As most of us wise advertisers, entrepreneurs, or analysts know, Google Analytics is one of the most robust and advanced analytical tools available, to continually improve the experience of your customers on your website. Plus it’s free! I’m going to break down the latest feature Google Analytics has come out with called Annotations, and explain how it can be useful to any advertiser.
What are Google Analytics Annotations
If you’re like me, it sometimes seems almost impossible to remember the exact date of every change or significant fluctuation in an online marketing campaign. Have you ever thought, “When exactly did we launch those new display ads?” or “What was the day that there was that huge fluctuation in traffic across the industry”? If there’s every been a time like that in your life as an advertiser, Google Analytics Annotations will help you to denote any and all significant changes or fluctuations that’s occurred in your marketing campaign.
How Exactly Do Annotations Work?
It works by allowing any user with access to a Google Analytics Profile to leave a shared or private note right on top of a campaign’s over-time graph. This feature essentially brings together and makes logic from the common anomalies that most companies face, which tends to be the most expensive and commonly lost resource of information. An effortless note upon the raw data from a colleague or yourself can truly save hours of labor and frustration for an analyst that’s expected to make sense out of a dry set of figures.
Taking Annotation’s effectiveness even further, you could confidently make it your central repository or logbook for all online marketing and website design activity in your business. It’s especially useful when you have multiple marketing teams or analysts working on the same account. Even in the event of employee churn or fluctuations in management of an account, it instantly allows a new manager to interpret past data, which may dictate new focuses moving forward.
In summary, Annotations have been one of the top most requested features in Google Analytics for some time now and finally it’s available to us advertisers. Annotations is slowly becoming available for all advertisers and currently the Analytics team is activating an additional 10% of accounts each week, and it is expected to be pushed live to all accounts by mid January.
By Jerrold Burke
Paid Search Analyst
Sources:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/12/holiday-bonus-more-great-features.html
