My 2012 Summit SiteCatalyst Feature Wishlist [SiteCatalyst]

Each year at the Adobe (Omniture) Marketing Summit, customers are given an opportunity to “vote” for new product features while Brett Error reviews them (and cracks a few jokes!). From the rumor mill, it sounds like Brett may no longer be around (??), but even if he isn’t, hopefully the session will live on. Each year around the time of Summit, I like to look back at the past year and think about what SiteCatalyst features are not available that would have helped me and my clients the most. The SiteCatalyst product team is always swamped with great ideas from the Idea Exchange and have been doing a great job of pounding them out. Therefore, this list is not meant to mean that my requests are more important than others they are working on, but rather just ones that I have personally experienced pain for not having (some of them were on my last year list as well which you can read here). All of these ideas are in the Idea Exchange, so if you have experienced similar cases where they would help you out, please vote for them there (shortcut links to items in the Idea Exchange are provided for each) and possibly in the Summit session should they arise…

Segmentation Enhancements

In a recent post, I went through some of the reasons why companies might decide to abandon multi-suite tagging and just rely on v15 Segments instead. Currently, there are a few features holding me back from going “all in” on v15 Segmentation. These are:

1. The ability to compare segments in reports (http://bit.ly/yERLbr). As I mentioned in my previous post, it is easy to compare the same report for two report suites or ASI slots, but it is not yet possible to do the same for two (or more) segments without using Discover.
2. The ability to have security for segments so you can assign who can see data for a segment (http://bit.ly/yh0djM). As Ben Gaines astutely pointed out, many people use report suites for security reasons to determine who at an organization can see which data. It would be great if this could somehow be duplicated using segments. However, I think that this is not possible until my next feature request is addressed.
3. The ability to lock down eVars like you can Success Events and sProps (http://bit.ly/wSMLU3). For years, I have asked the SiteCatalyst team to provide the ability to add User/Group security to eVars. Currently, it is possible to prevent a user or group from seeing a specific sProp or Success Event, but for some strange reason, you cannot do this with eVars. Once you can lock down eVars and you can lock down segments, you can truly secure your data set and cease to rely on multi-suite tagging or additional company logins to enforce security.
4. One item that is unrelated to v15 segmentation and multi-suite tagging, but still related to segmentation, is the ability to segment on a path (http://bit.ly/xzkeTr). There are many cases in which you would want to isolate visitors or visits where visitors navigated in a certain way. Hence, it would be great if you could add a 3 or 4 step flow as a valid way to segment. Since Pathing is available on all sProps, my hope is that this functionality would work for any sProp that has Pathing enabled, not just Pages and Sections.

Multi-Session Enhancements

One of the limitations of SiteCatalyst is that there are many aspects that are only session based. In the future, I would like to see this restriction lifted. Here are a few examples of what I’d like to see:

1. Ability to see multi-session Paths (http://bit.ly/zimT2O) so you can see how visitors navigated the website across multiple sessions.
2. Ability to see multi-visit campaign code attribution (http://bit.ly/yzBTUE) in a way that is better than just first touch and last touch or the Cross Visit Participation plug-in. Even if the current option for “Linear” allocation worked cross-session, that would be a great step forward.

Report Sorting Enhancements

If you spend a lot of time in SiteCatalyst reports, you are familiar with the fact that you can only sort by metric columns. I would like to have the following sorting enhancements:

1. The ability to do a weighted sort so you can easily filter only the top X number of rows before sorting (http://bit.ly/zsJNps). I am sure the following scenario has happened to you at some point. You add a calculated metric like Bounce Rate to a report and then you choose to sort. You end up getting items with a 100% bounce rate, but when you dig deeper you see they have only a few values. What you really want is the ability to filter the report for only the top 50 values and then to apply a sort (like Google Analytics provides). Currently, this has to be done in Excel, but should be native to SiteCatalyst.
2. The ability to sort by the value column (http://bit.ly/ylULpS). There are some cases in which you would like to sort by the actual values passed into SiteCatalyst instead of by a metric column. Currently, you can work around this by using search filters, so this isn’t a super-high priority, but it would be nice to simply have the ability to sort by the value column for times it is advantageous.

Final Thoughts

Obviously, I could list many more, but the above list of items are the ones that I have run into the most. If you have others that you would like to see elevated in priority, feel free to list them here. Thanks!