Google Analytics Annotations are Finally Here…Sorta
At the top of my GA wish list has always been annotations – a place to document changes and make notes. Well, Google answered that wish in early December by including annotations, allowing you to place a quick note when you click on an actual date. This feature was not automatically available to the public; however, earlier this week we spotted it in our accounts. Some accounts had it and some didn’t, so we did some research to figure out why. Here is our conclusion:
Under 10,000 visits: Annotations
Above 10,000 visits: No Annotations
The accounts that had less than 10,000 visits this month had annotation capabilities while the others did not. The only reasoning we can come up with for this discrepancy is scalability. If Google tried rolling this out to every account at once and traffic suddenly dropped it would be easily noticeable and they would receive a giant web backlash. It’s easier to test new features on a small scale; if small drops appear, it’s less noticeable. Now i’m just waiting for Google to roll it out to my other accounts and i’ll be able to document all the changes that happen to a website.
Update: 1/27/10, Annotations have spread to all our of accounts.
~Lorrin
on January 27th, 2010 at 10:18 am
Great post! I’ve been waiting for this feature for so long, and have had a hard time being patient for it to be launched for all accounts. Your assessment of the rollout seems consistent with my experience, although the benchmark may be a little lower (one of my sites with 5k/month is still lacking annotations as of 1/27).
In their announcement of annotations, I believe Google said annotations would be rolled out for all accounts by the middle or end of January. Here’s hoping we’ll see it soon for larger sites
on January 27th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Great post Lorrin.
Really hope Google could be a bit more responsible and transparent on the information of their own products.