People are naturally curious. And when you’re running your own site, you become even more so. Is this working? Do people like this button? Would they like it better if it was a different color?

Questions are around every corner and rarely do we find any answers. Which is frustrating since there are no easy questions.

When you’re looking at traffic data in Google Analytics, you’ll find yourself asking the same question over and over again: why did that happen?

Whether it’s a traffic spike or the bounce rate suddenly shooting up, you’ll see something in a chart and get that curious urge to know why.

Thanks to analytics (and the information on this site…I hope), you can find good answers to all your questions about traffic spikes and changes in patterns. The data is all there—you just have to know how to get to it and how to interpret it.

That’s the whole point of this site—to help you learn how to use all the tools that in Google Analytics to do some detective work and figure these things out.

But once you do figure it out, why not leave yourself a note so you can always see it in the future?

Annotations

Google Analytics allows you to add a small annotation to your charts so you can easily add the “why” so you (and anyone else with access to your account) can see what caused it.

Let’s say the source of the spike in your chart was caused by David Hasselhoff re tweeting you and exposing all his followers to your site. Great news! You can create an annotation to commemorate this blessed event!

Here’s how:

1. Click on the down arrow below a chart.

2. A small window should expand. Click on the Create new annotation.

3. Enter the date and any text you want that’ll remind you of what happened on that day.

4. And now you’re done! The next time you’re looking at that date in your Analytics, you’ll see a small bubble that indicates an annotation. You can check it out by clicking on the down arrow in step 1.

Image by Marco Bellucci