SiteCatalyst 14 and SearchCenter 3.0 Growing Pains
Published March 10, 2008 by Garry Przyklenk Omniture
To 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.
