Healthcare organizations rely on website analytics to understand how patients and other users interact with their digital experiences. With more platforms available, determining which capabilities best support your organization’s needs can be challenging.
Before comparing technologies, it’s important to consider what your team wants to understand, which insights may be missing from your current reporting, and what resources you have available.
This five-step guide outlines how healthcare organizations can evaluate their analytics needs and better understand the technologies available to support them.
Step 1: Define Your Measurement Goals
Before determining what to measure, consider what your organization wants to accomplish through its digital experiences and how analytics can support those objectives.
For healthcare marketers, this might include improving access to care, increasing online appointment scheduling, or helping patients more easily find the information they need.
Once you’ve identified these priorities, consider the questions your analytics should help answer:
- Where do patients encounter friction when searching for providers, services, or locations?
- Are users successfully progressing from provider searches to appointment scheduling?
- Which marketing channels contribute to meaningful website actions?
- Where are users abandoning important journeys?
Healthcare journeys are rarely linear. A patient might review several provider profiles, check insurance information, and call a location rather than schedule online. Measuring only completed online appointments could overlook other meaningful interactions.
Connecting your measurement goals to broader organizational objectives can help ensure your analytics provide insights that support meaningful improvements to the patient experience.
Step 2: Identify Your Gaps in User Insights
Once you’ve established your goals, consider what types of data and reporting capabilities will help you achieve them.
Analytics capabilities generally fall into several categories:
- Website analytics: Measures traffic, acquisition channels, engagement, and conversions.
- Behavioral analytics: Examines how users interact with website elements and navigate between pages.
- Journey and funnel analysis: Tracks progression through experiences, such as finding a provider or requesting an appointment.
- Marketing attribution: Helps teams understand how campaigns and channels contribute to desired actions.
- Privacy-focused analytics and data management: Supports the collection, management, and analysis of website data while accounting for healthcare privacy requirements.
For example, traditional web analytics may show that visitors are reaching your Find a Doctor experience but aren’t progressing to scheduling. Behavioral and funnel analysis can help your team investigate where users leave, which interactions precede abandonment, and whether certain pathways present more friction than others.
The distinction matters because different capabilities answer different questions. Understanding where your current reporting falls short can help you identify which additional insights would be most valuable..
Step 3: Assess Your Team’s Capabilities
An analytics platform’s value depends on your organization’s ability to implement, manage, and use it effectively.
Before exploring specific technologies, evaluate your existing infrastructure, technical resources, and reporting processes.
Consider the following:
- Technical resources: Who will support implementation, configuration, and ongoing maintenance?
- Existing technology: How will the platform integrate with your CMS/DXP, CRM, EHR, and other systems?
- Reporting needs: Who will use the data, and what depth of analysis will they need?
- Data management: Does your team have the resources to maintain tracking configurations and validate data quality?
- Budget and scalability: What can your organization support today, and how might those needs evolve?
Implementation is only one part of the equation. Website updates, new scheduling integrations, and changes to digital experiences can affect tracking accuracy and reporting consistency.
Consider not only what your team can implement today, but what it can realistically maintain as your digital experience evolves.
Step 4: Understand Your Platform Options
Analytics technologies serve different purposes, from measuring website performance and user behavior to managing how data is collected and shared. Understanding these distinctions can help you determine which technologies best support your organization’s needs.
Website and Behavioral Analytics
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4): Provides event-based website and app analytics, including acquisition, engagement, and conversion reporting. However, Google does not offer a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for GA4, and HIPAA-regulated organizations must not use it in ways that expose protected health information (PHI) to Google.
- Contentsquare Product Analytics (Heap): Offers behavioral analytics, autocapture, and journey and funnel analysis to help teams understand how users interact with digital experiences.
Integrated Analytics Platforms
- Piwik PRO: Combines website and app analytics with tag management and data management capabilities, emphasizing privacy and control over data collection.
- Piano Analytics: Provides digital analytics capabilities for collecting, analyzing, and reporting on audience behavior, engagement, and performance across digital properties.
- LightTrail: Offers healthcare-focused website analytics, visitor journey tracking, conversion measurement, and marketing attribution.
Healthcare-Focused Analytics and Data Privacy
- Freshpaint: Helps healthcare organizations control how data is collected, filtered, and shared with analytics and marketing platforms, including tools that cannot receive PHI.
- Ours Privacy: Provides healthcare-focused data collection and privacy controls, alongside built-in analytics and attribution capabilities.
These technologies don’t all serve the same purpose. Integrated analytics platforms can provide alternatives to GA4 for website measurement, while privacy and data management technologies can help organizations manage how information is shared with other tools. Some platforms offer overlapping capabilities, and organizations may use multiple technologies together.
Data collection methods also vary. Platforms with autocapture capabilities can collect many interactions without requiring each event to be defined in advance. Manually configured tracking offers more deliberate control over what is measured but may require additional development and maintenance.
You also need to consider your organization’s data retention needs. For example, standard GA4 properties retain granular event-level data for two months by default, extendable to 14 months for certain analyses. Organizations requiring longer-term detailed analysis may need additional infrastructure, such as BigQuery.
Understanding these differences can help you evaluate how each technology fits within your broader measurement approach.
Step 5: Evaluate Privacy and Governance
In healthcare, privacy and data governance should inform every stage of the analytics evaluation process.
HHS guidance on online tracking technologies outlines how HIPAA requirements can apply when regulated entities collect or disclose protected health information (PHI) through website and mobile app tracking.
The Federal Trade Commission has also addressed privacy and security risks associated with healthcare tracking technologies.
As part of your evaluation, consider:
- What information will the platform collect, and could it include PHI?
- Does the vendor offer a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) when required?
- What controls are available for filtering or restricting sensitive data?
- Where does collected data go, including downstream analytics and marketing systems?
- Who can access the data, and how long will it be retained?
As illustrated by GA4’s limitations, a platform’s analytics capabilities don’t necessarily mean it meets your organization’s privacy and compliance requirements. Even technologies designed with healthcare privacy in mind require careful consideration of how they’re configured, what information they collect, and how that data moves between systems.
Establishing clear expectations for data collection, access, and ongoing governance can help your organization maintain a more secure and sustainable measurement strategy.
Turn Your Evaluation Into Action
Evaluating website analytics starts with understanding what your organization needs to measure, which capabilities will provide meaningful insights, and how those technologies fit within your existing digital infrastructure and teams.
By taking the structured approach we recommend, you can make more informed technology decisions and build sustainable measurement practices. Not only will that upfront effort help you choose the platform that best meets your team’s needs, it will also support ongoing improvements to your patient experience.
Need Help Evaluating Your Analytics Strategy?
Connect with Modea to explore how we can help align your analytics strategy with your organization’s goals and capabilities.