IssueTracker

Excellent idea which will definately work for all us marketers.

It would be useful to add this feature so linkbuilding, PR, or ppc change activity
can be recorded in GA.

Here are some other examples of useful data to add annotations to...

Google News Events
http://news.google.co.uk/news?um=1&cf=all&ned=uk&hl=en&q=%22my+company+name%22&cf=all&output=rss

Chart + News on Googlefinance
http://www.google.co.uk/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:GOOG

We're an ESP and we'd really like to automatically create annotations in our clients' GA when they launch a
mailing.   But another, perhaps better, way to track "external events that drive website traffic indirectly" is
integration with a Google Calendar.

This would be useful

Please stop commenting just to say "+1". If you want to follow this issue, you can
star it.

mechanical

This would be an awesome addition and would help our customers to better understand
how what we're working on how publishing great content to the web affects their
traffic and repeat visitors.

ecommerce users could push an annotation when a product goes out and out of stock and
use analytics to measure trends in sales.

With the launch of the Management API, shouldn't this be included? http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mgmt/home.html

Anyone know if this is in the new management API?  I have been looking feverishly for some sort of information on this subject, but all I seem to be able to find is wishful thinking.

Hi, John as far as I know the new management won't allow you to add annotations.

wikileaks pakistan ...................................

thanks for google

Cant wait to see this :)

+1 on this request. I'd like to add automation in our website for recording when a new post is written as well as number of other things to keep good notes on what is going on.

+1, it would make the charts way better...

count me in ... I'd love to see this feature available

+1 we want to integrate this into our deploy routine

ganesh gangadhar mote mo.7588055738                                                                        at.salimba                                                                    tq.wadwani                                                                         po.pimparkhed dist.beed                                                                          state.maharashtra 431122  

Oh hell yeah. This would be so useful.

If Google does this, I'll write a Wordpress plugin that taps into it. (As suggested by Nick here: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/16716/how-could-i-import-twitter-posts-as-annotations-in-google-analytics/16719#16719)

Removing an obsolete label that was used when these issues were in the gdata-issues project.

Changing the issue type to match the organization desired in this project.

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I hope this gets implemented. This would be extremely useful.

This feature would help put trends in context.

When considering this feature, it may be helpful to imagine multiple audiences using it. For example, as melvin said above, the dev team can automate the notifications of code changes. Email marketers can note major newsletter or offer mailings. Paid advertisers can note the launch date of campaigns. Optimizers can note A/B or MVT test launches, etc. It would be helpful if these were categorized so we can see all public dev anotations, all email annotations, personal private annotations etc.

Since many of the stakeholders are using various software packages to update or report, having API access to read AND write annotations would provide a very useful level of functionality.

+one on my end

This would allow us to add annotations based on published content for a news website I manage. Some kind of csv upload or xml file linking could also be a solution.

This would allow our CMS to auto-insert a comment every time we published content - which would be extremely useful.

yes!

I need this feature pls

I think this feature would be great as I want to get a hook into Capistrano/git so whenever a dev deploys they can give a comment that describes the change thats just been implemented. Then looking back we can see what changes actually made a difference

I'm voting for this as well. It would be a huge time saver. In practice it would also allow for webmasters/ businesses to track more events that occur and therefore make much better decisions for users across the web.  

This would be super helpful. This could be don't through webmaster tools integration already I would think?

That would save me a huge amount of time!

i bet this will just be for gold members.

Please Please Google AdWords Auto Annotations in Google Analytics...

+1, Would be definitely helpful to add this automated step in my deploys scripts!

This would be extremely useful

I need I need I need I need !

This would be really useful.

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Google, what is the word? Any thoughts on when this will be included in the product?

We are really looking forward for this!

I've been following this issue for nearly two years now. Time to give up hope?

@badmonkey0001 I've been wondering the same thing. Is Google even paying attention to this?

This would be a great addition. I envision being able to push changes to a website and use the API to automatically create annotations based off of recent SVN/GIT commit messages.

Yes, I would use this in conjunction with my website deployment system.

guys, this is never gonna happen... let's stop asking!

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How can I unsubscribe to this? I'd love to see the feature, but I'm sick of the "me too" notifications.  On that note, sorry to everyone for triggering yet another email to this request.

No problem; as long as you're fine with getting this one too ;).

Btw; yes - I too still want this feature!

