SiteCatalyst’s New Marketing Channel Manager – First Look
As many of you may have noticed, there is a new menu available in the SiteCatalyst Admin Console. It was released with the 9/16 maintenance release. It is currently in a closed beta and should go live before the next maintenance release. Have not seen it yet? Well if you have admin access here is what to do. In the Admin Console select Report Suites. In the Report Suite Manager, select any one of your sites and then mouse-over the Edit Settings link. Now you should see something similar to this:
Here we see a new menu item called Marketing Channels with 5 more menus beyond that, Marketing Channel Manager, Marketing Channel Rules, Marketing Channel Costs, Marketing Channel Classifications, and Visitor Engagement Expiration.
OK so what is it? Well no one at Omniture will say yet, but by the look of the menus it appears to be some form of the Unified Sources Vista Rule and the Channel Manager plug-in. Lets hope it is. That is an extremely popular and powerful Vista rule (and expensive), and the plug-in is extremely heavy in weight, and is challenging to maintain. So if this is that added functionality then prepared to get a lot of great value from this new addition.
UPDATE: From what I hear this is supposed to go into public beta in November 2009, and be released Q2 2010. Anyone attending the Omniture Summit in early 2010 will probably hear much more about it then.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Looks cool!
Can’t wait to get a chance to site down and play with it.
I just looked for the “Marketing Channels” option in my Admin panel – and it’s not there. Has the release of this new feature been moved out – does anyone know?
Yeah you are correct. It looks like Omniture has removed it form the Admin interface, but I hear through the grapevine that it is still displaying in certain current beta versions of SiteCatalyst. This is something I am really going to be looking for.
I think I have a good guess what this is, and I actually recommended something like it to Omniture in the past when I visited them as a CAB member. My guess is that you will be able to create rules for your incoming and campaign traffic and automate the values in your classifications (or other variables?) based on your rules.
So if your paid search campaign tracking codes all have a prefix of “ppc,” then your “Marketing Channel” classification would automatically get populated with “Paid Search” upon seeing a new tracking code that has a prefix of “ppc.”
Of course, I could be wrong too!