Feature Request: Classifications & Menu Customizer

A few weeks ago, fellow Omniture SiteCatalyst blogger Jason Egan described some ways to take advantage of the Menu Customization feature in SiteCatalyst. I wrote about how to use the Menu Customizer in this post, but recently I have been wanting to do something new with the feature that doesn’t appear to be possible. In this post I will describe what I am trying to do in hopes that someone else out there knows of a way to do it or if nothing else to get it on the radar of the SiteCatalyst product management team…

Why Classifications Mess up the Menu Customizer
For those of you who are savvy enough to understand SAINT Classifications, you will quickly realize how powerful they can be in a SiteCatalyst implementation. In addition to the normal function of rolling up data into groups, SAINT Classifications are great in cases where the root source of the data is not as “clean” as you would like. For example, imagine a scenario where you are trying to capture two character text strings for US States into a Traffic Variable. Unfortunately, your developer has passed data in using both upper and lower case (i.e. CA and ca). While this can be fixed going forward, there may be reports you need to show that group these together. Therefore, you would create a SAINT Classification and lump both of these values into a value of “California” in the classified report.

So far so good. But what if you wanted to show only the Classification report, but not the source report (the one with the “CA” and “ca”)? Believe it or not, this is actually possible by 1) creating a custom report for the Classification version of the variable and then 2) using the Menu Customizer to put this custom report in the right spot and 3) hiding the original report that was classified. However, there is one major drawback of this approach. If you ever need to have a user perform a break down by that classification, for say a Traffic Correlation, you are completely out of luck since hiding the source report disables the ability to break it down. So in this case, if you had an Internal Search Term report and wanted to break Internal Search Term instances down by state (either the “CA” version or the “California” version), you cannot do it once you have hidden the source report. The same limitation applies to classified Conversion Variables (eVars) and Conversion Variable Subrelations.

Proposed Solution
While the example above is somewhat basic, there are many cases where you might want to show a classified version of a report, but not show the source report of the same variable. Unfortunately, since you cannot even see Classifications in the Menu Customizer yet, I am not optimistic that this will be addressed anytime soon, but in an ideal world, it would be possible to do the following:

1. See SAINT Classifications in the Menu Customizer as they appear in the regular SiteCatalyst menus and have the ability to hide/move any of them or the source of the Classification. Currently, most of my Classification data appears in a 3rd level fly-out from the menus and it would be great if I could move these reports anywhere I’d like as I can with non-classification reports.
2. In cases where the source of the Classification is hidden, still allow users to breakdown Traffic and Conversion reports by the classified versions of the source variable
3. If a Custom Report is created using a variable that has Classifications, allow users to have breakdowns of that report in the same way they would if they were looking at the regular version of that report (i.e. don’t punish users for using the Custom Report functionality!)

If anyone out there has come up with a work-around for this, please leave a comment here…Thanks!