Simply a better way to do web measurement!
Functionalism and Web Analytics
Despite dramatic improvements in the reporting and measurement capabilities of
common web analytic tools, the actual practice of web measurement has yet to undergo similar advances.
It continues to rebolve around the use of a disparate grab bag of tools with no particularly overarching
understanding of when, how, or why a tool is the most appropriate choice. As a result, many analytic efforts
are disappointing, and the ultimate usefulness of web measurement
to an organization has remained all too dependent on having an outstanding individual practitioner.
These are all symptoms of an immature practice, one hindered by the lack of a
standardized method that can provide insight into any specific web site or any particular
analytic problem. It's a situation that can hinder every aspect of web measurement:
it hides important insights, causes analyst training problems, makes sharing approaches
and insights difficult, and it causes tools to multiply features in ways that are often unhelpful
and unnecessary.
Over the course of a decade as a pioneering web analytics consultancy, we've developed
a brand new methodology called Functionalism that solves these problems. It's an approach that breaks up a web site into
its component parts and then assigns one or more specific functions to each. These functions
can be anything from navigation (e.g. route visitors to a specific place), to motivation (e.g. convince
a user to do something) and information (e.g. provide a visitor with some piece of information).
Based on the function of the page, it's assigned a particular page type from a set of common
templates that we've based on our experience measuring different types of sites. Once a page-type is assigned,
the success of each page is measured by KPI's specific to the functions for which
it was designed. And it's in this assignment of type-specific, easily-measurable KPI's that
the power of Functionalism resides.
The advantages to Functional Measurement emerge in several different ways.
First, because each page on your web site can be measured directly against statistics related to its
function, it suddenly becomes much easier to determine the actual effect of design changes on that page's success.
This approach stands in marked contrast to eforts that measure a page change against larger site KPI's (like total revenue),
which usually make it virtually impossible to screen out exogenous effects and obtain any reasonable statistical
measurement of change.
Perhaps even more important than the ability to usefully measure on a page-unit
basis is the conceptual framework that Functional Measurement places around the Design, Implement,
and Measure cycles. Designers, marketers, and analysts can all immediately grasp the basic concepts
in Functionalism- pages are built with a purpose in mind, and measurement is focused on that
purpose. Thus measurement can be seamlessly integrated into the
design process in a standardized fashion. This is simply not the way that web analytics is conducted now.
Finally, by providing a standardized method that can be consistently applied across your website,
Functionalism dramatically reduces the importance of individual practitioners. Unlike ad-hoc measurement approaches, it
provides the essential ingredients needed to achieve conceptual simplicity, near-universal applicability, a
direct real-world path to implementation, and consistent advantages in actual measurement capability.
Looking to put real method into your measurement? Functionalism is the answer.