You should be able to unsubscribe by "unstarring" the thread. Though that will also undo your vote for this issue. And I guess we all want to keep those votes, so that perhaps one day somebody at Google will work on this.

Perhaps you should just make an email filter instead?

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When a ticket has been around long enough to start collecting SPAM, it's a definite sign that it's never going to get resolved... 2.5 years now. Geez.

Yes yes yes! +1

We're increasingly using the Google Analytics API to archive reports and slice the data in increasingly complex ways. I would love to see this implemented so we can pull our release annotations into our own reporting and have it centralized.

This API feature is a no brainer. Waiting anxiously!

We'd love to have this, too.

Now that Google has made a change to it's User Permissions, this feature is invaluable to us as a company as we need the team to be able to add annotations that are 'shared' but do not want to give them 'edit' access for security reasons. So we are now missing out on valuable information on our trending graphs.

If we had this feature on the API we would be able to do shared annotations more securely.

Waste of time. I've been following this for 3 years and Google Still hasn't replied of given any idea if this feature is on the roadmap.

I'm still going to promote it. This would be a FANTASTIC feature to have.

Please at lease support a google doc import/export or mass edit...  Please for the love of god let us know you are still thinking about this and wont just kill it next week.

Please hurry Google.

Hey Google, Help US !!!

doit.

+1 Still waiting on this. I would love to create our own internal annotations solution, but without being able to relate it back to our analytics (or being able to pull that data into our own system), it doesn't make sense!

@c.fillipe You can pull the data out of GA, it's surprisingly easy to do.

@daniel How do you pull annotations data out of GA?

@c.fillipe sorry I was unclear, you want to create an internal annotation solution, so pull all the data out of GA and push it into this internal solution. Extracting GA data, with the exception of annotations, is surprisingly easy to do.

Oh, *much* clearer. LOL.

I think the question is "Can I, using my API token, access my annotations data programmaticly?" That is to say:

* As an API user, I can send a request to retrieve all of my annotations so that I can store them in a third-party system
* As an API user, I can add annotations so that my third-party data can be reflected in Google Analytics
* As an API user, I can delete annotations so that my data is up to date

These are essentially the requirements that this ticket is trying to address. Additional features could be:

* Retrieve all annotations by date range
* Retrieve all annotations across multiple profiles

My concern at this point is: Google seems to have no interest in this feature, in which case: what exactly are annotations meant to be used for? Since, apparently, it's not what we're expecting.

My original request was to be able to ADD annotations to GA via the API.
For example if I have a email program, it could add an annotation to GA every time an email is sent to customers, then we can easily look at sales behaviour based on that annotation.

That's not what annotations are for. The correct way of tracking what you
want is with events. Events are really powerful, you should look into it.

Annotations were added to be one-off notes for final users for a date. Like
for example: next time you have a spike in your traffic, you an annotate
the date with a "emails sent to customer", so that when you look at it
again 3 months for now, you can remember what it is.

I'd have to agree with Hogan's use case. That sounds what annotations would ideally be used for. The 'Events' section in Analytics is for on-site click tracking (such as, opened a modal window or played a video) while annotations are for factors outside of the site itself (such as a trade show or an email newsletter).

A common usecase of Annotations is to highlight the events on the history of the site: new features where added, new version of the site, a particular bug was found/fixed...etc.

It would be really convenient to be able to connect the bug tracker of choice to your GA account.

Or, the business is running Marketing campaigns that they may be tracking with a calendar in a certain application. Auto adding that would make sure that we are not losing information.

Basic CRUD operations on annotations via an API isn't too much to ask. Annotations are useful for any number of purposes, to track when:

- marketing events occurred
- site changes/releases occurred
- outages occurred
- 3rd-party / world events affecting site behavior occurrred (e.g., getting Slashdotted, a holiday occurring that impacts traffic, etc)
- marking the start of tests

Annotations are timeline metadata, to be compared against any other metric. Annotations have no quantitative value directly associated with them aside from the timestamp. It exists in a different space from tally-able data like Events, visits, etc - and is meant to be consumed alongside with it.

The idea behind exposing the API is not so we don't have to track this stuff internally - but specifically so we can, and have that data sync (back and forth) with Google Analytics.

Another nice feature would be being able to tag these annotations for categorization purposes, but I'll settle for the CRUD ops.

This woudl be great.

