Feature Guide

Chart Annotations

Pin dated notes to your charts so every spike and dip keeps its story.

Three months from now, you’ll look at a traffic spike on March 12th and have no idea what caused it. Was that the newsletter? The radio interview? The new pricing page? Annotations solve this permanently: they are dated notes you pin to your charts — “Launched on Product Hunt”, “New pricing page”, “Sent newsletter” — so traffic movements always have their explanation attached.

Annotations appear as markers on your Page Views chart; hover one to read it. The habit takes ten seconds per note and turns your analytics from a chart of mysterious wiggles into a running diary of what you tried and what it did. That’s the difference between “traffic went up in March” and “the newsletter works — send more of them.”

They also make your AI smarter. Stats Chat and the weekly AI report read your annotations and use them to explain traffic movements instead of guessing. Annotate “Ran Facebook ad, June 3–10” and the next weekly report can tell you what that ad actually did to your numbers — in plain English, with your own note as the evidence.

How it works

Each annotation is a short text note attached to a date for your site. Crafty Meerkat draws a marker at that date on the Page Views chart, and hovering the marker reveals the note. When the AI Advisor analyzes your data — in Stats Chat or the weekly report — it reads annotations that fall inside the period it’s discussing, so its explanations connect cause (“sent newsletter”) to effect (“Tuesday’s 214-visit spike”).

Step by step

1
Do something worth remembering
Publish a post, send a newsletter, change your prices, get mentioned somewhere, start or stop an ad.
2
Add an annotation with the date and a short note
A few words is plenty: “July newsletter sent”, “New homepage live”. Write it the same day while it’s fresh.
3
Spot the marker on your Page Views chart
The annotation appears at its date. Hover it any time to re-read the note, right next to the traffic it may have caused.
4
Let the AI connect the dots
Ask Stats Chat “why did traffic spike last Tuesday?” or read your next weekly report — annotated events are used to explain the movement instead of leaving you guessing.

Tips from the den

◆Annotate marketing you do outside the website too — a market stall, a print ad, a podcast appearance. Offline efforts show up as “mystery” traffic unless you note them.
◆Keep notes short and factual. “June price increase” beats a paragraph; you can always ask Stats Chat to elaborate on what happened around it.
◆Annotate the bad days as well — “site was down 2 hours”, “Google Business listing suspended” — so dips don’t send future you on a false hunt.

See it live — no signup

The demo dashboard runs on a real site with real traffic.

Open the live demo →

Common questions

Where do annotations show up?

As dated markers on the Page Views chart in your dashboard — hover a marker to read the note. They are also read by Stats Chat and the weekly AI report when explaining traffic changes in that period.

Can annotations cover a date range, like a week-long ad campaign?

The simplest habit is two notes: one when the campaign starts and one when it ends. The chart then brackets the campaign visually, and the AI can reason about the period between them.

Do visitors ever see my annotations?

No. Annotations are private notes inside your dashboard. They never appear on your website or in anything a visitor can access.