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Reporting in SiteCatalyst should become what people actually need + automated intelligent reporting

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Level 3

4/4/13

I know this may sound vague (and maybe outrageous), but I would love an all new Reporting Within SiteCatalyst that actually represent what users need and do and that intelligently does what most people do anyways.

For example, dashboards can only hold one metric, you can't really easily add your targets or trendlines, you can't take two or more values in props/evars and add them together or subtract them to create a new graph value. You can't eliminate annoying percentages in tables that pertain to the whole site (no one I worked with for 7 years really needed them in 95% of reports), Or cross-tabulation like in Discover. And what about have gauges that give you green, yellow, red arrows up and down with numeric values next to trended graphs so you can see if the measure point is up or down compared with YOUR wish for comparison with yesterday, this week, last week, last month etc.

In my current job, my old job, some of my contacts, partners to Adobe that I know off, sister companies to my company and many others create most reporting in Report Builder and I wonder why. Also i noticed after 7 years of working with analytics that the dashboards we create in the industry is very, very similar.

Adobe should:

1. Create a framework that allows users to create the graphs and dashboards they ACTUALLY make. Adobe should:

* get hundreds of clients dashboards

* create a top 50-100 list of what features the majority of clients do and need in terms of reporting.

-- why do they use Report Builder as opposed to dashboards instead? The answer to that question tells you what to put in SIteCatalyst.

* Add the features to SiteCatalyst reporting and dashboards.

Suggested first items to start with mentioned in above examples.

2. Intelligent Reporting. Adobe should:

* Create intelligent reports that create themselves for you.

-- so how is that possible? Well I see trends in what people do with Adobe Analytics. If I want to get a 10-20 page dashboard that tells me how my core products (individually) are doing in terms of sales, new customers, what external traffic sources drives traffic to each individual product, what internal pages or banners (evar with query string tracking code) drives traffic or did it come from logged in (known users), or what 20% of products drive 80% of our value, how is SEO doing for 10 different site sections, why do I need to create all this work myself?

--- How could it be implemented? Create a feature in SiteCatalyst that allows the administrator to tell SiteCatalyst which precise classification of which prop holds the core product names. What particular last touch report or evar holds your traffic etc., What prop/evar or props/evars (even concrete values) contain your main site sections etc. etc.

When all this information is fed into the system ONCE, why should the users painstakingly create reportlets for each part of the report. Adobe should create it in a simple widget where you tell it what you want (example: user tells SC to create a report that shows all external and internal drivers to your main products sales and revenue or CLV values.

Final thoughts:

Why would Adobe do this?
I think a lot of productivity is spent creating reports rather than looking at insights. Even analysts who claim they don't , still do. We need Adobe to create the reports we need in the browser interface (dashboards in SC) so that it represents what people actually create anyways. We can never get away from Excel and Report Builder, but as it is right now I consider Report Builder the only valid tool and I see SiteCatalyst dashboards to be of extremely limited use.

SiteCatalyst reporting could be really powerful and semi-automatic.