Adding Business Data to Google Analytics Data

October 28, 2008 by Justin Cutroni

I know the past week has been full of Google Analytics news, but I’m excited to tell you about something one of our team members created: Google Analytics Notes.

For a long time we’ve wanted to add business data to GA to help keep track of marketing activities, industry news and GA configuration changes. These things are critical to know when analyzing data as they add more context and help us understand what’s affecting website performance.

We tried using Google Spreadsheets to store business info but it never worked. People did not take the time to open up a spreadsheet and add information. We figured that adding some type of ‘note’ functionality to GA would be the easiest way to change this behavior. That’s how GA Notes was born.

GA Notes is a Firefox extension that lets you add business data to a profile. Notes appear in a concealable table at the top of every report.

Any GA user who views a profile, and has the Firefox extension, will see the notes entered for the profile. You can add notes, edit notes and delete notes. Notes can also be exported in XML format for archival purposes.

Installation

Installing GA Notes is easy. Just download the following file to your computer:

https://ga-notes.appspot.com/ganotes.xpi

Once downloaded double click on the file. Firefox should open and ask if you want to install the extension. Click install and that’s it. You’re ready to start adding notes to your GA data.

Usage

The extension adds a ‘Show Notes’ button in the GA menu bar. Click on the button to view notes for this profile or to add a note or edit/delete an existing note. It’s not that complicated. :) We wanted to keep this easy and flexible.

How it Works

For those of you that are interested, GA Notes runs on Google’s App Engine. No data is stored on your machine or our servers. It’s stored on Google’s servers. The Firefox extension provides the interface to enter and display data. But all of the processing and data storage happens on App Engine. All data sent to App Engine is encrypted prior to transmission.

In a perfect world we would have added notes to the data-over-time graph at the top of each report. However, we can’t get inside that part of GA using a Firefox extensions (or Greasemonkey script). We thought this was a good compromise. If anyone out there knows how to dig into Flash let us know! :)

Road Map

This is obviously a beta version of the software. We have a number of features that we’re working on and hope to have done soon. These include:

  • Sorting and searching notes by date
  • Excel friendly export
  • An admin flag for notes to separate admin changes to your GA account
  • Some type of alert to show you how many new notes have been added since your last login
  • A more graphical visualization of note

If you have any suggestions or ideas please let us know!

Credit

I don’t have the smarts to build these types of things, I just know enough to be dangerous. Chris, a new member of our team, built GA Notes from the ground up. Thanks Chris for all the hard work.

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  1. 122 Responses to “Adding Business Data to Google Analytics Data”

  2. Always one step ahead of us, poor mortals…

    Great job!

    By Daniel Waisberg on Oct 29, 2008

  3. Really nice extension…..would be great if Google developed a build-in functionality for this.

    By Lars Gundersen on Oct 29, 2008

  4. Hi, it sounds like a great add-on! These are just a few questions I have. First: is it possible to differentiate notes for administrators and users (managed in the User Manager tab)? It is true that it would be useful to share information with clients, but at the same time it could be necessary to share information with colleagues and NOT with clients :)
    On the second hand, I would like to know where those data (the notes) will be stored and who’ll have access – apart of me and users of that profile – to the data…

    Thanks!

    By Marta on Oct 29, 2008

  5. As a consultant I can only admire such a tool. Very often we need explanations to be placed within certain reports so that viewers of it can get a better understanding of what they are looking at. Keep up the great work!

    By Matthew on Oct 29, 2008

  6. Thanks for the feedback everyone.

    Marta, to answer your questions. Right now you can not differentiate notes for users and admins. That’s something that we’ve been thinking about.

    The data is stored in Google’s App Engine, a development environment hosted on Google’s global network of servers. It’s stored in a flat file, not a database as that would be overkill for this application. The only one who has access to the data for a profile is someone who has the extension installed on their machine.

    Thanks for the comments folks, keep those suggestions coming!

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Oct 29, 2008

  7. This is great, thank you. I’ve relied on shared Google Docs in the past, but it was always hard enough to discipline myself to keep them up to date, let alone get other people to use them.

    By Tim Leighton-Boyce on Oct 29, 2008

  8. Thanks Tim. That’s exactly the problem that we had. People just refused to use a doc or spread sheet. Hopefully this will encourage folks to record more data.

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Oct 29, 2008

  9. Wow – this is fantastic! Thanks so much!!!

    By Lindsay on Oct 29, 2008

  10. Now if you could link this to WordPress – it would be amazing.
    every blogger will be able to see how a new published post has influenced his website analytics.

