Recently I’ve been asked how to produce a number of reports, both of which have lead me to believe that Omniture does not currently deliver nearly enough reporting granularity to the end user. Subsequent searches on google to find more information on this subject have so far proved unfruitful, most documentation lying within Omniture itself, and in most cases, not helpful in assisting with report generation.

Omniture Natural Search Report

So, here I am blogging about it, hoping that one day someone else may find this and in some way feel placated by the fact it is happening to others.

I should also add at this point that there are a number of reports that don’t seem to yet work on V14 of Omniture, and this is causing both support issues when users think their site has stopped reporting, and frustration for experienced users. This area of non functionality that I have tried to use so far, seems to affect Traffic Sources, Visitor Retention and Visitor Profile. So most of the time below, it’s version 13.5 that I’m referring to.

Anyhooo, the reports I’ve been asked about are as follows:

• The user would like to be able find out the number of visits to the site coming via natural search engines in order to keep track of search engine saturation over time. This would allow them to see if anything is wrong with the sites SEO, or perhaps a change in say the google ranking algorithm, very quickly. The key to this working however, is the time aspect, something which, bar doing an A/B comparison of only 2 dates is seemingly impossible. Even the data warehouse does not contain these figures. So, as it stands, the only way to produce this data is manually, clearly this is infeasable accross such a large porfolio of sites.
• This user would like to be able to find out the average page views per visitor for a given Channel/Site Section, so that they can work out which sections are working successfully. The overall figure is strangely available at the bottom of of the Visits page, but that’s all you get. This figure is not available for correlation either….
• Similarly, a user would like to track page views per visit, but in this instance, over a set time period. Once again, Omniture does not give the user the chance to graph this periodically, it will average a figure for the total time elapsed, but not allow you to break it down to say a week by week basis.

Expect to read updates as I delve deeper into these problems and hope to find solutions! And, if you fancy a long chat about Omniture implemtation strategy, please get in touch, as I’m constantly trying to work out what is the best solution here….