Annotations Guide: How to Mark Events on Your statpx Charts

Six months from now, will you remember why traffic jumped on a Tuesday in March? Probably not — unless you wrote it down at the time. The Annotations page in statpx lets you mark deploys, campaign launches, redesigns, and any other event directly on your traffic charts, so a spike or drop always comes with an explanation instead of a mystery.

Why Annotations Matter

Traffic charts show you what happened but never why. Without a record, "why did sessions jump 40% that week" turns into archaeology — digging through old emails, Slack messages, or deploy logs to reconstruct a timeline you could have captured in ten seconds when it happened. Annotations put the "why" on the same chart as the "what," permanently, so anyone looking at the data later — including a future version of you — has the context immediately.

Adding an Annotation

From the Annotations page on your site, adding a marker takes two fields:

1. Date — the day the event happened.
2. Label — a short description, up to 200 characters, e.g. "Deployed checkout redesign" or "Started Google Ads campaign."

Once saved, the annotation appears as a marker on your traffic charts at that date, and in the annotation list on this page for quick reference. There's no limit tied to a specific chart — every annotation you add for a site shows up everywhere that site's traffic is charted, so the context travels with the data no matter which report you're viewing.

What to Annotate

Not every day needs a note, but a few event types are almost always worth logging:

• Deploys and releases — especially anything touching the homepage, checkout, or navigation. If a deploy breaks something, the annotation makes the correlation with an error spike or performance regression obvious immediately.
• Marketing campaigns — launch and end dates for ad campaigns, email blasts, or influencer mentions, so a traffic spike is instantly attributable instead of investigated from scratch.
• Redesigns — layout, pricing, or content changes that could shift behavior metrics like bounce rate or conversion rate.
• External events — anything outside your control that affected traffic, like a mention in the press or a competitor's outage, so future-you doesn't mistake it for something you did.

Reviewing and Removing Annotations

The Annotations page lists every marker for the site, most recent first, so you can scan your history at a glance. If an entry was added by mistake or is no longer relevant, delete it from the same list — the change is immediate and removes the marker from every chart it appeared on. Set up an alert on the same metric you're annotating, so a threshold-triggered alert and a manually-logged deploy annotation land on the same date and confirm each other.

The Bottom Line

Annotations cost ten seconds to add and save hours of guesswork later. Every time you deploy, launch a campaign, or change something that could move the numbers, log it — a date and a short label is all it takes. Over time, your annotation history becomes a running changelog laid directly on top of your traffic, turning "why did this happen" from a research project into a glance at the chart.