Annotations
Annotations are timeline notes pinned to the visitor chart. Use them to mark launches, deploys, campaigns, ad pushes, or outages so you and your team can read the chart in context months later. Every annotation is either a site note, visible to everyone with access to the dashboard, or a personal note that only you can see. The Annotations preference controls how the pins appear across every dashboard: always shown, shown only while your cursor is over the chart, or hidden.
Set it from Dashboard preferences, in the Annotations row.
What an annotation looks like
Annotations appear as a small pin at the date they were added. You do not have to aim for the pin itself: hover anywhere on that date and the note appears inside the regular chart tooltip, right under the visitor numbers, with the author's name on site notes. Click the pin to open the editor and update or delete it. When several notes land on the same date, the pin carries a count badge and the tooltip lists them all.
Site notes and personal notes
Every annotation has a visibility, chosen in the editor:
- Site notes are visible to everyone with access to the dashboard: teammates, guests, and anyone viewing through a share link. They carry the author's name, so the team always knows who marked the launch. Adding, editing, or deleting site notes requires an editor role or above (guest editors included).
- Personal notes are visible only to you. Every signed-in role can keep them, including viewers and guest viewers, which makes them the right place for your own working notes on a dashboard you cannot otherwise edit. Personal pins render as a hollow outline so they never read as team-wide context.
Editors can update or remove any site note, not just their own. A personal note can only ever be touched by its author. If someone leaves the team, their personal notes leave with them; the site notes they wrote stay on the chart.
Adding an annotation
Annotations are pinned from the dashboard, not from this preferences page. The chart at the top of the dashboard is the entry point.
- Open the dashboard for the site you want to annotate.
- On the main visitor chart, click anywhere along the date you want to mark. The whole vertical column for that date is clickable, not just the data point on the line. An annotation editor slides in.
- Enter a short label (the title shown in the tooltip) and an optional note (the longer description underneath it).
- Optionally set a time of day, so the note pins to the exact hour on intraday views. Leave it empty for all-day events.
- Optionally add a URL so the annotation links to a release note, blog post, or campaign brief.
- Pick a color for the pin (orange, green, red, blue) so different kinds of events are easy to scan at a glance. The same color marks the note in the tooltip.
- Choose the visibility: site note or personal note. Site note is the default for editors; viewers create personal notes.
- Click Save. The pin appears on the chart immediately.
Editing or deleting an annotation
Click the pin itself (the small colored bubble below the chart). The same editor reopens with the existing values. Adjust and save, or click Delete to remove it.
Annotations are stored per site. If you have access to multiple sites, each has its own timeline. Editing or deleting an annotation only affects the dashboard for that site.
Notes with a time of day
A deploy that went out at 14:30 deserves better than a pin on "sometime that day". Give an annotation a time and it behaves like this:
- On the Today, Yesterday, 24h, and single-day views, the pin sits on its exact hour, so you can line up the deploy with the dip that followed it.
- On daily, weekly, and monthly views, it renders on its date like any other note, and the tooltip shows the time next to the author.
- Notes without a time still appear on intraday views, gathered at the start of the day.
The Realtime view is the one place without pins; annotations return the moment you switch to any regular range.
The three modes
Shown keeps every pin visible all the time, the right call when annotations are part of how your team reads the chart. On hover keeps the chart clean at rest and draws the pins the moment your cursor enters the chart, a good middle ground for screenshots and presentations without giving up the context. Hidden removes them entirely. Whichever you pick applies to every dashboard you open on this device.
Where to find it
Sign in, click your avatar in the top-right, then Settings. In the sidebar, choose Dashboard. Annotations is the fifth row of the preferences card.