The Challenge
HealthConnect (name changed) is a telehealth platform with 500K monthly visitors and 50K monthly consultations. Their GA4 implementation was a mess—and in healthcare, messy analytics can mean compliance risk.
Key Problems
- Broken conversions: GA4 showed 10% of actual consultation bookings
- PII in events: User emails were accidentally being sent to Google
- No consent management: Tracking fired regardless of user consent
- Duplicate events: Page views firing 2-3x due to SPA misconfiguration
- Zero trust: Marketing and product teams built their own spreadsheets instead
The Solution
We performed a comprehensive audit, remediated all issues, and rebuilt GA4 with healthcare-appropriate data governance.
Compliance Framework
- Consent-first tracking: Integrated with their existing consent management platform
- PII scrubbing: Server-side GTM with data redaction before sending to GA4
- HIPAA considerations: No PHI in analytics, documented data flows
- Data retention: Configured 14-month retention to match policy
Technical Remediation
Week 1: Audit
We documented every event, identified PII leaks, and mapped the gap between reported and actual conversions. The root cause: their single-page app was re-firing the GA4 snippet on every route change.
Week 2: Implementation
We rebuilt the GTM container with proper SPA handling, implemented server-side tagging for data control, and created a clean event taxonomy aligned with their patient journey.
Week 3: Validation and Dashboards
We validated every conversion path, reconciled with backend data, and built Looker Studio dashboards that matched reality.
Privacy-First Architecture
The new architecture ensures no PII reaches Google:
- Client-side GTM collects events with consent check
- Events route to server-side GTM container
- Server-side GTM scrubs any PII (email, IP, etc.)
- Clean events forward to GA4
- BigQuery export for advanced analysis (with retention controls)
Results
- 100% data trust: Marketing now uses GA4 as source of truth
- Accurate conversions: GA4 matches backend within 2% (vs. 10% before)
- Compliance confidence: Clean audit trail for regulators
- Self-serve reporting: Teams can answer questions without engineering
Marketing Impact
With accurate conversion tracking, the marketing team discovered their Google Ads campaigns were actually 3x more effective than they thought—the broken tracking had been massively under-reporting. They doubled down on winning campaigns.
"We went from GA4 being a liability to it being our most trusted data source. The compliance piece was critical—we can now show regulators exactly what data we collect and where it goes."