Omniture SiteCatalyst iPhone App Impresses
In the closing paragraph of my article posted yesterday on recent improvements made to the Omniture SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter applications, I mentioned the company also recently released a SiteCatalyst app for the iPhone. Love it or hate it, the iPhone has amassed a huge following world-wide in the developer community and can now boast a significant application base. Omniture is the first analytics company out of the gate, so how do they fare?
Well, I like what I see thus far…
Omniture has the luxury of relying on their newly revamped AJAX reporting platform, which makes porting data to the iPhone of any other mobile device much easier than developing a whole new custom application. Of course, iPhone users could try to access Omniture via Safari, but the complicated user interface is really not meant for small screen operation. The trade-off is iPhone access to dashboard applets and bookmarks in SiteCatalyst only, but that’s not really a bad thing.
If you consider the the majority of users are likely to only use dashboards and bookmarked reports anyways, Omniture’s done a good job of addressing a marketing need. For the most part, the reports within a dashboard or bookmark are graphical in nature and translate well to the iPhone’s screen. You can quickly get updates on standard site metrics, revenue numbers, and even Search Campaign performance.
Very Cool Indeed, but…
The only downside to the current version of the SiteCatalyst iPhone app is that it doesn’t display more graphically complicated (and sexier) reports such as the conversion funnel report and geo-segmentation report. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before they are supported and missing out on these isn’t a big deal.
One thing that might be a big deal to some is the lack of tabulated reports. Say you have your search campaigns listed in a table with all the metrics you hold near and dear (sigh…), the current Site Catalyst iPhone app doesn’t support displaying these for some reason, so you’re stuck having to schedule those for e-mail delivery or possibly navigating to those in Safari. Unless of course you feel the need to graph each and every metric and save those reports to a dashboard?
At the end of the day, the wow-factor is still there for me. This is a very cool tool, and I doubt the introduction of a Blackberry version is far off. I’m glad one company in the analytics space took the lead, because I would not be surprised if companies like Google, WebTrends or Woopra were to release similar applications.
