Feature Request: Classifications & Menu Customizer
A few weeks ago, fellow Omniture SiteCatalyst blogger Jason Egan described some ways to take advantage of the Menu Customization feature in SiteCatalyst. I wrote about how to use the Menu Customizer in this post, but recently I have been wanting to do something new with the feature that doesn’t appear to be possible. In this post I will describe what I am trying to do in hopes that someone else out there knows of a way to do it or if nothing else to get it on the radar of the SiteCatalyst product management team…
Why Classifications Mess up the Menu Customizer
For those of you who are savvy enough to understand SAINT Classifications, you will quickly realize how powerful they can be in a SiteCatalyst implementation. In addition to the normal function of rolling up data into groups, SAINT Classifications are great in cases where the root source of the data is not as “clean” as you would like. For example, imagine a scenario where you are trying to capture two character text strings for US States into a Traffic Variable. Unfortunately, your developer has passed data in using both upper and lower case (i.e. CA and ca). While this can be fixed going forward, there may be reports you need to show that group these together. Therefore, you would create a SAINT Classification and lump both of these values into a value of “California” in the classified report.
So far so good. But what if you wanted to show only the Classification report, but not the source report (the one with the “CA” and “ca”)? Believe it or not, this is actually possible by 1) creating a custom report for the Classification version of the variable and then 2) using the Menu Customizer to put this custom report in the right spot and 3) hiding the original report that was classified. However, there is one major drawback of this approach. If you ever need to have a user perform a break down by that classification, for say a Traffic Correlation, you are completely out of luck since hiding the source report disables the ability to break it down. So in this case, if you had an Internal Search Term report and wanted to break Internal Search Term instances down by state (either the “CA” version or the “California” version), you cannot do it once you have hidden the source report. The same limitation applies to classified Conversion Variables (eVars) and Conversion Variable Subrelations.
Proposed Solution
While the example above is somewhat basic, there are many cases where you might want to show a classified version of a report, but not show the source report of the same variable. Unfortunately, since you cannot even see Classifications in the Menu Customizer yet, I am not optimistic that this will be addressed anytime soon, but in an ideal world, it would be possible to do the following:
- See SAINT Classifications in the Menu Customizer as they appear in the regular SiteCatalyst menus and have the ability to hide/move any of them or the source of the Classification. Currently, most of my Classification data appears in a 3rd level fly-out from the menus and it would be great if I could move these reports anywhere I’d like as I can with non-classification reports.
- In cases where the source of the Classification is hidden, still allow users to breakdown Traffic and Conversion reports by the classified versions of the source variable
- If a Custom Report is created using a variable that has Classifications, allow users to have breakdowns of that report in the same way they would if they were looking at the regular version of that report (i.e. don’t punish users for using the Custom Report functionality!)
If anyone out there has come up with a work-around for this, please leave a comment here…Thanks!
Adam Greco is the Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com. You can read his previous Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst blog at http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco/ and can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamgreco. To be alerted to new blog posts, I recommend subscribing to this blog via e-mail using the tool provided on the top-right of this page. Please send questions and comments to adam@the-omni-man.com.
Please note: I am no longer an employee of Omniture and the content/views expressed here are my own and not those of Omniture.
Not a 100% clean solution, but on my implementation I simply move all standard reports into a separate folder called admin. I don’t hide the source of classifications. Then make a classification custom report and place it where it makes most sense for users. This works well for me or am I missing something?
I second Tim’s suggestion. Just hide those source reports in a part of the menu where nobody ever looks.
That is a good idea. A bit of a pain if you have lots of reports though. So I assume you train your users that to do any breakdowns they need to look in your “Admin” folder?
The trade off here is that the menu structure when specifying the breakdown reflects the location of the report. In my case its under the admin folder. I only have a few people who need to know how to do this and they are typically used to navigating into admin to get at some bespoke reports. However since all reports are under the “admin” folder the user is only really presented with the none option or exploring the admin folder when doing a breakdown. We would hope that they at least take a look what’s in there given the restricted options. Perhaps should name the folder with something less scary if that’s an issue.
I hear what you are saying, but I have over 80 reports and probably 1/2 of them have classifications so it would take a HUGE effort to move all of those reports and re-create them using Custom Reports…I may have to do that, but was hoping for a cleaner solution…Thanks for the thoughts…