Omniture SiteCatalyst: Too Much Of Nothing
By Craig Danuloff
One of my pet peeves about SiteCatalyst is its insistance on including data for the 'None' category in just about all of the 'Commerce' reports. For example, when requesting a summary of inbound traffic generated by natural search engines, the report below is presented (click to zoom), in which the non-organic traffic completely overpowers any sense of the relative performance of the natural search engines.
The relative strength of the search engines alone can be seen in the Traffic Reports section, but not with revenue numbers (and lots of other data points) attached. There is a way to see the relative strength of the engines in Commerce, by simply sorting by some variable where 'None' ranks low, as shown below, but the axis percentages still take the 'None' data into account.
A trick that works in some reports, is to use Advanced Search to include only data elements that do not include the word 'None' but that trick doesn't work on this report.
Anyone know another way around this? Else let's hope Omniture adds a toggle box to turn on and off the inclusion of 'None' data in this and the many other reports where this problem occurs. This was a relatively popular request at the Omniture Summit session run by CTO Brett Error in March. It would be great to get some feedback as to how this, and other requests made there, are working their way onto the future release schedule.


