Google Analytics Gets An Upgrade With Annotations

For those who are familiar and are using with Google Analytics, here is a piece of good news – Google Analytics gets an upgrade with Annotations (see Article).

Annotation with Google Analytics

Annotations is important for  web marketers to keep track of key events that affect the performance of the website (such as marketing events, system performance, competitive actions, etc). Prior to having an annotation feature, marketers / site owners will have to keep a separate record on the key events that affect the performance of the website. When viewing the web performance matrix, we will have to mash both information together to make a meaningful analysis of the data. With annotation feature enabled in Google, it would mean that we can keep a record of the key events within a single data source and thus when generating the reports, we will be able to explain the spike and drought in the site performance matrix – very convenient indeed.

I have been a user of Google Analytics for a number of years to track the performance of my websites and landing pages, and must comment that Google has done a fantastic job in providing business with a best in class analytic package. Although not  as powerful and feature rich like commercial web intelligence application such as Omniture or WebTrends, Google Analytics is sufficient for the rest of us, that want a simple to use, simple to deploy solution. In recent years, Google have made a number of enhancement to the analytic package (such as custom reporting, annotations, API to Google Analytics), thus making the tool very useful for small business that do not have the budget to spend on Omniture or Webtrends.  Kudos to the team in Google for making it easier for the rest of us.