Google Analytics since the first days of the company

This data was originally featured in the March 17, 2021 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2021/03/in-the-headlights-march-17-2021-three-year-anniversary-edition/

In this week’s Rear View Mirror, we take a walk down memory lane for our anniversary. One of the things we rarely do in any of our analytics is step back and look at the BIG picture, which in this case is a look at Google Analytics since the first days of the company:

You’ll note a few interesting things here. First, the journey to today isn’t a smooth, linear ride from point A to point B. There are lots of hills and valleys, but the trip is generally going in the right direction.

Second, you’ll note the annotations at the bottom of the chart. This is one of the most powerful, most under-used features of Google Analytics – the ability to make shared notes when something’s gone awry, so that later on down the road when times have changed, you can look back and see what happened in the past.

This is especially important as you have people coming and going from an organization – any tool like this helps preserve institutional knowledge, and when we do assessments of companies’ analytics maturity, a Google Analytics account with annotations that are frequent and current is a sign of high maturity.

What would you do with a similar analysis at your company? Any time you’re looking at big picture data, dig into the anomalies – what made the highs so high, what made the lows so low? Are those things that you can either replicate or mitigate? Very often – especially with changes in personnel – we’ll find hidden gems in our back data, things we forgot we did that worked well. When you find those and dust them off, see if you can do a variation of them to build repeatable successes.