Fact-Up Modeling – Making the Impossible Possible
The 6Qs is more than just a set of definitions to help teams share data and context. It also includes a method to apply those definitions easily and accurately to every engagement.
We call this method Fact-Up Modeling—a simple but powerful approach that makes the “impossible” task of describing millions of engagements both practical and scalable.
The Challenge
Everyone needs data—but they all need it for different reasons:
Business leaders want to see how customer engagement connects to business outcomes.
Marketers want to measure campaign performance in real time.
Creatives want to know how different versions of content perform.
Audience Managers want to validate that their segmentation is accurate and effective.
Medium Managers want to confirm whether templates and UI designs meet audience needs.
The problem? These are very different questions, each requiring its own set of answers.
And the complexity is enormous:
You need to capture as much data as possible, since it’s impossible to predict in advance which fact will matter.
No single team has the time or knowledge to completely describe every engagement.
Scale is staggering. A mid-sized asset manager’s website alone may offer 50,000+ engagement opportunities (clicks, reads, form fills, downloads, etc.), resulting in 2–10 million unique engagements per month.
Each engagement could require tracking facts about who visited, what they saw, where it happened, when it occurred, why it was presented, and how the audience arrived there. Trying to manage this volume one engagement at a time quickly becomes unmanageable.
The Solution: Fact-Up Modeling
Fact-Up Modeling turns the problem upside down. Instead of trying to describe every engagement individually, we break them down into the 6Qs—Who, What, Where, When, Why, How—and ensure each facet is described at the point of design, build, or enablement.
This reduces the complexity to manage by orders of magnitude.
Example: Describing WHERE Engagement Happens on Websites
According to the 6Qs, WHERE captures the method and location of an engagement. As complex as websites can be, there are only seven ways a visitor can interact:
Click/Tap – navigating via links.
Content Interaction – reading, watching, listening.
Form Input – typing or selecting information.
Communication & Support – chatting with sales, support, or bots.
Transactional Actions – purchasing or signing up.
File/Data Exchange – downloading or uploading.
Passive/Behavioral Signals – scrolling, rage clicking, timing out.
When developers build sites, they don’t create all 50,000 opportunities one by one. They assemble 50–100 reusable components (article readers, shopping carts, chatbots, etc.), each enabling one or more of these seven engagement methods.
Those components are then combined into 10–20 templates, which produce the 200–500 pages on a typical corporate site—or 1,000–10,000 content entries in a headless CMS.
The Payoff
By:
Tracking whenever one of the seven methods is used,
Describing the make-up and purpose of the 50–100 components and noting which is used in each event,
And doing the same for the 10–20 templates…
…a web team can accurately describe WHERE 2–10 million engagements occur while managing fewer than 200 items.
And remember—that’s just WHERE. By applying Fact-Up Modeling across all 6Qs, you can create a context-rich, scalable description of every engagement.
Why It Matters
Fact-Up Modeling ensures that the data every team needs—leaders, marketers, creatives, audience managers, and medium managers alike—is baked in at the source.
The result is clarity, consistency, and scalability, without the burden of trying to individually track millions of touchpoints.
Want to know more? Let’s talk.
