Annotate your analytics timeline

Instead of relying on your analysts to remember important events, annotate your analytics.

This is helpful in two scenarios:

• Sharing knowledge: You analysts can’t always keep up with everything being done on your site. Especially if it’s a big site. Showing a sale promo in the analytics timeline helps them understand the difference in behavior.
• Troubleshooting: If you see a sudden drop in a certain part of your site. It’s helpful to see if it coincided with a new release of your site.

Having these kinds of annotations is especially helpful if you want to look back in your analytics.

Parts of this is automatable

For example application releases. A lot of applications today have changelogs with versions.

These releases can be automatically added to the analytics timeline.

In the end, you’re making sure that every analyst in the organization knows if an external event is having an effect on the analytics.

Including these annotations in reports to other people in the organization is also very helpful.

– Samy