Shopify Analytics adds staff notes: record campaign context beside your charts

Shopify merchants can now add their own notes to supported time-series reports. The 1 October announcement adds staff-created context alongside markers from Shopify and installed apps.

That makes a small but useful Q4 habit possible: record when a campaign, creator mention or operational change happened while the details are fresh, instead of reconstructing the timeline months later.

Add a note where your team reviews performance

Shopify’s annotations guide explains the workflow:

1. Open Analytics → Reports and choose a report with time as its first dimension.
2. Open Annotations and create a note.
3. Add a title, date or date range, activity category and optional description, then save.
4. Enable annotation visibility if the markers are hidden.

Notes can appear across reports covering matching dates and activity types. They are not confined to the chart where you created them.

A practical campaign log

For example, a store could record “Autumn email offer — existing customers” with its actual campaign window, then separately note a delivery delay or a bestselling variant going out of stock. These are suggested examples, not results from a merchant test.

Keep the entries factual. “Creator video published” is a better record than “Creator drove the sales spike” unless you have evidence for that attribution. A marker helps you ask a question; it does not prove why a metric moved.

Agree on a short naming convention before peak season. Include the channel or operational event in the title, and give one person responsibility for checking that the weekly timeline is complete. Avoid writing the same campaign under several different names.

Know the limits before relying on notes

Annotations do not appear in report exports or multi-store reports. Staff cannot edit Shopify-generated or app-created entries. Apps with annotation access can read staff-note titles, descriptions, dates and activity types, although they cannot read the creating staff member’s name.

Keep sensitive customer details and private personnel information out of this shared reporting space. Retain your campaign records elsewhere if you need a complete export for analysis.

For the numbers themselves, see our explanation of Shopify’s session-measurement changes. Keeping a timeline of activity is useful alongside checking whether the underlying measurement method changed.