- [Instructor] Analytics can tell us what happened,
but it often struggles with the why.
As analysts, of course, that job falls to us.
It's incredibly useful for us
to be able to provide our own context
and provide more background about what's happening
with our site so we can do that analysis easier.
In this case, we're looking at the revenue report
from the last video, but over a longer time period.
We can look along here, and one of the things I see is
April 5th, it looks like the revenue shot up on that day.
Went from about 10 thousand to all the way
up to 60 thousand dollars, but why?
We're not sure.
Was there a great blog post, did Google run
a particularly effective ad campaign
for the merchandise store, was that the day
that the site went haywire and counted
every visitor and transaction five times?
We don't know.
Now as we research this, we wanna treat the answers to that
with as much care as we treat this original raw data.
Particularly if we work in a group
where multiple people will be accessing these same profiles,
we can use annotations to inform them of these events,
changes, and perhaps explain some of these anomalies
to the site data, once we've done our research,
so we don't have to do it over and over again.
Now if you work in a group, that's obvious,
but I will say that even if you work alone,
these can be extremely useful to help
you remember six months from now
what you changed today, what happened, why,
and what the results of that research was,
so, you again, don't have to do that all over again.
So, to help you in that, we can add
some useful annotations to this graph,
and help us remember those significant events.
To do so, I'm gonna click on this little drawer icon
down here, it's gonna open up the annotations drawer.
We can see there are a couple here already,
some Google employees have added a few of these.
One on July 1st, we can see that
from the little annotation icon here
along the graph, as well as one on August 2nd.
Now, I have the ability to go in and create a new one.
I can click over here, Create new annotation.
There's gonna be a date on here,
we were gonna put in that April 5th date.
And we can say here that there was
a link to the home page in email blast.
Now, there's visibility options here.
We can do Private, private means
that only the person logged into this account,
so in other words, me, is gonna be able to see these.
So these are essentially a note to yourself.
There's also Shared.
Shared means that anyone who has access
to this profile is gonna be able to view this.
Now you see, we don't have access to do that on here
because we don't have the right permissions.
In order to create a shared one,
you have to have the permission of collaborate or above
on the entire view to add or modify these shared notes.
We'll go into some permissions later,
but you can always edit your own private annotations.
Okay, so we go ahead and save that,
and now we will have this annotation here
for the next time we come back
to this account and do this analysis.
And we can use these annotations
to document and show things like
when the view changes were made,
if we apply a filter, that's an important one,
if we set up new goals, when we link an AdWords account,
or if things in your business,
like when you start advertising or when you enable
e-commerce or make any other change to a view or account,
you wanna make sure you notate that here.
We can also detect significant anomalies,
and maybe some of the possible causes.
So if it's known, unknown, even suspected,
any information that we have here
that can help our future selves
or the next person who is researching this,
we wanna go ahead and put that down.
Annotations allow us to provide
that context and the meaning to the data.
It's gonna save ourselves and our team a tremendous amount
of research time, preserve that information
for future analysis, and help us spot
and explain some trends over time that may impact
our business and our analysis both for good and for bad.