Web Analytics Annotation and Application Release

Table of Contents

You may be wondering what can be common between web analytics annotation and application release. Before I answer that, it will be nice to understand what is annotation with respect to web analytics.

Annotations or Notes

Using annotations user can add shared or private notes right on the web analytics graphs. Annotations are quite useful to explain the unusual spikes or behaviour in your web analytics graphs. An unusual spike can be due to a marketing event, seasonal campaign, celebrity tweet or may be due to release of a new version of your web or mobile application.

Annotations are supported by most of analytics services like Google Analytics, WebTrends and Omniture SiteCatalyst.

Annotating your release

Annotating your release is always a good idea. You can add annotations manually or automatically. WebTrends and SiteCatalyst allow you to add annotations automatically using either RSS feed or calendar events. Currently in Google Analytics you can only add manual annotations and support to add annotations to via an API is proposed.

Here is one example showing release annotations. As you can see each release annotation consists release date, version, type and features included in release.

Annotating your release in Google Analytics
Annotating your release in Google Analytics

Related Posts

A Standard Data Layer for Customer Experience Data

A Standard Data Layer for Customer Experience Data

After much deliberation, recently W3C Customer Experience Digital Data Community Group released …

Decoupling Deployment and Release- Feature Toggles

Decoupling Deployment and Release- Feature Toggles

There are key differences between deployment and release. Deployment means putting the latest stable …

Creating a new Vagrant base box from an existing VM

Creating a new Vagrant base box from an existing VM

Typically my Vagrant workflow starts with a official base box provided by Ubuntu. With help of a …