Drew Bernard

Over the past months I have been doing a lot of thinking about the state of the art, and tools, around web analytics. I am sure you all understand why I would think this is worth my time. Suffice to say that I really believe most organizations should be working smarter to increase the success of their online activities. One of the things that has bumped this up in importance to me is that I have a few website migration/upgrade projects in the pipeline and I can’t help but think that without changes to the content on the sites, new and improved tools and designs are not going to have nearly impact on performance we all would like to see.

Anyway, one of the most compelling pieces of work I have come across is a white-paper entitled “Functionalism, A new Approach to Web Analytics.” (you can get the PDF here) That was published by a web analytics firm called Semphonic,

In this white paper, Gary Angel, Joel Hadary, and Paul Legutko outline an approach to website analytics called functionalism.

Some of the highlights from the paper:

Their list of functions is interesting, as is their discussion of metrics that might matter most for pages that serve different functions/audiences.  However, the most interesting point they make, I think, is that once you are able to find similar functioning pages (or pages designed to serve different audiences) on the site, it is then possible to compare those pages to each other and, hopefully, see how they are trending over time.

I think there are some really interesting nuggets in this approach that can help most organizations focus on what really improves site performance over time. The reality is, the content and the intended function of content, are the things groups should be most focused on as they work to manage and improve their websites once it goes live.

I took a quick crack at creating the functions that I think most conservation organization sites consist of. I started to think about metrics, but then realized that they will likely very from site to site. I may go back in time and try to put in a generic set of metrics for groups to use a starting points.

Goals for different Pages

All content that you create and all pages that are present on your website should serve a specific purpose. The more clearly these purposes are defined, the easier it is for us to gauge the success of each different section, page, tool, or resource you have spent time creating and maintaining on your website. If we consider your website through a very functional lens, there are a number of different goals/functions different pages play on most non-profit websites.

These include:

1. Routers: These pages are designed to quickly move a visitor along to content they are looking for and that we want them to find.
   Metrics of an effective routing page: Short visit times. High click through rates. Low bounce rates.
2. Engagers - Designed to get visitors to something, anything, on the website.
3. Educators and Explainers - Designed to educate or explain a particular issue, project, program, or other effort.
4. Convincers – Designed to “sell” the visitor on a particular course of action, perspective, etc.
5. Closer - Designed to get visitors to enter into an engagement process.
6. Informers - Pages designed to provide basic news and information about your organization, issues, activities, etc.
7. Converters - Pages that are part of whatever is necessary to gather information/agreements and get a finished lead or transaction via the site.
8. Re-Assurers - Pages designed to reassure a visitor about some potentially problematic issue or concern (Privacy policy, etc)
9. Tools – Pages designed to collected or provide information as part of a non-sales or closure process.
10. Completers - Thank you pages, etc.
11. Sponsors – Pages or series of pages which themselves provide value to your organization, but whose content is mostly provided by a third party or partner.

I think there may be another content type called Attractor, but I am not sure if it’s different enough from Engagers and Sponsors to call out separately.

Side note:

Now, here’s the crazy Drew idea part… What if organizations had an easy way to tag each page/content on their website with an intended function(s)? If we could, and if Google Analytics had an API) we may just be able to then feed that up to Google Analytics and create reports that allow groups to see how different content with the same function are doing in comparison to each other. Keep in mind that these reports will focus on different goals/metrics based on the intended function of the content (long visits vs. short quick pass-through, etc).  

Over at ONE/Northwest, we have a very strong framework for the content tagging bit, in a Plone product we deploy with most our websites, called Pigeonhole. But the API piece may be a bit more elusive. At a recent NOI conference I had a chance to chat with someone from Google and ask if he knew whether or not they planned to create an API to Google Analytics. His answer was: “I am not sure, but I haven’t heard anything about a move to do so.” Damn… The potential power of such a move is really significant. Anyway.

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