Omniture SiteCatalyst Menu Customization and Custom Reports

Without a doubt, two of the most underused features of Omniture SiteCatalyst have to be menu customization (the ability to customize the standard menus in the left-hand navigation) and custom reports. When these two great features are combined, they can make the adoption of Web analytics (and of course Omniture SiteCatalyst) all that much easier for an organization. The great thing about these features are that they can be used to make you analytics reporting intuitive to your stakeholders. In fact, if you are not using this feature, I can’t see how your company is getting the most out of the SiteCatalyst user interface. Just as an example on my blog, here’s a screen capture of the SiteCatalyst Menu for my report suite:

As you can see here, I’ve changed the default menu to a great degree. But if a user were to log into Omniture SiteCatalyst where no menu customization has been applied, how would they know just where to look for information about the performance of internal search? From my menu above, it’s pretty obvious where to go for reporting on Internal search performance.

In addition to the custom menus, custom reports can also be inserted into these custom menu items. Most companies that have a significant marketing spend, will most certainly be using SAINT classifications to apply meta data to their marketing tracking codes. And, many marketing reports are the result of breaking down one marketing classification by another, or even breaking down something like paid search engines by most popular product categories. In stead of having to train your marketing team on how to do classification breakdowns, you should be creating custom menu folders for marketing channels where you also have custom reports where classification breakdowns have already been created.

In short, you are doing your stakeholders and your business a disservice if you are not fully leveraging custom menus and reports. If you are not doing this, I would challenge you to meet with the stakeholders of your company as soon as possible to identify custom reports that they could benefit from, and then making those available in custom menus.