In this post I'll describe the basic building blocks of functionalism. As you follow along, think about how you can apply these techniques to your own web site measurement and optimization projects.
Functionalism Defined
Functionalism is a methodology for web measurement. It includes:
- A way to understand what each part of a web site is supposed to accomplish.
- A specific set of measurements to determine how well the function is being performed.
Here's the cool part - functionalism is appropriate for any type of site: commerce, lead gen, media, branding, support, etc.
Back when I was an on-staff web analyst at a large company with a very diverse collection of web sites - none of which had direct and obvious ties to revenue - I used to joke that, "I wish we just sold shoes." No offense to analysts who measure commerce, but you people have it easy. If I had known about functionalism back then, my group's web analytics projects would have been far more structured and consistent than, sadly, they were.
So much for my flashback. Here in the present, functionalism can give you and your web analytics team a framework for measuring every component of every diverse web site that you own. Not only can it enforce business-wide consistency in basic measurement, it can also put some much-needed structure around the process of doing web analytics.
The Approach
Functionalism has 2 major components:
- A set of page types that map to content on your site
- A set of KPIs that map to each of the page types
Once these components are in place you can take any page on your site, give it a page type classification, then measure how well it's performing using the KPIs associated with that page type. In this way, functionalism provides a method for deciding when and how to use any KPI that you define.
Page Type Classification
Page types are designed to capture the natural function of a page. For instance, you'd call a page a "Router" if its function is to move the visitor to specific places on the site, and you'd call a page a "Convincer" if its function is to convince someone to buy your product or service.
As I classify pages I often refer back to a definitive list of the page types in my repertoire. It looks like this:
- 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 specific places on the site. One of the differences between an Engager and a Router page is that the latter is built with the expectation that the visitor has come to the page looking for a particular type of information/service. 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.
- Informers: Pages whose primary objective is to provide basic news and information about a product or industry. This differs from Explainers in that content is not specific to your own particular product or service.
- Billboards: Pages providing various content to visitors, but whose primary business objective is to display third-party advertisements on a Cost-per-Impression basis.
- Sponsors: Pages or series of pages which are themselves revenue-producing, whose content is mostly provided by a third-party who pays for inclusion within your website.
- Closers: Pages that are supposed to get visitors to enter a conversion process.
- Converters: Pages that are part of whatever is necessary to gather information/agreements and get a finished lead/sale/transaction.
- Re-Assurers: Pages built to re-assure the visitor about some potentially problematic issue or concern (privacy policies are a common example).
- Tools: Pages that are designed to collect or provide information as part of a nonsales 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 subdivided into more granular types.
- Completers: Thank you pages – designed to signal the completion of a process and – in some cases – drive to additional engagement.
This is the Cliff Notes version of the full page type listing that you can find on page 19 and following in Gary Angel's freely-available Functionalism White Paper.
Make a list like this for yourself. Keep in mind that, as long as you have defined the right page types, every page on your site can be classified. Don't feel bound by the list I've provided here - it's totally fine to create your own page types.
Page Types & Associated KPIs
Within the framework of functionalism, each page type is associated with one or more KPIs. In this way, the measure of a page's effectiveness is tailored to the function it performs.
For instance, a "Router" page will be associated with KPIs that measure how well it moves visitors to specific places on the site. Typical router KPIs will measure the "next page" behavior for that page - the percent of clicks on body content, percent of clicks on navigational links, exit rate, etc. Similarly, a "Convincer" page will be associated with KPIs that measure how effectively it convinces a visitor to buy. The most common convincer KPI is percent of next page clicks on call-to-action links - you can call this "Conversion Rate" as long as your business audience is clear on the definition. Here's a sample mapping: As with page types, the KPIs can be customized to suit your needs. Pick KPIs that 1) make sense as a measure of functional performance, 2) are meaningful to your business audience, and 3) are actually obtainable from the web analytics tool that you use. KPIs are tool-neutral and designed to be implemented in a range of solutions including Omniture, Webtrends, Google Analytics or any other tool. So as long as you've got a basic, valid visitor behavior tracking in place on your web site, you can use functionalism today without having to customize your implementation. That's the basic setup. Once you've defined how you'll measure each page, you can use it to compare pages of one type to one another, to assess the effectiveness of redesigns, and to provide focus for ongoing optimization. I'll cover examples in future posts.
Functionalism is NOT ...
Now that I've outlined what functionalism is, here's a quick note on what it's not. Functionalism is not designed to provide any subjective analysis of pages: It includes no subjective design rules, no business specific classifications, no way to “score” pages subjectively.
It simply provides a framework for performance measurement.
[This post is part of my series on Functionalism. In my next installment I will walk you through a how-to.]