were referencing. The beauty of Heap is that you add it to the site and then you start capturing all of these events by default. I will say from previous experience that that has saved our bacon when the Bulletin first came down and we had to turn off GA4 and Google Ads pixels, but we had Heap that we were leveraging for a client.

The fact that Heap was already automatically capturing all those conversion events, allowed us to go dark on those platforms, but still capture the information through Heap, and then it was just a question of how do we leverage this data? How do we make the most of it, but that was something that we were able to figure out more on our own timeline.

The order capture functionality of people think about data delays. It’s okay if you’re not reporting out on data straight away, but you must be capturing it. That’s something that that Heap does out of the box, which is fantastic.

DJ Johnson: Doing it in a very secure and controlled manner too. It’s not just collecting every interaction and giving you tools to explore it, it’s making sure that you’re only collecting what you want to collect and you’re not collecting anything further. Heap by default is very privacy first. We don’t collect. For instance, we’ll understand when someone navigates through a form, but we’re never collecting any of the form field selections or the text entered or anything like that.

We have controls to control the capture as well. You can turn off things that some of our clients aren’t comfortable with geolocation, so you just flip a switch and that’s turned off. Same thing with IP address. It’s much easier to be in compliance or internally consistent with your privacy policies and everything else with Heap, because you have those tools. Even though you’re capturing a great deal of data, you’re only capturing the data that you explicitly tell Heap you want to capture.

Rich: That’s fantastic because obviously you don’t have control on GA4 or for a lot of other analytics solutions out there as well. That’s probably the question that you get the most. I’m assuming when you guys are talking to healthcare marketers or health platforms, I assume that most of them have been on GA4 or Google Analytics and that they’re looking for an alternative, whether it was the Bulletin that caused them to rethink their MarTech stack or whether it was some other reason.

When a healthcare marketer is coming to you and saying, I’m using GA4, how is Heap different or how can Heap make my analytics more effective, what are you guys typically saying to those folks and how are you helping them to understand the differentiation there?

DJ Johnson: A big part obviously is the savings of having to go through engineering effort every time you want some new data points. That’s an immediate improvement that people can see, but also speak to insights, I think is a major one. If you need an answer to the question, Heap, coming from that product analytics world, you’re designing and building and pushing products all day long, you don’t have time to wait a couple weeks for an answer to come back.

You need those answers very rapidly and that benefits anyone that that uses Heap. Another big one too is GA4 itself. GA4 went from universal analytics, they’ve now migrated almost entirely to GA4, wasn’t a voluntary migration, it was forced on a lot of people. I think that rubbed a lot of people a wrong way, especially people that were using universal analytics because it was the default choice.

It was a decent tool set, it was usable. Then GA4 comes along and it’s got a entirely different data model, it’s got an entirely different set of tools, that pushed them over the edge of, “Hey, we’re already in a state where Google said they won’t sign a BAA and they don’t want this data at all. They don’t want the hassle so maybe we start to look for alternatives.” That’s really opened the floodgates. We saw this peaking out when the GA4 transition was looming last year, but now it’s really picked up quite a bit.

Rich: Even potentially without the HIPAA piece, there’s the forced migration onto a new platform created the change that people didn’t want, created the conditions for them to start looking around and sourcing what the best options were out there. That’s really interesting. Obviously HIPAA is top of mind for a lot of healthcare marketers, but there’s more to the discussion than just HIPAA. What are some of the biggest needs or problem statements that you’re hearing from healthcare marketers who are coming and having these initial discussions with Heap and eventually becoming Heap customers, what are some of the biggest other problems that they’re looking to solve with Heap or just with measurement in general?

DJ Johnson: Aside from the obvious, like just I don’t want to have to manually instrument absolutely everything in my site, they also are under pressure from both sides. They’re under pressure from internally, they know they need to get more digital, they need more service stability outside of someone picking up a phone or coming into an office, that’s just obvious. It’s just where everything’s going, but on the other side, they have people, their potential patients that they’re used to really good online experiences. They’re used to apps that are developed by multi-million, multi-billion dollar corporations that just work very well and work correctly.

It’s this constant struggle of where do we even start, because we know that we have an improper, imperfect experience for these users. We just don’t know where to focus first.

We don’t know what the biggest pain is. We know that people aren’t happy with it. You get signals like complaints or people calling into a call center, I can’t use your site, or I can’t use your app, but that’s an imperfect signal. It’s never going to give you the true data of where is the struggle, what is the very first thing I can do to improve? I think that’s the biggest thing that people are looking for right out of the gate.

With Heap too, we do an onboarding when a new client comes on because we can start collecting data and providing insights immediately. The onboarding really adds that rigor of, here’s a problem that you want to solve, here’s how you will solve it. With Heap, here’s how you govern everything and make sure the data is clean. Then at the end of that process, now you’re ready to work with your consultancy or work with your teams to get the next insight to uncover the next golden nugget of what to approve.

Rich: Presumably, because it’s a paid product, you guys will actually offer some amount of client support, which is–

DJ Johnson: Yes, that’s a big one. I’m not going to say it’s impossible to find a Google phone number that you can call up and get some analytics help, but it’s near impossible. It might as well be.

