What happens when medical students graduate and venture out into the real world and start treating patients? The MD founders of PEBMED in Brazil learned firsthand that classroom learning is not always enough for in-the-moment practical application. In response, they decided to build their own app that lets medical students and healthcare professionals make better decisions in daily practice using the curated content. Built on an app-based content platform consisting of Whitebook and Nursebook, and a web news portal, Portal PEBMED, the content is designed to aid doctors with clinical decision-making.
But how did the founders know what kind of content to create and how to organize it? How did they know what was being used and what was popular? How did they learn what users needed?
PEBMED’s challenge
To understand the complete user journey, PEBMED knew that they needed to look at user behavior at the most granular level possible. They wanted to understand the end-to-end and often changing user journey completely. This understanding would:
- inform content development
- inform subscription-generating and retention strategies
- identify problem spots in the acquisition and conversion funnels
Clearly, finding this insight was a job for data analytics — but where to begin?
At first, the PEBMED team sampled a variety of analytics solutions to get to the fastest answers. This worked at first but eventually led to duplicate data, duplicate work, inconsistencies in naming and terminology conventions and general lack of cohesion in how data was handled. This was not a sustainable approach to data analytics, which drove PEBMED to find a better solution that would grow with their need for data-driven decision-making and more sophisticated data uses.
Growing up: Adopting Snowplow BDP as a solution
PEBMED’s co-founder and CTO was adamant that the solution PEBMED adopted must provide:
- Data and infrastructure ownership to gain unopinionated data
- The ability to flexibly customize data tracking
- Collect and centralize data in a single source of truth
They knew these factors would sort out the data analytics challenges they were facing and help unlock knowledge about their users.
PEBMED discovered that Snowplow allows for complete ownership of data and infrastructure and would allow for custom data modeling that would ensure that PEBMED didn’t have to buy into pre-built assumptions that many third-party analytics solutions bring to bear. Instead Snowplow freed PEBMED to start asking the questions they wanted of their data and start working in a methodical, streamlined, consistent way with their data.
“We spent much of 2018 looking at analytics solutions. Most things we tried could not answer the business questions we had, such as user attributes at the time of taking an action. With Snowplow, we realized that all the things we had been doing manually could be done by Snowplow right out of the box. With the product and expert support we’ve received, PEBMED has really moved forward with our data endeavors.” – Pedro Gemal Lanzieri, CTO, PEBMED
What PEBMED was able to do
- Own data; own infrastructure – Ownership helps to enable the flexibility and transparency required to reach deeper, richer insights while freeing PEBMED from the perils of black-box solutions and vendor lock-in.
- Flexibility to track everything – Snowplow enables tracking of custom-defined events across all platforms, products and brands in a single format. PEBMED found this custom tracking essential in getting in-depth insights into user behavior and content consumption.
- Reaching a single source of truth – Snowplow powers a centralized, single source of truth, giving PEBMED what they need to make data-driven decisions drawn from their custom data models rather than on a gut feeling… and get to the answers to questions they would not have been able to answer before – faster.
- Build custom data models – PEBMED uses the raw, unopinionated data they get from Snowplow to build custom models that reflect the use cases that truly interested them: mapping what their users are actually doing in their products and with their content.
PEBMED shared much more detail about how they have used Snowplow to understand their user journey, build very specific custom data models and how this informs their marketing and content development efforts. Download the case study to learn more.
