SiteCatalyst 14 and SearchCenter 3.0 Growing Pains
March 10th, 2008 Posted in OmnitureTo say the migration to Omniture SearchCenter 3.0 and SiteCatalyst 14 has been rough might be the understatement of the year. As previously reported, both upgrades should have addressed severe problems in SiteCatalyst 13.5 and SearchCenter 2.6, but instead of introduced a suite of new glitches. For SearchCenter users, the problems are much worse, as SiteCatalyst seems to work as Omniture intended. However, the main problem with Omniture seems to be communication.
In a way, I feel sorry for Omniture, because according to their own people, some customers are much more vocal than I’ll ever be. Add to that the fact that these new releases were significant milestones in development that fall flat, and you have a recipe for abandonment. Improvements made to the new releases are certainly diluted by poor testing, something that could easily have been determined well in advance.
In some respects I sympathize with those angry clients. After having to run multiple workarounds myself for months on end in order to solve simple problems, it’s no wonder people are starting to make a stir. Unfortunately the value proposition can’t help Omniture much, since the relatively high price tag on their solutions is hard to reconcile.
The Problems
I’ll bet your dying to know what problems made this article possible. Here goes:
- Upon launch on March 4th, SearchCenter 3.0 does not report accurate metrics on search campaigns. I.e. impressions, clicks, spend, etc. Not by a little, mind you, but by a whole lot - multiples, if you will.
- SearchCenter reports fail to print or output to file from the web interface. Here are your beautiful new reports, but you can’t have them. Thankfully reports still can be e-mailed as attachments, so not all is broken.
- Did you want to find out which cities or countries your visitors came from, or which products you sold to visitors from search campaigns? I did, but that bug still isn’t fixed. I’m hoping that data will be available some day, because I’ve been without for months.
- It’s fixed! Well, no it isn’t. I thought it was fixed too, after spending countless hours on the phone with Omniture reps last week to discover more reasonable analytics data this morning. After literally 5 minutes of correlating numbers with Google Adwords, it was obvious that Search Center 3.0 was still broken.
A Simple Solution
Communication.
Omniture is a company built on communication, offering a software product designed to communicate insight and analysis. Problem is, they don’t know how to communicate with their customers. They also don’t know how to effectively empower their customers to provide feedback. In recent weeks, feedback has proven to be one-way with many questions and concerns falling into an abyss.
C’mon guys, let’s talk.
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8 Responses to “SiteCatalyst 14 and SearchCenter 3.0 Growing Pains”
By Bill Ingram on Mar 12, 2008
Hi Garry,
We are sorry to hear you had a negative experience with Omniture. We are committed to listening to customer feedback and improving our products. Before we ever launch a product, we involve customers in an extensive beta-testing program. Omniture launched SearchCenter 3 last week after several months of intensive beta-testing. Omniture also has a customer advisory board where we solicit feedback from our customers. As with any new software release, it is possible that some glitches may occur. When we learn that one of our product features is not working as designed, we work to correct it as soon as possible.
Again, we encourage customer feedback and take it very seriously. Someone on our team will reach out to you soon to discuss these specific issues.
Bill Ingram
VP, Product Management
Omniture
By Garry on Mar 12, 2008
Hi Bill,
I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my post. I also appreciate that with a significant software update such as Site Catalyst 14 and Search Center 3, there are bound to be glitches.
However, what impresses me the most is your personal attention to detail and actively seeking posts like mine. It certainly speaks to significant changes in your organization, and for that you should be commended.
With SES New York literally around the corner, I hadn’t had time to write a follow-up post about some of the headway we’ve made to resolving my issues. Suffice it to say, account reps and client care reps have worked hard to address and fix major problems within literally hours of being reported.
Although they’re not all fixed, I’m confident we’re not far off.
By another PPC analyst on Mar 13, 2008
I guess I’d get more attention from Omniture if I wrote an article like this on our blog. We have yet to get a response to our issues which include the inability to import or synchronize any search engines but Google. Oh and I can’t apply bid rules to new keywords. Oh yeah, I can’t edit destination URLs either, which is about to be a crucial problem considering the Apr 1 destination URL rule changes taking place in Google - we have over 100 client sites to manage and now we don’t even have the option to go back to the old interface and make these adjustments - we’re back to good old My Client Center and AdWords Editor.
Omniture still seems to be a singularly effective web analytics 800 pound gorilla trying on a PPC management dress that’s 3 sizes too small… we need agency-friendly, “enterprise level” tools and this still falls short.
By PPC Manager on Apr 2, 2008
I’ve seen similar problems since the upgrade to SearchCenter 3.0. Very frustrating. We just got word, however, that they’ll be releasing a fix this week or next.
Cross your fingers.
By SC customer on Jun 3, 2008
We started directly using SC 14 so i can not complain about any upgrade problem. However i share your views in term of communication, they do not listen and when they do, they takes ages to fix issues.
More than 21 days to activate a metric in a report, or trying to charge you for any single option which google analytics or even any other payment tool gives included in the price shows they are not customer oriented but money oriented.
By Garry Przyklenk on Jun 3, 2008
Hi SC customer,
I feel your pain - not being able to access simple metrics available in Google Analytics.
Typically, I install Google Analytics as a backup to Omniture to get those metrics I want. More specifically, I look at paid traffic bounce rates, position numbers, and geosegmentation. All are features that haven’t been included in Search Center.