Creating and Managing Annotations

Content Activity Reporting—Conductor's change detection technology—automatically detects changes to all of the elements listed below, in addition to when Conductor first discovered the page:

• Title tags
• Meta Descriptions
• h1-h6 tags

You can also create and view custom annotations on Pages and Page Details to help you monitor and keep track of all your SEO and content activities—not just those that Conductor detects with Content Activity Reporting. For example, you can annotate moments in your pages' performance that reflect algorithm changes, campaign beginnings and endings, or events relevant to your industry.

Hover over the purple pins to view the kind of custom annotation that appears for a date. Then click to find more context about the annotated event.

Create a custom annotation

1. In Pages or Page Details, do one of the following:
   • Follow the path Annotations > Add New.
     
   • Hover over a date in the chart and click the green icon.
     
   • Open an existing annotation (the purple pins) and click the Add Annotation icon.
     
2. Enter details about the annotation that reflect the note you are making:
   • Enter a description for the annotation.
   • Give the date (if not already selected) you want to associate with the annotation. Note that you can select dates in the future as well as in the past.
   • Select the type of change associated with the event. You can also create types if the default list does not include a type you want to use.
   
3. Select the page or pages you want this annotation to apply to. You can choose just a single page, multiple individual pages, pages associated with a particular page group, or every page on your site. Note: you can even enter a page that does not yet have traffic, and is not reported on in Conductor. This allows you to add annotations to Conductor when an event occurs (such as a campaign start or when an article was published), and does not require you to wait until it appears in your platform reports.
   
4. Click Save.

You can now see this new custom annotation in the chart. It will appear with any other Content Activity Reporting annotations that Conductor discovers.

Review your annotations

Curious what annotations your team has created and that Conductor has generated for your technical changes? Just follow the path Annotations > View All.

In the Pages report, the window that appears shows you all your custom annotations created in that report. In Page Details, the window shows you all of the page-relevant annotations generated from technical changes detected by Conductor and all custom annotations you have created.

Want to download your annotations?

You can download the annotations that are associated to the report you are viewing. From the View all window, click the Share icon and select Download XLSX. The resulting Microsoft Excel file includes all the annotations associated with the Pages report, Page Details report, or Keywords report you are viewing. Note that any filters or view settings are not applied to the downloaded file.

Manage the annotations that appear

By default, all types of annotations appear through Content Activity Reporting (though, in the Pages report, these annotations are limited to the custom annotations you have created).

To determine the events for which annotations appear through Content Activity Reporting, you can follow the path Annotations > Display Settings.

In the Pages report, you can choose the types of custom events for which you want annotations to appear in that report.

In Page Details, you can choose the Custom Events and Detected Events for which you want annotations to appear in that report.