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Omniture Search Center 3.0 Released

After months of client feedback collection through feature requests, bug reports, and competitive pressure, Omniture flicked the switch today for all current Search Center clients.  Search Center 2.6 was based on Site Catalyst 13.5 interface and functionality, whereas Search Center 3.0 is a significant departure.  With a laundry list of new features, Search Center certainly does deserve the new version number, but are the bugs fixed?

Some of the redesign (read aesthetic) updates in Search Center 3.0 include:

• Flatter navigation, offering fewer clicks to your destination.  I’ll give them that much, they have improved usability, but not necessarily report load time.
• Easier report suite selection.  What?  Was this hard in 2.6?
• Easier date selection and date comparison.  Yup, borrowing a few ideas from Google Analytics in terms of making reporting periods much more intuitive.

Functionality updates are more interesting:

• Campaign budget automation.  Search Center has always had powerful business rules for optimizing campaigns, but making campaign projections and limits was more challenging.
• Forecasting possible returns on increased bugets, and outcome scenarios for future budgets and new campaigns.

Enhanced Search Engine Integration:

• Additional Search Engine Support for Miva.  Oh yay. (sigh)
• Tighter integrations with the latest Search Engine APIs.  This one troubles me, because it implies there may have been something wrong with the way Search Center 2.6 integrated with the major players.
• Account summary information across Search Engines.  That’s always been the case, but it was never front and center because the data presented was never as accurate as individual reports.  No one knows why.

Actionable Reporting:

There is a lot of marketing fluff in this list of features, so I’m only going to touch upon a few of them.

•  More charting options for better visualization of your data.  Sure, Google Analytics did offer greater charting options compared to 2.6, but Omniture’s strength in this area was customized charts and dashboards in Excel.
• Faster access to bookmarks and dashboards.  That’s an understatement as it’s now quicker than ever to access frequently used data - an especially nice addition to Search Center 3.0.
• Boardroom-ready downloaded reports in PDF, Excel, Word, and HTML.  In the past, Omniture’s logo, trademarks, and privacy information was all over exported reports.  Now comes the ability to customize what appears and what does not appear on presentation-ready reports.

Conclusion

Although Search Center 3.0 is a welcome release to updating Omniture’s SEM management product, it’s more or less half the story in analytics.  I found it odd that Omniture would essentially push Search Center 3.0 out of development as a soft launch to Site Catalyst 14 functionality.  Sure, Search Center has a smaller client base, but the soft launch will certainly dilute enthusiasm for Site Catalyst 14.

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