Google just rolled out upgrades to its Analytics service, now featuring annotations. Any user with access to a profile (i.e. a specific site’s traffic information) can now mark the graph with info explaining – or even speculating on -  spikes or lulls in traffic. In organizations large and small, it’s becoming common for multiple users to access the same Google Analytics profile. Even so, there’s a lot of data in each profile, perhaps more that many casual observors would prefer to muddle through.  With annotations, it should become a good deal easier to share not just the data itself, but interpretations of it as well – what the GA blog refers to as a company’s tribal intelligence. Here’s a short video primer:

Damon Kiesow posts over at PoynterOnline on new tools available from Google Analytics. Given the myriad options already in GA, and its consistent evolution over the last few years, I have trouble understanding why ANY organization would dump money into a commercial “enterprise” analytics solution. Yes, Webtrends, yes, Omniture, I’m referring to you.

Need to find out how a Web site is being used? For 99% of us, the surest, most authentic, available method – and far away the most cost-effective – is to learn all we can about using Google Analytics tools, and then put those tools into play.