Enter The Net

I hope that you had a satisfying and fruitful holiday!

I wandered all around the Portland area, hitting various family functions, exchanging gifts and enjoying a day when I had promised not to even turn my computer on. This morning, December 26, I found a nice “gift email” from Google – something I have asked for more often than the kid asked for the Red Rider BB Gun – a way to make “notes” right on my Google Analytics graphs!

Woo woo!

Ok, my geekiness is showing again. But, before you write me off as just another kid excited about a new toy, let me explain – with Google’s help – why this is so cool, and what it means to you.

Google Analytics is a powerful system for tracking all sorts of metrics about your website. You can track visits, visitors, sources of traffic, keywords used to get people to your site, popular and unpoular pages, where your visitors live and much more. You can then break down data to figure out what works and what doesn’t related to your advertising, site design or anything else you control.

But the greatest thing about Google Analytics is that it is web-based. Armed with your account email address and a password, you can access your stats for any time period, from any computer. You can also grant access to multiple people. This feature, however, also exposes one of the biggest problems with Google Analytics.

It is easiest to explain this with an example. In the figure below, you can see visits to a small site over a period of about one week. The thing that really stands out is the spike in visits on December 3. Because I own the site, I know that this spike is the result of an email broadcast that took place early in the morning of that day. However, in one month – or one year – I may forget. I could download the data into Excel and add a notation for that day, but then I have defeated the whole web-based advantage of Google Analytics by requiring me to access an Excel file on my main computer to be able to see ALL of my data – including the notation about the spike on December 3rd.

What caused the spike on December 3?

What would be great is a way to make a notation right in my Google Analytics account that would always be there whenever I log in. Google’s gift to us Analytics geeks is just that – they call it Annotations. Here is Google’s video explaining how it works:

Oh Emm Gee! How cool! Like any kid who gets a sniff as to what the gift is, I tore open the paper with reckless abandon (I cut a beeline to my Google Analytics account.) But it was the same old thing – no annotations. No little tab available to add them. What the heck?

Well, a little digging among the discarded wrapping paper revealed the classic Xmas gift maneuver – an IOU.

Google says:

“Annotations is rolling out a bit slower than planned due to the holidays. New features within Google Analytics are launched on a phased roll out due to the volume of accounts, and the demands of testing as we activate the new feature. Usually this process takes from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the feature. Annotations is being activated to an additional 10% of accounts each week and will be pushed live to all accounts by mid January.”

Hey, I understand, Google. As a classic December 24 gift shopper, I have been stuck having to tell someone on Christmas Day that their gift is “on the way.” I also understand the desire to give the gift, anyway. Clearly, I think it is pretty cool, and according to the comments you are getting on your posts, I am not alone.

And it’s not like you don’t give out pretty good gifts (Calendar, Gmail, Wave, iGoogle, Alerts) anyway. So, I will be checking my account about three times per day to see if I am one of the lucky few to get annotations before the mid-January.

Thanks Google, for the cool gift – even if it is just an IOU.

>> Interested in learning more about Google Analytics? Click HERE.