What events should be included in the timeline?

Yesterday, I wrote about annotating your analytics timeline with events.

So what events should be on the timeline?

Here are some examples:

• New Features/Products: When you launch a feature or product, it should be on the timeline
• Promotions: When you have a promotion, put its start and end date on the timeline.
• Marketing campaigns: When a marketing campaign starts and ends.
• Application releases: Include any application releases in your timeline. Helps a lot with troubleshooting.
• Season: If you have seasonal products/services, annotate when that season starts and ends. You can also include known seasonal sales increases/slumps
• Legislation: If there’s legislation changes that affect you and your industry, include it.
• Universal events: An event that doesn’t only have an effect on your industry. COVID-19 is an extreme example of this. Most people know when the lockdowns started, but it’s easy to forget this when you check the data a year or two from now.

In the end, any event that you think will affect customer behavior should be on the timeline.

Having these events on the timeline helps analysts connect behavior changes to important changes in the product.

The alternative? Digging through emails or talking to other parts of the organization to remember these events every time.

– Samy