Annotations

An annotation is a note pinned to a date that shows on your charts, so a spike or a drop comes with its reason. Mark a sale, a launch or a site outage, for example. Annotations are shared: everyone on your team sees every one, on the charts that cover its date.

A sales chart with an annotation line on the day of a promotion and its label above the line

How It Works

Where Annotations Show

Each annotation appears as a vertical line on report charts that show change over time, and on the same charts on your dashboards. The label sits on the line. Hover over it to see the date and the description.

When a chart groups days into weeks or months, the line sits on the week or month that contains the date. Pages with their own layout, such as P&L and Pulse, don’t show annotations.

Adding an Annotation

You can add one from a chart or from the Annotations page:

From a chart: choose the Add annotation icon at the top of a report’s chart. The date starts as the first day of the report’s date range.
From the Annotations page: open Annotations, under Settings in the navigation, and choose Add Annotation. When you have none yet, the button is Add your first annotation.

Either way, fill in:

Label: a short title shown on the chart, up to 120 characters. For example, Black Friday Sale.
Date: the single day it happened. There’s no end date, so for an event over several days, add one annotation per day or mark the day it started.
Description (optional): more detail, shown when someone hovers over the line.

Choose Add to save it. It appears on every over-time chart whose date range includes that day.

The Add Annotation dialog with a label, a date and a description filled in

Recording a Campaign Decision

On the Advertising page, each row of the campaign table has Record This Decision. It opens the same dialog, dated today, with the label “Decision: “ and the campaign’s name.

When the campaign has figures, such as its reported ROAS, the description lists them. It ends with a dash, for you to write what you decided.

From then on, the decision shows on your charts at that date, so you can see what happened after it. This option is in beta.

Editing and Deleting

Select an annotation’s line on a chart, or its edit icon on the Annotations page, to change it. To delete it, choose Delete in the edit dialog or the delete icon on the Annotations page.

A deleted annotation leaves every chart at once. The message that follows has Undo.

Anyone on your team can add an annotation. You can edit or delete your own. People with the Edit dashboards permission can edit or delete anyone’s.

Every annotation added, changed or deleted is listed in the Audit Log.

What It Means for You

Add an annotation whenever you do something that could move the numbers: a promotion, a price change, a new ad campaign, an email to your whole list, or a stockout. When someone looks at the chart later, the reason is already there.

Annotations are most useful when the whole team adds them. Agree on short, plain labels, so the lines are easy to read on a busy chart.

Annotations: every annotation in one list, by date.
Dashboards: where annotations also show on your cards.