Have you ever jumped into your mountain of data and reports, only to be perplexed by certain spikes or troughs in your charts that occurred a while back. Then doing what any good analysts would do you segment the data, you compare it over time, you check your past analysis… only to find out that what you are investigating was a result of a campaign that you weren’t aware of (either you weren’t told about it and/or it wasn’t tagged properly) or your servers were down at that time or the GA tagging was inadvertently removed, an update was pushed live, a new product was launched, holidays (cyber Monday), or even weather…
Google Analytics has a solution for this problem and it is called Annotations (for charts). Annotations are a very powerful tool for the web analyst, and one that is very under utilized (even when people actually use it). Google Analtyics’ Annotations allow you to add up to a 160 character explanation of an event or happening for a specific day. If need be, and trust me you should often need to, you can add more than one Annotation per day.
To add an Annotation is very quick and easy. First you expose the Annotation interface beneath the chart.
If you have made any Annotations yet you won’t notice much. What you will see is an expanded grey area beneath the chart with the ability to show all or just Starred Annotations, and on the far right you will see a link to “Create new annotation”.
Once you have clicked on the “Create new annotation” link you will see the following.
Now you will see that there are 5 quick steps to creating an chart Annotation in Google Analtyics.
To view your annotation click the down arrow beneath the chart. When viewing you annotation you will see all annotation for the time period of the chart, their dates, description, and the email address of account that made the annotation. If you need to you can also go back and edit your annotations (you can’t edit someone else’s annotations). If you click on the ‘edit’ link you are brought back to the same interface that is used when creating your annotation. At this point, you can make changes or delete your annotation. You will also notice on the horizontal axis of the graph a tiny icon letting you know that an annotation has been made for that day.
Now you know the basics of creating, managing and reviewing annotations its time to start using them. Remember it is always easier to add your annotations as you go, instead of coming back later when it is hard to remember what happened. That being said if, when doing your analysis, you uncover explanations for the peaks and troughs, or the events that created them, go back and add the annotation and share it with others.
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