Hello everyone!
Welcome to the next part of my Google Analytics Blog Course. The course breaks down how to use Google Analytics for your blog in the most simple way possible.
If you’ve missed the previous posts, then catch up using the links below:
The basics:
Intermediate:
Google Analytics Annotations
Picture this – you’ve just re-designed your website. You’ve spent hours installing a new theme, playing with fonts, picking a colour scheme and re-branding all of your social media. Then what?
Or how about this – you’ve started a new series on your site that you hope will bring in traffic. Or maybe you’ve been looking into ways to boost your traffic and want to track your progress.
Google Analytics has a cool little tool that’s practically hidden away unless someone tells you about it.
That tool is Annotations.
What Are Annotations In Google Analytics
Annotations allows you to add a snippet of information next to a date in your analytics to mark something. This then gives you an extremely quick way of seeing if any traffic boosts come after the event.
It also allows you to remember things that happened. For example, maybe one day you got linked on a big website and you were sent some traffic that made your views double for that day – stick an annotation in as a reminder. That way, when looking back on the month, quarter or even year, it gives you a great insight to what things helped you boost traffic to enable you to plan future goals and plans.
It also gives you a good insight to what was a complete waste of time.
Started using something you thought would give you a boost? You can quickly see there’s no increase in traffic and then decide whether it’s worth the time and effort.
The annotations will be visible in all reports – so if you start using some new SEO techniques, you’ll still see them in reports relating to organic search if you want to take out the noise of social, referral or direct traffic. Your annotation will be right there, so you don’t have to make notes of when you start applying some new techniques to your site elsewhere.
Better yet – it takes about 30 sections to do this!
Let’s go.
Using Annotations in Google Analytics
See the speech bubble next to April 15th? That indicates there’s an annotation.
If you click it, it will open up your annotations and highlight it. If you look in the second photo, it lets me see that April 15th is the day I put the URL to my blog in my Instagram profile.
How to add annotations in Google Analytics
So how did I enter these?
See the tab with the arrow pointing downwards? You just click that, then click onto ‘create a new annotation’ on the top right and enter the date and your note.
Easy peasy!
So there you have it, a really quick, easy hack to add a few notes to your Google Analytics for future review. Have you used Google Analytics annotations before?
Enjoy!
Very useful tip! Thanks for sharing!
These posts are so useful, I am useless with analytics apart from the very basics and you tell it so simply! Thank you xx
You really are queen of GA. I had no clue how to use it at the start of 2016, I now feel like I almost know what I am doing! I just started promoting older posts so hoping this will help to see where it began and if there is any improvements 🙂
http://www.makeerinover.co.uk
I had no idea there is the possibility to add annotations in analytics. These posts you are making are so helpful, I realize how many things can be done in analytics if you know what to do.
I had absolutely had no idea this existed, you’re a total analytics wizard! 🙂 Can I just say once again that these posts are incredibly helpful and thank you so much for putting the effort into creating them! Now, have a great weekend, you deserved it! 🙂
I will keep this in mind. Great post and advice!
http://fairyland111.blogspot.com/
This is very helpful I need to ck mine thanks.
I love this series Corinne! I’m always learning something! Thank you for sharing about this, as I had no idea you could do something like this, it seems really useful. I need to get a better handle on my stats and recording events so I can look back and see what things have impacted my blog.
Away From The Blue Blog
I’ll definitely start doing this! Thanks for sharing! xo
Ooh, this is so useful! Thanks for sharing – I bet there’s so many more hidden gems like this!
Oh wow, this is so cool. I had no idea about this feature, but I think it will come in very handy! xx