Fluctuations in website traffic can be caused by many factors.  Some are intentional marketing campaigns or optimization efforts and others are “outside” influences like news articles or competitive marketing campaigns.  I was recently asked to integrate some key events into trended campaign reports in Google Analytics.  Instead of having to go back through emails, news releases and other sources to gather important dates that influenced the client’s site traffic we pulled the information from Google Annotations.   You can incorporate any events, up o 160 characters, across all of your reports and add them as they are happening.  Another nice feature is the ability to make them visible to everyone or private to your login.

Annotations offer several helpful advantages:

• Save time and effort searching for causes in data fluctuations
• Incorporating offline marketing efforts into your reporting
• Documenting key optimization dates

By utilizing the annotations feature, you can save valuable time digging through multiple reports trying to investigate the cause of a spike in traffic.  Websites can change frequently with content and design as well as the various marketing campaigns and media buys that drive traffic to the site.  The more data that you can incorporate into your annotations, the less time you will have to spend digging through reports or other sources to be able to explain major fluctuations in traffic.

Integrating the release of offline media campaigns into your annotations is a great way to bridge the gap of measuring offline marketing efforts through web analytics.  Insert an annotation on the date that your print ad was distributed and see how it influenced site traffic even if you can’t specifically segment that traffic out.

As media campaigns run over time, your web analytics application is generating valuable data on the quality of that traffic.  Certain ad campaigns will prove to be more successful than others and some campaigns simply need to be optimized to improve results.  Annotations are a great way to mark specific  dates of key optimization efforts.  You may notice an upward trend in paid search conversion rates but and can easily attribute optimization to that change by referencing your annotations.

This powerful and easy to use feature in Google Analytics is often overlooked but can save valuable time and effort if it is utilized.  Hopefully Google will continue to improve upon this feature by allowing you to group annotations by specific categories or allow you to insert an active link to a blog post or article directly into the annotation.

Tags: annotations, ga annotations, Google Analytics, reporting

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.