Google Analytics Launches Annotations

Posted Wednesday 9th December 2009 by Allison in Analytics.

New features just launched by Google Analytics include Annotations, which allow all users of the same Google Analytics account to post notes on to the over-time graph.

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Google Analytics presents a multitude of data as to how traffic arrived at and behaved on site, but it doesn’t tell you as an analyst WHY something happened. If you work in a sizeable company, the chances are that someone else will know why it happened and the changes implemented within the company that were responsible for a spike, but who?

Annotations

Google Analytics’ Annotations feature is designed to save time and aid analysis by allowing users to easily access information as to why a certain spike or dip happened by looking at the notes posted by other employees.

Perhaps a server was down, or new ads were launched, and these would explain the changes but, in a business with many different employees and divisions, it could potentially take a very long time asking and digging around intill you obtained the information you wanted, or the employee that would know the answer may even have left the company.

Now with Annotations, Google Analytics users can see at a glance what happened in the company at the time of a spike or dip, capturing, as Google puts it, the ‘tribal intelligence’ of your company.

Annotations can potentially save any analyst the trouble of digging around trying to explain a set of dips and spikes and asking various arms of the business if there were any new initiatives at this points, or problems at another.

The notes left by any user of the new feature can be shared or private, and Google says that Annotations will be used as a central logbook for a company’s online marketing and website activities, meaning that if there are multiple webmasters or even external agencies, causes for traffic change can easily be explained at a glance.

New features

There are other Google Analytics new features too, including a set up wizard for the tracking code which automatically generates the corresponding tracking code for you based on your setup specifications.

This takes the hassle out of manually configuring the tracking code for situations that are complex and specialised, like mobile web tracking and multiple subdomains.

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One Response to “Google Analytics Launches Annotations”

  1. Rebecca

    This looks great – but do you know when it will be up and running in analytics?

    December 14th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
     

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