It was told to me that areas that "pop" out to my eyes, also pop out to a cats eyes. Before this year I had never found a cat toilet. When I found my 1st one this year, I studied it. HARD. Then I found more places like it. It was a low spot in a crop feild, were the water runs off and grass don't grow. These spots jump out and everyone of these spots I found had cat scat.
Ended up finding over 10 toilets, caught twice as many cats as my previous best season, and 85% were on toilets and everyone was on purpose. The only consistency that I found with cats was toilets. I caught them on baits, lures, urines, dirt holes, walk throughs, blind sets, turd sets, some with flags, some without, I caught cats the 1st night, 15th night and 2 over 30 nights later from set date. When you're on cats (a toilet with 5 plus piles of different sized scat) You are gonna have a chance. When I found a really good toilet, I would not leave until I took cats, or season was over.
I believe 2 things are critical with cats. #1 being on location and #2 bed that trap solid. You do those 2 things, you will catch cats.
Lures, baits, urines, visual attractors. I don't believe they are an absolute necessity, but I don't believe they hurt anything either and I do use them more times than not, but when I use a type of scent, I use high quality stuff. Weiser, Derrick, Graham, O'Gorman, June, Lennons etc, etc.
Those are my thoughts, take them for what they are worth, I am not a pro, far from it, but those are the things I found this year on my line in Mid-Mo