Rich: Again, the product DNA of the platform really leaning into helping people, healthcare marketers, understand the patient journey and build better patient experiences than they’ve ever been able to build before. Which is becoming so crucial with more competition and more complex patient journeys and patient journeys that exist end to end on digital experiences now, which is certainly not something that happened in the past. In terms of end-to-end, I wonder if you get this question a lot, we certainly get this question a lot, multi-touch attribution. Lowe’s Loop reporting, these are the holy grails that everybody is after.

How does Heap help to deliver that or help to facilitate some of those more advanced analytics. You mentioned data science earlier. Some of the more advanced analytics solutions that would sit on that far end of the analytics maturity curve in terms have reached multi-touch attribution, or have reached closed the Loop. How does Heap fit into that ecosystem and help marketers achieve that?

DJ Johnson: I think the biggest thing is being able to go beyond just like a session. The days are gone where someone would just sit at their laptop and have an end-to-end journey in 30 minutes and you can analyze it. It’s much more, I got an email on my phone and I clicked through and I started something, but I didn’t complete it. I actually went to my laptop and went halfway through it, but then forgot about it, left the tab open. The journey itself tends to be chaotic when you look at it that way. Heap has the tools to tie those users together in a very secure way. You basically identify someone if they authenticate or if they supply some information, but do it in a way that’s not a PHI element. That way we can see that, “Oh yes, this person got started on their laptop and then on their phone later actually completed the process.”

You can start to answer some of those questions, and as you mentioned, that’s a little bit further on the analytics maturity curve. A lot of times with healthcare providers especially, their pain is more immediate, so they have more– that’s something nice to have in the future. They are like, that’s great that we can do that but today what we need is just looking at all this data and trying to figure out where to start. That’s really where the future is, is looking at a journey doesn’t take 30 minutes, it takes sometimes months to really truly analyze.

Rich: Yes, so just to summarize there what you’re saying, essentially the initial pain point is often how do we remove friction from the journey to get more people down the journey? Once you’ve done that, how do we understand the complexity of the journey better in terms of patient A starting on this device over here that’s switch this device, then creating another session through this other device, et cetera, maybe someone in the household is doing some research. How do you tie all that back together to understand the true nature of that journey and what it really takes to get someone to become a patient from a prospect?

DJ Johnson: Yes, even things that are cross-product, I would say, like they booked an appointment six months ago and they haven’t been back since, but now they’re back. What are they looking at? Are they looking at aftercare resources and so on. This can cross multiple stages within the customer’s experience and lifetime with the provider.

Rich: Got it. Yes, that makes sense. For those companies that are currently on GA4 or are currently flying blind, not even leveraging an analytic solution right now because they don’t feel like it’s safe to do so what kind of an undertaking is it to onboard Heap? I know with the auto capture piece that makes it relatively straightforward in terms of getting all the events being tracked, but what should a marketer expect if they were to switch from, let’s just say GA4 to Heap? How much of a learning curve is it? How long does it take to implement? I know that’s a tough question to ask. Give us a general sense because I’m assuming that’s another question that you get a lot.

DJ Johnson: Yes, absolutely. Like any new system, there’s an adjustment period. I will say like the deployment itself can be very, very rapid, it’s put the tag on the site. Data starts flowing within a few seconds and people actually start generating insights. We have a great deal of customers that can never talk to a person like me or anyone on the Heap side, they’re just free customers. We’ve had to build these tool sets that can generate insights automatically so you don’t have to go hunting for them.

You’ll start to see dashboards populating conversion analysis, acquisition analysis. Those started just filling out automatically. It typically is a very easy experience to try out Heap and just start playing with it. Also advantage to most people aren’t paying for GA4 so they can just leave it on the site. They always have that as a fallback if they need to get a quick answer and they’re more familiar with GA4, they can always do that. Unless they’re being prevented, unless they’re being told, “Just take it off the site immediately.”

Also, it’s like working with folks like you that understand the bigger picture can navigate through, it’s not just deployment and training, it’s really understanding what data you want to capture, what data you don’t want to capture. What’s your identification strategy if you have one. Navigating through how do we operationalize the transition? You’re not just swap in a new tool, but swap in new capabilities and new ways to discover insight.

Rich: Makes perfect sense. I think, as we’ve always said, since day one, the HHS Bulletin should not be looked at as a horrific bombshell that is going to upend your entire world, but as an opportunity to really assess what you’re doing from a measurement point of view, from a data analytics point of view, and make sure that you have the most optimal setup. I think it has uncovered the fact that there are significantly better solutions out there that will allow healthcare marketers and marketers in general to get more out of their data and to leverage it for better insights, for more accurate changes to their patient journey that will allow better performance down the road.

DJ, it has been fantastic to have you here on the pod. I hope that those listening found it useful and now have a better understanding of Heap. If you would like to reach out to Heap, I’m sure that we can provide DJ’s information or also if there’s other folks on the Heap side that you’d like us to provide DJ, we can do that as well.

Thank you everyone for listening. Hope this was useful and we’ll see you next time on Ignite.

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