    Great work you guys :)

    (p.s: since you are using wordpress yourself. vs 2.6.1 even, then please add the plugin “subscribe to comments”) – so a commentator like myself could have followed your updates on my Idea.
    Cheers,
    Tal.

    By Tal galili on Oct 29, 2008

  11. Hi Tal,

    Excellent suggestion! I love that idea and we’ll see if we can add it. I’ll also add the subscribe to comments plugin as you suggest.

    Best,

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Oct 29, 2008

  12. Wow! I was about to write a post commenting the good idea it could be something like this when you have materialized it!
    Thnks a lot.

    By Ani López on Oct 29, 2008

  13. Great, thanks Justin :)

    By Tal galili on Oct 29, 2008

  14. Brilliant add-on. I was just thinking the other day a good way to track changes made to the site, and how this maps to the analytics data.

    I will download and test.

    By Chris Shepherd on Oct 29, 2008

  15. Great!

    I wonder why Google haven’t implemented a similar feature themselves given how easy it would be. I really think that this simple feature helps a lot when analyzing reports.

    By Martin Leblanc on Oct 30, 2008

  16. Greatest idea ever!!

    It won’t let me install it though. I save the file on my computer – but it’s a ZIP file and when I extract it – I am not sure which one to open to install the Notes. I tried to open some:) but it keeps opening them as text.

    By Dishu on Oct 30, 2008

  17. Justin,

    Fantastic application, I can stop writing these things down in my day timer now.

    Have you thought of making it possible to append the note to more then one profile with out having to switch? You would have to be able to pick and choose which ones, as the note might not apply to all, but probably applies to more than one.

    Darcy

    By Darcy Foster on Oct 30, 2008

  18. Thanks everyone for the great feedback! Glad to hear that you all like this idea. We’re still working to refine it and you ideas will help.

    Darcy: Good idea re: adding the note to multiple profiles. We’ve thought about that but it’s a bit complicated. We’ve put it on the “wishlist” features.

    Dishu: If you’re having trouble try opening the file using Firefox rather than double clicking on it. If it’s being saved as a zip file then there may be something wrong with the way the browser is downloading it. Are you using FF?

    Thanks again,

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Oct 30, 2008

  19. Justin, you’ve got the mime type wrong on the xpi file.
    AddType application/x-xpinstall .xpi

    I’ve toyed with writing something similar as a greasemonkey script, but tied to an RSS feed. I got hung up on getting it onto the graph, though, same as you did. I suppose this is a good first step. Nicely done!

    Joshua

    By Joshua McKenty on Oct 31, 2008

  20. Thanks for the heads up Josh, I’ll try to change that.

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Oct 31, 2008

  21. Great idea and implementation.

    Regarding admin use, is there any way to either filter the notes by uri (eg …analytics/settings/… or analytics/reporting)
    or use the same mechanism that identifies notes by profile to do so by profile and URI.

    Regardless, thanks very much.

    By Brian Katz, VKI on Oct 31, 2008

  22. Hey Brian,

    Thanks so much. I’m a big fan of your social plugin!

    Interesting idea. As of right now, no. We can not sort the notes based on URI. I guess we could tweak the code to look at referral URL when extracting the notes…. But for now we feel that most people will like having all data in on place.

    Keep those ideas coming.

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Oct 31, 2008

  23. This is by far the coolest firefox plugin I have seen in a long time. This is now one of my MUST HAVE add ons along with WASP & Firebug. Keep up the good work.

    If you can figure out how to overlay the notes on the graph to relate notes with peaks visually that would be awesome.

    By Mark on Oct 31, 2008

  24. I attended a Google webinar (Google Webmaster Myth Buster on Oct 22) and asked for this specific functionality! Excellent work!! Great minds really do think alike! :)

    By mike on Oct 31, 2008

  25. Great post, wonderful feature. I love having the data in one place.

    By Ecommy on Oct 31, 2008

  26. Thank you for the great tool. Will have to go and try it out. Marta above makes some really valid points about who gets access to what. But until I try it out I wont know. It does makes sense that this should be standard with Analytics.

    By Goran Giertz on Nov 2, 2008

  27. Very good idea; thanks for sharing.

    By Adrian Bold on Nov 4, 2008

  28. Well this is simply FANTASTIC!!!
    If we could only create a time line from it..

    By Ophir Cohen on Nov 11, 2008

  29. Justin,

    I echo everyone’s comments of this being a much needed feature, but I am concerned about security. Since the plugin does not require a password, I assume it is simply using my UA# to identify and retrieve the data from Google’s App Engine. While the data is encrypted when sent, this couldn’t stop someone from emulating your plugin, sending my UA#, and accessing my log of notes from Google’s App Engine server. Or am I mistaken? (I hope I am).

