Omniture SearchCenter has had something of a tortured history, first released in in early 2005 as a 1.0 version that was essentially a really bad mock up of a potential application, and then again in early 2006 as a 2.0 version which was essentially a very poor beta.

But the company and the teams assigned to it persevered, and half a dozen painful months later they turned version 2.1 into a stable if still unimpressive application. Today version 2.2 hits the streets, and to their credit they’ve included the #1 requested feature from a ‘User Advisor Council’ meeting held at the Omniture Summit this past March: bi-directional synchronization with the search engine management consoles. It’s worth noting that this feature didn’t even seem to be on their roadmap when the users made clear what a priority it was.

The Sync feature allows PPC managers to make keyword, campaign, or bid changes directly in the Google, Yahoo (and now MSN) interfaces and then sync these changes back into SearchCenter. Previously once you began using SearchCenter, you had to make all changes via the SC interface. And the SC interface is far from intuitive or efficient. Also, since the engines are constantly adding new features, SearchCenter users were perpetually behind, forced to wait until Omniture moved these capabilities into the interface.

There is still a lot of work to do on Omniture SearchCenter, but the company has dramatically extended the resources assigned to the project, and they’re hard at work on version 3.0.

The challenge is that SearchCenter needs tremendous work on both the management and the reporting sides of its capabilities. The improved paid search reporting that SearchCenter enables today is the reason we choose to use it and recommend it to our clients. But there is far more breadth and depth of reporting, and a lot of report formatting and navigational issues that could be dramatically improved. I personally hope they focuse 80% of their efforts in this area, and make work on campaign and bid management a clear 2nd priority.

There are several reasons I advocate this approach:

1. The engines themselves have pretty good interfaces for keyword management, bid changes, and campaign organization.
2. SearchCenter has to replicate and implement management functionality against Google, Yahoo, MSN and other engines – meaning the workload per feature is very high.
3. Omniture is never going to keep up with four changing management interfaces in terms of features, it’s a perpetual game of catch up.
4. Omniture’s strength (in SiteCatalyst) is as a reporting system. They don’t help you to manage your website or marketing campaigns, they report on them. I think this is the right model for SearchCenter too.
5. Reporting alone is a huge and important task. It will take them another year or two to really nail it at its full potential. Any effort on management takes away from that.
6. The reality is that the entire current keyword management interface in SearchCenter is a UI and logical disaster and needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up.

So the choice they face is between doing something rare and valuable and directly in their expertise sweetspot, or something that at best duplicates existing functionality and at which they’ve proven rather incompetent. Doesn’t seem like too tough of a management decision.

The one exception (and there may be others) is bid automation. Conceptually that is a value-added feature, although I contend their current implementation has some critical flaws. But more importantly, with Google and Yahoo adding features like day-parting and position targets, isn’t it likely that they come in with very good to great business rules for bidding and make this feature unnecessary as well?

So we’re very glad to see Omniture SearchCenter 2.2, and congratulate the teams there on listening to their customers and getting the product to this stage. We’re looking forward to version 3.0 and beyond, and hope the listening continues.