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Omniture SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter Improvements

Sep 17, 2008 Google Analytics, Omniture

Commiseration used to be the operative theme for many Omniture user group meetings, as many people continue to bask in a love-hate relationship that really defines the analytics suite.  Don’t write this post off as negative just yet because the light at the end of the tunnel is slowly closing in.  That’s right, Omniture Search Center and Site Catalyst are almost at a point where setting up and manipulating reports seems, gasp, easier!

It’s obvious that someone is actually listening for once.  Small nice-to-have improvements have been slipped in here and there.  Errors that were an absolute thorn in a savvy analytics user’s side are - dare I say - fixed?  Far be it from me to withold praise when praise is due so you know what?  Good on you, Omniture.

To be fair, SiteCatalyst never really was very broken.  Sure, some reports were awkward and needed a bit of tuning to make sense from different line of business perspectives, but for the most part you could find solutions quickly and easily, bookmark those reports, and get quick access to them later.  It appears only minor changes were made to fix nagging bugs in SiteCatalyst.

Whoa, SearchCenter is usable again!

I’ve nagged and whined a lot about how Search Center was inaccurate, slow, and clumsy to work with, so now I should set the record straight.  Search Center is much improved these past few months and now makes managing and micro-managing search campaigns much, much easier.

In the past, there were noticeable inaccuraciesand disparate metrics reported between search engine user interfaces such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft Advertising and the numbers found in Search Center.  Although they had fixed the multiplier issue that plagued the release of Search Center 3.0 relatively quickly, the Search Engine Management tab seemed always to be a bit off.

After having increased the API data pull rate in recent months, these numbers seem to be much more truer (still not a word), so business decisions and more importantly Search Center Business Rules, can be much more effective and reactionary.  Changes in the campaign management screens, especially for the top tier search engines has also been much improved.

I have to admit that in previous months, I found making changes to search campaigns in Search Center to be a real chore.  It was actually easier to make changes on the search engine itself, then synchronize those changes to Search Center, then activate those campaigns.  Things are different now:

• making changes to live ads is much easier
• standard metrics from campaigns are accurate
• business rules actually work the way they were meant to

So, now that I’m living and breathing campaign management almost exclusively in Search Center, there are definitely things Omniture can still do to improve.  Simple-stupid features that don’t currently work but are relatively easy to implement include:

• Geographic information through search campaigns collected on the visit/ad click, either through the Google Adwords API or through reverse DNS lookup is crucial!
• Differentiation between match type on duplicate keywords (”mixed” is too vague), also crucial!
• A little bird told me Omniture didn’t necessarily use the latest version of the Google Adwords API, limiting the functionality of Search Center, I can’t verify that, but that’s something they should look into.
• Support for recognizing campaign settings through the API such as position preference, day-parting, network targeting preferences, all things that would be nice to have sooner than later.
• Odd-ball campaign types that don’t necessarily get much support such as placement-targeted campaigns on Google Adwords would be nice.

Of course, we’re in the realm of IT, so development time comes at a premium.  Priorities have to be weighed carefully, and my bet is that several of these changes are in the pipe.  I just find it odd that obscure features that are more “fluffy” than anything get priority, such as the Omniture iPhone App.  That review is pending.

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