    By Cole on Nov 11, 2008

  30. Justin,

    I am having problems downloading the file. I am using a Mac. Do you know if this file extension works with Macs?

    Thanks,
    Damien.

    By Damien on Nov 13, 2008

  31. There’s only one bummer with this thing…

    The time it’s gonna take me to copy paste
    my changes list from excel to that :)

    Thanks Chris…

    By Amit Ohayon on Nov 22, 2008

  32. Hi Damien,

    The file should work just fine on a Mac. We all use Macs here at EpikOne. Try right-clicking and saving the file to your downloads. Then open it with FireFox.

    Hope that helps.

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Nov 23, 2008

  33. Excellent script, I love it! Though I would love to see the possibility of entering “alarms” or reminders. That way I can enter a note to myself and set it to remind me in e.g. one week. This would be great for following up on changes that I’ve made earlier on. I can e.g. make changes in bid prices, and then one week later I will get a reminder in GA reminding me to check the effects out of that change etc.

    By Ricky on Nov 28, 2008

  34. Thanks, this sounds like an excellent tool. I thinks it is going to be really handy for myself.

    By shannon on Dec 5, 2008

  35. great extention. Another surprised addon for me :) Thank you very much admin

    By bilecem on Jan 1, 2009

  36. Just discovered this – VERY cool !

    By Debi on Jan 21, 2009

  37. Love GA Notes! however on my new laptop with Firefox 3.0.5 the xpi extension is not recognized. I’ve googled for a solution, and it appears that it might be a mime issue.

    Justin, did you correct the mime type as suggested by Joshua above?

    Thanks,
    Rob

    By Rob Salsman on Feb 1, 2009

  38. Thank you for the great tool.
    I work in a corporate environment and security is a huge priority. How has access to teh data? Is it possble to change the location of the data stored?

    By Paul on Feb 6, 2009

  39. That is really great! Thank you! This will come in quite useful for documenting changes! Thanks again!!!

    By Kate on Feb 10, 2009

  40. It seems that the add-on only works within the Google Analytics interface (“orange”) and not within the Analytics tab of AdWords (“green”). Any plans to make it work in both?

    By Michael Harrison on Feb 11, 2009

  41. Hi Cole,

    Thanks for the feedback. We’re definitely concerned about security and have made numerous tweaks to reduce the possibility that someone can gain access to the data.

    While I don’t want to say too much about how it works, the plugin does NOT use your UA number to identify your account.

    Thanks so much for the feedback,

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Feb 11, 2009

  42. Hey Rob,

    I have not heard of any problems with the new version of FF. Let me know if you’re still having trouble and we’ll poke at it a bit more.

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Feb 11, 2009

  43. Paul,

    Unfortunately no, there is no way to move the data storage location. But, we would be happy to discuss how you can create your own version for your internal needs. Just contact me.

    Best,

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Feb 11, 2009

  44. Hey Mike,

    Great to hear from you man.

    Great idea adding it to AdWords. We’ll add that suggestion to the roadmap.

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Feb 11, 2009

  45. Hi there!
    what a great tool! I happened to stumble upon your ga extension and it´s just what our agency needed. thanks

    By Emre on Feb 25, 2009

  46. Awesome thanks!

    By Mike on Mar 19, 2009

  47. great tool…will help for sure.

    By Sourav on Apr 3, 2009

  48. Hi, this tool is exactly what I was looking for – thanks!

    By Anardaana on Apr 17, 2009

  49. hey really that is great tools i have add it on my fire fox browser thanks for it.

    By Gaurav kasera on May 28, 2009

  50. I ve been asking google for such a functionnality for a long time :) all they answered me was ‘yeah, why not, we ll think about it’

    Thanks for creating that wonderful and absolutly necessary addon !!!

    By miracl on May 29, 2009

  51. I love this tool. Any chance of an update with FF3.5?

    By Jen on Jul 2, 2009

  52. This is such a great tool! I’ve been using it for months now. Unfortunately, since I updated my browser to FF 3.5, the notes feature no longer works. Any chance this will be updated? Thanks again for the great tool!

    By Kate on Jul 8, 2009

  53. Hi Jen and Kate,

    Thanks for catching that! We’re working on an update and hope to have one done soon.

