One Half Amazing!

If you’re a Google Analytics user, you’ll be happy to know the GA team is slowing rolling out new features. One of the coolest and most needed in my opinion is the ability to add annotations to your data over time.  Annotations are small notes and snippets you can add to your timeline.  They’ll help you keep better track, trend and paint a picture of what outside influences caused a sudden dip or spike in traffic.  Now you won’t have IT, marketing and business scratching trying to remember what happened on a particular day 3 months ago.

Here are some ideas you could use annotations for:

• Track traffic spikes to your site after posting to social media pages such as facebook, twitter, and youtube.
• Note when products or campaigns launch to see how they impact visitors
• After commenting on a post, did you get any traffic back to your site? Make a note of the site and when.
• Track and don’t worry about forgetting when and how well that guest blogging gig turned out

Annotations are slowly rolling out to all users in January and should be in your hands by at least mid-January 2010.  Want more information? Watch the Google Analytics Annotations video.

Trakkboard (free) gives you Google Analytics data on your desktop and the ability to easily create dashboards that pull data across multiple Google Analytics logins and profiles. Trakkboard uses the Google Analytics API to load data from Google Analytics and to display top level metrics all within the same view. It’s a neat little application and time saver for those of you that manage multiple Google Analytics profiles and would like an easier way to display the data on one screen.

5 Ways Sentiment Analysis is Ramping Up in 2009 via ReadWrite Web

Sentiment Analysis aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to a particular topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation their affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader). From Wikipedia

Here is a simple Greasemonkey extension for Google Analytics that adds social media metrics right in with your web reports. The developer promises more services to come, but as of now it measures Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Yahoo inLinks.  Check it out.