Analytics Blog
Google Analytics Tip: Annotations
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’
Step 2: Type in your annotation (160 character limitation) and click on ‘Save’
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.
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.