Annotations in Google Analytics

Picture this situation:

You are looking at your website’s Google Analytics data for the past quarter and you have noticed a spike in your web traffic during the 2nd month. Great news, right?

You have an idea that the spike is probably due to the new advertising you had started in that month… or wait, was that increase in traffic due to seasonal search patterns? Or due to a change in your website’s structure?

Confused, you then had to ask your marketing team the date which they started the new advertising and then check in with your web development team on when they implemented on the website changes…

Sounds familiar, anyone?

When looking at the data collected in your Google Analytics, it is sometimes hard to keep track of the reasons behind the changes in your web traffic. We constantly have to recall answers to questions like:

Was that dip in traffic because the servers went down?  
Did the new advertising launch bring us any traffic?
When did the changes on our website go live? And what was it’s impact to our web traffic?

Finally, all this confusion and guess work can be addressed. This week, Google has implemented Annotations in Google Analytics. This feature allows you to place notes on the dips and spikes in your Google Analytics charts. The following example will show you how this exciting new function works.

The following graph shows traffic data in Google Analytics:

Now, we are able to label each point within our charts with notes on what activities and changes we had done for our website.

By selecting on a point in our chart, we can now select “Create new annotation”.

A drop-down box would then appear and we can enter the events and other important notes which we can use for our future reference.

Here is what Google has to say about Annotations:

Annotations allows any user with access to a Google Analytics profile to leave shared or private notes right on the over-time graph.  Building upon the concept of bringing Intelligence to data, Annotations complements existing anomaly detection by capturing the tribal intelligence of your company, which tends to be the most expensive and easily lost resource of all.  A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers.

Taking its usefullness even further: Annotations can become your central repository, or logbook, for all online marketing and website design actions within your business.  So even if you have multiple marketing teams, agencies, or webmasters, or if you have employee churn or other disruptions, you can always see which events may have caused conversions to increase or decrease. No wonder this has been one of the top requested features in Analytics for such a long time!

Personally, this new addition to Analytics is a great help for me. It replaces a lot of random notes and post-its I have for my various analysis work.  Definitely looking forward to using more of this fantastic tool in future – and getting rid of the many yellow pieces of paper plastered all over my desk. Kudos to Google!