Blast Analytics and Marketing

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Category: Digital Analytics

Google Analytics Tip: Annotations

December 7, 2010

This is a simple Google Analytics Tip, but extremely valuable. Google Analytics has a great feature to add a note (i.e. annotation) to a specific day in your profile. This can serve as a historical record for:

  • marketing efforts
  • code changes
  • and a variety of other events.

Proactively using this annotation feature will save you time by eliminating the need to lookup and correlate past events when analyzing data at a later date because it is now aligned with a specific marketing activity or other event such as a site change.

For example, you may want to annotate a specific date of when an important newsletter was distributed. Two months from now, when you are analyzing traffic (and hopefully see a huge spike), having this annotation in place will save you time and eliminate the drill-down required to figure out why you received a spike in traffic.

Step 1: Click on a specific day’s data point and click on ‘Create new annotation’

How to Create an Annotation in Google Analytics

Step 2: Type in your annotation (160 character limitation) and click on ‘Save’

Save Google Analytics Annotation

Anytime it falls in the date range of your report, you’ll see a handy annotation icon. Just click on it to view the annotation for that day.

Google Analytics Annotation Example

A few additional comments about Google Analytics annotations:

  • If you mark your annotation as ‘Private’, it can only be seen from your login. When ‘Shared’, anyone else that has access to your profile can see the note.
  • Annotations are not linked to reports; they are globally accessible throughout any report that has a chart.
  • You can have multiple annotations per day.

If you need help with Google Analytics Annotations or any other feature of Google Analytics, our team of Authorized Google Analytics Consultants can lend a hand. Feel free to post any questions you may have below.

Joe Christopher
About the Author

As Vice President of Analytics at Blast Analytics, Joe leads a team of talented analytics consultants responsible for helping clients understand and take action on their vast amounts of data, to continuously improve and EVOLVE their organizations. With over 20 years of experience in analytics and digital marketing, Joe offers a high-level of knowledge and guidance to clients across all industries. He is an expert in all major analytics platforms including Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, as well as various tag management systems such as Tealium and Adobe Launch. He also consults on data visualization, data governance, and data quality strategies. Having extensive expertise in many areas, has enabled Joe to become a well known thought leader and speak at industry events such as Tealium’s Digital Velocity series. Joe remains on the pulse of various information technology, programming languages, tools and services, keeping Blast and its clients on the leading edge.

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn. Joe Christopher has written on the Blast Digital Customer Experience and Analytics Blog.

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