Web Analytics Functionalism

Louis Sullivan famously observed that in buildings, form should follow function. His strict adherence to this discipline re-shaped the world's skylines and changed the way we think about buildings. This same dictum can be applied to web sites and their measurement - with the same potential to re-shape the way we build and measure sites.

You can't do effective web measurement without first understanding the intended function of the web site. This is hardly revolutionary - though often forgotten. But Functionalism can be profitably extended to a much deeper level in web measurement (and, by implication, in web design). It can and should be extended to individual pages.

The first step in doing Functionalist web measurement is to understand what role each page on the web site is designed to play. Over the course of numerous web analytic projects, we've found a core of very common categories that can usefully describe page functions. Here are just a few of the most common types:

Engagers: Pages whose primary purpose is to interest the visitor and get them to do something/anything on the site.

Routers: Pages whose function is to move visitors into the best (from their or the sites perspective) place for them on the site. Search should often be treated as a special class of Router page.

Convincers: Pages whose function is to "sell" the visitor on a product or service.

Explainers: Pages whose job is to help the visitor understand some aspect of a product or service.

Tools: Pages that are designed to collect or provide information as part of a non-sales process (like checking an account status or finding a location). There are many different kinds of tools and for a tool-rich site tool pages need to be sub-divided into more granular types.

Converters: Pages that are part of whatever is necessary to gather information/agreements and get a finished lead/sale/transaction.

While many web designers and analysts may think along these broad lines, they don't take the next logical step of measuring each of these types of pages differently.

And the simple fact is this: to measure the effectiveness of a page requires an explicit understanding of its function. There is no single measure of page success that applies to every type of page on a website. This truth should be obvious once stated - but it is practically unheard of in common web analytics.

As part of a functionalist analysis, each page needs to be evaluated according to its effectiveness in its assigned role(s). We've been developing a set of functionalist measurements appropriate to each page type - and we're increasingly using this approach in our analytic projects. By developing success metrics specific to functions like "Routing", "Engaging", and "Closing" we've been able to develop a much deeper understanding of content success.

Part of the beauty of Functionalism as a method of web analysis is how intuitive it is. Functionalist Analysis is immediately understandable by marketers and designers - it may seem merely a formal system that helps everyone clarify what they were trying to do all along. And yet, by forcing a measurable discipline around what each page on a website is designed to accomplish it is a fundamental sea change in the way sites are actually built and measured.

The Functional methodology has become the cornerstone of our approach to web analytics. And we believe it is a big part of what makes our web analytics consulting so much better than everyone else!

You can read more about Functionalism in our extensive Functionalism White Paper. We've also published several articles on it with more coming.