theclickscount.com

I use sitecatalyst on a regular basis and what frustrates me the most is just how much of a handicapped tool it is for real world analytics. Sitecatalyst gives the impression that it will be useful but then disapoints so easily. A Omniture staff member once told me that the Omniture consultancy team do not use Sitecatalyst, they have access to and pretty much exclusivley use the very expensive Discover tool. It also appears that Omniture use Sitecatalyst as an upsell platform for their Discover tool. So I thought I would share with you some of the common problems we encounter in Sitecatalyst. Some of these points are feature requests, interface changes and bugs but they all have one thing in common the ability to infuriate the user. 

1) Sitecatalyst cannot display any segment data what so ever! Take a look at Google analytics and I can define and show up to 4 segments on a standard report it takes me 10 seconds to set this up. Sitecatalyst has datawarehouse feature which is itself a chargable addition to the standard package. Now datawarehouse allows you to build a segment then wait a few hours for an excel sheet to come back with some data. Then if I want to see the same data for a different segment I can repeat the process. There’s no way for me to compare this data in Sitecatalyst this is all done externally by pull this data together by hand. 

2) Excel client can’t deal with Segments so I can’t automate pulling multiple segments together in an excel sheet in point 1. 

3) The boardroom ready reports are not ready for the boardroom. Try building a big dashboard and downloading a PDF version of that file. The formatting will be slightly strange but also some headers will overlap and become un-readable.

4) At least in version 14 where an evar has a none value and is associated with a product there is no way to remove the none value and have the totals in the product adjust accordingly. We can do a filter does not contain none but the numbers don’t change. It may be a bug but its been there for 4 point releases of version 14 now. 

5) Publishing lists are useless, on release of version 14 a big deal was made around this functionality which should allow you to distribute the same master dashboard for different report suites with out having to re-build the dashboard. It does not work and has not been fixed in 4 point releases of version 14.

6) Why do I have to create a default metric for bounce rate and other common metrics? Why can’t we put this metric against useful items such as search keywords, referrer types etc etc

7) Why can’t I trend on useful items such as referrer types! Can do this in excel client but why should I?

Percentage change alerting is almost useful but when dealing with percentage changes across a large amount of values I get some text in a e-mail in no sort order either by the value or the percentage change. There’s no option for an csv file just this plain text e-mail which is not useful.

9) Monthly forecast has gone in version 14

10) Contextual performance against last month and year is only available on some report types and some graphs

11) We can do stacked graphs but no 100% stacked graphs (these are very useful when reporting to clients and you want to provide comparitive performance without providing numbers).

12) The only way to report on google news performance is to look at all referrer url’s and then do a filter for news.google why? referrer is an exceptionally long report to run.

13) Why does the excel client time out when pulling larger and more usful data set. E.g I can’t event pull in top 50 search terms month on month in excel with out time outs. 

14) Having multiple data blocks on an excel worksheet causes all data blocks to fail. 

15) Why do I need to set-up a plug-in to establish if a visitor is new or returning. 

16) Just when you need it Sitecatalyst reports never have a total colum.

17) The video reporting integration may not upload a persons viewing information until they visit the site for a second time. What happens if they dont no data for that video play.