Six months after a change nobody remembers what shipped, so every traffic movement gets attributed to whatever is fashionable. Analytics annotation features are usually abandoned within a month because they require leaving your workflow. The fix is to make the log the cheapest possible artefact and to record the things people never think to record.
---
name: annotation-discipline
description: Use when setting up or repairing the record of what changed on a site and when.
---
# Annotation Discipline
Six months after a change nobody remembers what shipped, so every traffic movement gets attributed to whatever is fashionable. Analytics annotation features are usually abandoned within a month because they require leaving your workflow. The fix is to make the log the cheapest possible artefact and to record the things people never think to record.
## What you need first
- a single shared sheet or file, not a tool
- deploy access or a release feed
- agreement on who logs what
## Method
1. Use one flat table with date, what changed, URL pattern affected, who did it, expected effect. Anything richer will not be maintained.
2. Log non-SEO changes too: pricing pages, checkout flows, nav restructures, a consent banner change. Consent banner changes wreck analytics comparability and are never in an SEO log.
3. Record the expected effect before you see the data. This is the only defence against retro-fitting a story to whatever the graph did.
4. Log the date the change was live for crawlers, not the merge date. A cached template can be days behind.
5. Include things you did not do but that happened to you: a competitor relaunch, a SERP feature appearing, a supplier feed breaking.
6. Review the log at the start of every reporting cycle before you open the analytics, so the log frames the numbers rather than the reverse.
## What this produces
A maintained dated change log that any analyst can read cold and use to explain a graph.
## Where this goes wrong
- Logging only SEO work, so a marketing site rebuild that halved traffic appears as an unexplained algorithm event
- Backfilling from memory once a quarter, which produces confident dates that are wrong by weeks
- Keeping the log private to one person, so it dies when they leave
---
From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/annotation-discipline
Free to download · no account, no email
A maintained dated change log that any analyst can read cold and use to explain a graph.