Please, do it. I have to enter manually more than 100 annotations manually...

The feature is, I think, absolutely necessary to make the annotations function what it really should have been from the start

Lost any hopes.... just look for different products, there are many!!

Yes please!

Doesnt seem google wants to add this. Been tracking for nearly 2 years and still no visible movement. :(

wizardin... My guess would be that they haven't even seen it. Also, at 89 comments over 2 years, it's not super active.

please :)

Yes please!

Please add the ability to get a users Annotations.   Use: A very useful dimension in my Google analytic's cube :)

Bump. Either bulk annotation upload, or automated annotations triggered by blog posts, social activity, etc. This would be fantastic.

Please add this, please, it should be fairly straight forward and would make this SOOOO much more useful

Yes please!

would be great to get this feature!

I'm very interested in seeing this, so I can import events from multiple locations and aggregate them for reporting purposes. Since business users prefer to annotate directly in GA, not having easy access to these significantly reduces the usefulness of these reports.

I've love to be able to add annotations as part of my build pipeline. Being able to tie in changes to code to an affect on traffic would helpful.

This will help us monitor out all the different changes in the marketing mix has affected Conversion rate. Is quite a task to add this manually. So the perfect solution would be a link with the API from a Google doc.... and the Google doc to be linked to an online form.

I would love to make this a feature for our platform. Hundreds of thousands of users would benefit from it.

This would be incredibly valuable. Currently we manually update all annotations to note when we have sent newsletters, etc. Automating this process would save time, increase accuracy, and provide incredibly valuable data for our clients and our company.

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Certainly would find this a useful feature - especially with write access, to allow points in time to be generated by products integrating with Google Analytics, now that write access to profiles and goals is being worked on in whitelisted beta in the Management API. It would be great if could be considered for about the time when Management API write access is made available generally, or shortly after - I couldn't imagine it'd be a big jump once the big aspects of profile/goal/etc. editing is made public.

It would also fit in with the ethos of the Universal Analytics "upload everything into GA" mentality being promoted. I'm not sure whether read-only access to annotations would be as crucial, but it would still be a help in this case.

I'd imagine it would probably need to sit in a similar position to Content Experiments - as a "management.annotation" resource living underneath the profile, but like experiments requires the profile ID for listing; no "~all" access.

(With v3 of the Analytics APIs, I'd suggest that this bug is miscategorised after the automatic component change from the sole Data Export API to Core Reporting, as it'd be a Management API feature now.)

I'd love to use the Analytic API to sync the Annotations with a google calendar.  So, I can see/share the annotations in a calendar format.  So, please add this to your universal analytics update.

+1 api for creating google annotations!!

It's strange that the whole annotation system isn't available trough an API yet.

+1 on this to enhance the power of analytics

Just spoke to Justin Cutroni and asked him to prioritize it.

+1 Would like twitter annotations to be possible, would make life easier

It would be great to be able to call this proposed Annotation API from deployment tools like OctopusDeploy to mark deployments.

+1 api for creating google annotations!!

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It would be great to be able to upload changes from other advertising tools such as when budget was changed, a campaign went live etc so our GA users can get a better idea of what's driving results.

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Could anyone add more information about this? This topic exists for four years now, still not any information about a planning or statusupdate (or even a priority).

This would be extremely helpfull for the same reasons everyone else posts, I also can't make a hack to do it in the meanwhile, so again, this would be extremely usefull.

I understand this takes time to build, but a simple 'extract items [from-till || limit=10]' and a 'post item [date][text]' wouldn't be the most complicated piece of code (I think ;) ).

I would also like to vote for this feature. As part of our BLOX TownNews.com Content Management System for media sites, it would be cool to allow actions in the CMS (a new ad campaign, change of design or navigation, publishing an important story, for example) to trigger an annotation in the analytics.

this would be very helpful in proving the impact of mailings on web traffic!

+1 for creating google annotations for deployments via api

+1 on this, especially for GA mobile. Would be extremely useful to have an annotation automatically added (with the APK version number) every time I push a build to the Google Play Dev Console

Vital - need to add this so when client adds articles to her website the cms can automatically add it as an annotation so that when she gets her emailed report she can see what happens when she posts. Very difficult to analyse a set of data without all the facts available.

This is so needed! Please add this feature to the API.

plus 1

+1 super useful for pushing commit id's, would love to see this get into the API.

