Google Analytics is an essential tool for many nonprofits seeking to effectively track their online marketing efforts. Whether you're focused on fundraising, event registrations, advocacy efforts, email sign ups or overall content marketing strategies, digging into the details of those eyeballs that are checking you out online vital. But numbers aren't everything. Sometimes a little context goes a long way in making sense of them.
Enter annotations in Google Analytics. Annotations allow you to insert helpful notes into your analytics that mark significant events that can help explain the data. These could be external to your organization like a given event that made national headlines that focused attention on your cause and boosted organic search traffic. It would be specific to your fundraising or marketing efforts such as the launch of a new fundraising campaign, major report, or or advertising effort. Or it could mark a change in website strategy or structure that caused you to drive traffic to a new or different call to action.
For details on how you can add annotations to your Google Analytics, check out this helpful video from Google:
Donations
Events
Petitions
Forms
Shop
Directories