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Keep your fingers crossed, Omniture Search Center 3.1 Release Scheduled

Admittedly, Omniture had a rocky start to the new year with the release of both Site Catalyst 14 and Search Center 3 back in March, with several hot fixes going into effect shortly after both releases.  My post outlining these issues is still my most popular article of the year, so I’m guessing I hit a nerve.  Despite the problems, Omniture Suite is actually much improved over older versions, but several smaller bugs were still in the pipeline since March.  Here’s hoping that the Search Center 3.1 release this week addresses those quirks.

Search Center 3.0 is a pretty good product, despite the synchronization issues sometimes plaging it’s accuracy.  With recent problems related to Yahoo Panama’s “auto optimizations,” Omniture marketers may have experienced tracking issues due to unsynchronized changes.  It’s one reason that several search marketers I know have pulled their ads from Yahoo.  Well, that issue, plus the lack of traffic going just does not warrant managing YSM campaigns.  The neeed for synchronization can be somewhat of a challenge, but it seems to be a requirement for Search Center marketers, so we’re not likely to see that change.

Geotargeting management, however is a built-in feature of Omniture Site Catalyst that is not necessarily supported in Search Center by default.  What this means is, although you will have an idea of where your converting visitors are located once they go through your signup stream (assuming you ask for that information), there is no way to determine where your visitors are located if they visit through a Search Center campaign.  The only workaround to this in the past was to use segmented Google Adwords or YSM campaigns targeted by state or region to give you a “good idea” of where your visitors are located.

It’s a shame really that Omniture decided to just stick with Google Adwords API data, rather than sniff for user location, because I for one would really love to know where each click originates.

Other small changes that I would really love to be addressed include:

• Omniture Excel Client metrics that are absent but missed such as “average position”.  As a marketer that runs custom Excel reports, I kind of like to know the position my ad showed up for last week.  If you’re using the Excel Client, you’re never really sure.
• Google Adwords Placement Targeted Ad tracking.  To be fair, this is a Google issue, since the metrics tied to placement targeted ad campaigns isn’t divulged in the Adwords API, but I’m hoping the devs at Omniture figured out a preliminary workaround.  All they really need to fetch is ad impressions, clicks, and cost.
• Flaky reports.  Simple interface issues still need to be addressed such as non-functional buttons, poorly formatted print outputs, and browser compatibility issues.

I’m really hoping the release goes as smoothly as possible for Search Center 3.1, because it’s not a bad product.  Certain limitations really necessitate the use of secondary reporting options such as Google Analytics or even the use of Google Adwords reports, and that should simply not be the case.

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