This is so needed! Please add this feature to the API.

plus 1

Would be immensely helpful.

I would certainly like the ability to write annotations via API:

If it was possible to create annotations via the Management API then I think that would open up lots of useful possibilities for setting them in a structured way -- for example as part of the process of sending out an email or launching some other form of campaign, or launching a new a/b text, and so on.

Similarly, organisations which use external tools for reporting, dashboards etc would benefit from being able to use annotations within those interfaces. And, indeed, creating annotations from within their interface.

I also wonder whether the annotations system to could be expanded to allow for commentary widgets within the GA dashboards.

As a starting point for the native dashboards, how about a dashboard widget for the existing form of annotations? That might help develop their use.

+1 for this. it would be incredible if the API allowed pulling as well as pushing new annotations.

+1 - It would be a great addition to the API

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Anybody knows these tool http://www.annoapi.com/? They tell that can automatically add or update annotations in Google Analytics via API.

This would be really useful, please add this...

Over 5 years since the initial request! hayibo Google! + 1

+1 +1 +1 !!!!

The minute we can write an annotation via the API we'll be integrating it with the CMS we use and into our deployment tools. Incredibly useful to understand how key content changes are affecting traffic and behaviour.

Annotations should apply across all views, so that we do not have to constantly add the annotation to every view.

It's been 5 years since this post started. We are a premium customer with hundreds of properties and views managed and desperately need this feature. At the moment, to add annotations, we need to copy and paste them to every profile/view we have. It's absolutely preposterous. Either add it into the interface or add it into the API but give us something Google.

+1 - we'd love this as part of the Measurement Protocol.

+1 -- we have 100+ websites in GA and need to get automated annotations into GA as it is a manual nightmare.

+1 Why is this not implemented yet? It would be incredibly useful!

This is sooooo needed! Manual annotations are such a pain!

This is so lame, Piwik all the way.

We need this, crazy that it hasn't been added to the API, we export data into Tableau for further analysis and without annotations it's only half useful

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+1 - This would absolutely make our life so much easier! Please do prioritise it as it would help a lot of people and businesses like us!

Yes please.. I assume Annotations are probably being refactored and redone- that this hasn't been sorted already. If not please do it.  !

annotation in the api...when do we want it...now! Please...thank you kindly!

Really disappointed that this is not available in the API. Really reduces the usefulness of the annotation feature.

We really need this feature !
please rank up

+1 as it would make our life much easier

This would definately make Google Analytics more useful.

We need this asap.

It is incredible that 6 years later we are still waiting for this feature. Particularly with the good support for APIs that Google offers in other areas. Here is a good post that was shared with the MeasureCamp community using the Measurement Protocol but it is still limited and does not place the data in the same location as the regular reporting: http://connectedwindow.com/data-and-measurement/automatic-annotations-in-google-analytics/

Would it be possible to get an update from Google regarding this feature request?

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This would come in verry handy ... example to empower our infrastructure team to add annotations when there is a change in our hosting setup (changemangement)... please foresee this feature in the API. thanks

Agreed, this would be incredibly helpful for us too.

This would be amazing. If we can link our google agenda or anything to the annotation api. It will really help data understanding.

would be very helpful to have

This is a must have.  Can't believe it's not possible.

I'm very interested in this for tracking website changes against site traffic and conversion. It would be truly splendid if i could hook into repo pull requests and log them as a annotation automatically.

Please add the ability to add an annotation by email or some other integration such that completed activities (via teamwork for example) would trigger an annotation on the account timeline.

Please add this feature, it would help a lot of our big customers to correlate media/content changes into GA results

Would indeed love this feature...but I guess it's not happening....

plus one. Please add it.

Very important feature to analyze impact of new release on trafic and audience.
Might be interesting to interface with tools like JIRA, Bitbucket.

Please add this feature, makes our lives much better!

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Very much needed here. So big +1 from me!

This feature would be very useful! Thank you!

+1 to analyze traffic when an event is triggered.

+1 this feature would indeed be useful

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Would come in very handy! I handle about 50 domains.

Yes please!

Need it!

Please add it!

Wow that was fast :p
No kidding, is there a user guide or guidance somewhere to look at ? Is this will be available for Universal Analytics ?

Does the merging of issues suggest this is now going to happen? It will be very useful.

+1 to adding this to Google Analytics API

 * +1 need it very very very much