    Thanks again,

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Jul 8, 2009

  54. Would you all consider setting up an email form to alert folks when ganotes is updated for 3.5? Its such a useful tool…

    By Brian West on Jul 10, 2009

  55. I would like this notes app run on adwords because of more needed notes there. Strange it doesn’t work going to analytics from adwords only straight to analytics.

    very nice tool !

    By Analytics lab (dutch) on Jul 14, 2009

  56. Hi this plug-in sounds great!! I’m having trouble installing it. I’ve tried downloading it with IE and FF but no luck – anyone else having the same problem?

    By Donna on Jul 15, 2009

  57. Perfect tool! One more person waiting for FF 3.5 update… ;)

    By Tomas on Jul 24, 2009

  58. I am looking forward on getting the addon updated for FF 3.5 so i can retrieve my notes while surfing on my different GA profiles.

    Really useful.

    Thanks

    By Karlitos on Jul 28, 2009

  59. Hi there,

    Any updates on the update for this tool. I miss it!

    Andrew

    By Andrew on Jul 29, 2009

  60. have tried this add on but since i am on a mac i cant get it to run at all which is a real shame because i was looking forward to seeing it working but thanks for the infomation will try again once i have my windows computer fixed next week and let you know how i got on

    andy

    By ajay on Aug 9, 2009

  61. Yes – I second Justin!

    Please get an update out to work with the latest versions of FF!

    It’s a really useful tool, and I’ve got a load of notes in it …

    THX

    By Charles on Aug 20, 2009

  62. I second Kate’s comment. I was using it all the time. Will the notes we made be gone with the new version? I wouldn’t have upgraded FireFox if I had known it was going to kill GAnotes. Who knows why GA doesn’t implement this themselves…

    By Joshua McClure on Aug 26, 2009

  63. hi,

    thanks a lot for this tool.

    but after upgrading firefox to 3.5.2, the tool does not work.

    have you got more informations?

    TY.

    By Guizmy on Aug 27, 2009

  64. Hi

    Just following up on the update for FF 3.5?! Am really missing my info :)

    Thanks

    By Tara on Aug 27, 2009

  65. Great addon. Very needed. Thank you for sharing.

    By David on Sep 3, 2009

  66. Thanks everyone for the comments and sorry for the delay responding. We’ve been very busy and have been trying to dedicate time for GA Notes. I’m hoping to allocate some time to our developers soon.

    Thanks for your patience!

    Justin

    By Justin Cutroni on Sep 8, 2009

  67. Yes, GA-notes is very useful add-on! I’m waiting for update too :)

    By Daniil on Nov 8, 2009

  68. I’m also waiting for the extension to be available for Firefox 3.5 – please update I can’t live without it!! Great extension

    By Mark on Nov 11, 2009

  69. I am trying to get this to work and it says it’s not compatible with ff 3.5.5 is there something I can do?

    By Dustin on Dec 3, 2009

  70. Justin,

    I’ve noticed the ganotes is no longer compatible with the latest version of firefox and that you haven’t released a new version of ganotes for some time now. I run a software development company (part of what we do for social media clients) and we’d be happy to take over the maintenance.

    I have to admit its not just for the common well being. I’m LOST without my ganotes since I’ve updated to the latest version of firefox and I wouldn’t have upgraded had I known that ganotes functionality would be gone…it’s that important to what I do.

    By Joshua McClure on Jan 1, 2010

  71. Hi,

    Just found this and can’t believe I haven’t seen it before – fantastic plugin!

    Only problem is some people here use FF v3.5 – I know you said you’re trying to find the time to update but thought I’d just add my vote to the pile!

    Is there any way of getting a notification when this update becomes available?

    Many thanks,
    Tim.

    By Tim on Jan 8, 2010

  72. Help! I just upgraded to Firefox 3.5.7. GA Notes Add On is not compatible. Any plans on upgrading this wonderful tool?

    Karen

    By Karen on Jan 14, 2010

  73. Google Analytics just released, on January 28, the Annotation feature… and it is working for any browser :)

    Enjoy!

    Here is the link: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/01/annotations-now-available-in-all.html

    Next thing… how to export notes from GANotes to Google Annotations.

    By Karl on Jan 29, 2010

  74. Has there been any updates to this extension so that it works with the newer versions of firefox?

    By kacey on Mar 3, 2010

  75. This version doesn´t seem to be compatible with Firefox 3.6 and I can´t find where to download an updated version. Suggestions?

    Ryan

    By Ryan on Mar 15, 2010

  76. Any chance that this addon will be updated to the latest FireFox?

    By JeppeKM on Mar 31, 2010

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