Create an annotation

I’m going to walk you through a feature called annotations in Customer Journey Analytics. This feature is meant to help you communicate contextual data nuances to those you share projects with. Some good examples of when you’d want to use annotations include things like spikes and metrics due to marketing campaign launches or the inverse if you experience implementation issues where tracking is temporarily impacted. Before I show you how to enable, create and manage annotations, I’ll mention that it requires special permissions. While users have rights to view annotations like they do with other components, an admin will need to provide explicit permission to do these things. I’m in an existing project, I’ll show you some ways to create annotations using this report. In the components menu at the top, in a table, I could right click on a cell or range of cells, then select create annotation from selection, in a line graph I can click on a point and get the context menu, there’s also a CJA annotations API, which I won’t be showing in this video, but I just wanted to mention it’s available. Alright, I’m going to demonstrate setting up an annotation using the builder. I’ll go to components, then annotations. Any existing annotations would show up here. I’m going to click on the add symbol to the left of the search box to create a new one. This is going to open up the builder. Now, one thing you’ll want to confirm initially is that the data view you’re setting this up for, is actually the one selected, that’s in the upper right corner. I want to make sure it’s the same one that I’m using in the report I was just viewing. This also impacts the metrics and filters you’ll be setting up in the annotation, so it’s really an important step. I’m going to name my annotation Memorial day sales event. In the description, I’ll add launched Memorial day sales event, in tags, I’ll add campaign launch. Next consider the date and date range. I’m going to use a single date of May 25th, so I’ll select that from the calendar and then hit apply. If you want to customize the color, you can do that, I’ll select purple. Now, setting up the scope is key. You’ll want to think through all of the dimensions and/or filters that the annotation will be visible with. You can drag and drop up to 10 metrics and 10 filters that will trigger showing the annotation. I’m going to use the search box. I’m going to search for sessions first. I’m going to be dragging and dropping session starts and session ends. Now when you drag over the second metric, make sure you see the blue border to the left before you release your mouse button. That part can be a little bit tricky. Now at the bottom you have the option to apply this to all data views in your account or the one that you’re working with currently. I’m not going to check this box for my demonstration. Last, I’m going to click on the save command at the bottom. I’m going to go back to the report I was just viewing in workspace, at the top, the right corner, you can see a purple colored note. If I mouse over this, I’ll see the details of the annotation. Scrolling down to my second component, I see two areas where the annotation also appears for the date of May 25th, both in the table and in the line chart. Editing is easy and there’s a couple of ways to do this. If you’re in a project and see an annotation, and of course, if you have the proper permissions, you can click on the annotation and then select the pencil icon. This is going to open the annotation in the builder and you can modify any of the settings here. I’m going to select cancel, and this will take me back to my project. I’ll leave you with a final detail regarding sharing annotations. Let’s say you create a project with annotations and then you share the project with another user. These annotations will be displayed to that user but cannot be edited or deleted by that user unless they have admin rights. I’ve walked you through the annotation feature and Customer Journey Analytics. You should now feel comfortable creating these for your own projects. Good luck. -