Revenue jumped 18% last Thursday.
Was it the email campaign, the new bundle, or the influencer post that went out the same morning? In most teams, the answer is whoever speaks first in the Monday meeting.
Shopify now puts that context directly on your charts. Annotations mark what happened in your store on the day it happened, so you can see a spike and its likely cause side by side. No spreadsheets of launch dates, no scrolling through Slack to remember when the theme went live.
Here is how to use them in five minutes, and where they stop being enough.
What annotations actually are
Annotations are color-coded markers on the timeline of a Shopify report. Each one flags an event on a specific date or date range. Hover over a marker and you see what happened; click it and you get the full list for that day.
They come from two places:
- Shopify itself, automatically. Product events (published, unpublished), store changes (theme published, app installed or removed) and system events such as data delays or changes to how a metric is defined. No setup needed. Product events are ranked by revenue, so the ones most likely to matter show first.
- Your apps. Apps can now write their own annotations: a campaign send, a discount, a landing page launch, a supplier or warehouse change, a new market. Each shows the app’s name and icon, so you know where the context came from.
The second group is the one that answers “which campaign moved the needle.” If your email, loyalty or subscription tools support annotations, your marketing calendar starts appearing on your sales chart by itself.
Sources: Shopify Help Center, Shopify Changelog.
How to turn them on
- In your Shopify admin, go to Analytics > Reports.
- Open a report with a time-based dimension (day, week, month). Total sales over time or conversion rate over time are good starting points.
- In the Visualization menu, switch on Show annotations. Markers appear on the chart right away.
- Optional: open the All events menu and keep only the event types you care about, for example just campaigns and product publishes.
- Click Save, so the report opens with annotations next time.
Annotations group by the report’s time unit. On a daily view you see each day’s events; on a weekly view they bundle into weeks. When you’re hunting for a cause, zoom to daily.
Reading the chart: three quick scenarios
Conversion rate drops on a Tuesday. You turn on annotations and see a new theme was published that morning. That is your first suspect. Check the product page and checkout on mobile before blaming traffic quality.
Average order value climbs for a week. The annotation shows a “spend over X, get free shipping” discount starting the same day. Now look past the AOV bump: did total revenue and margin also rise, or did you just move the same customers into bigger, less profitable baskets?
Fulfillment times get worse. A supplier change sits right at the turn of the line. Before annotations, that link would take a week of back-and-forth to spot. Now it takes one hover.
The routine is the same every time: spot the change, find the marker, write down the likely cause, then check it.
Where annotations stop: timing is not proof
An annotation tells you two things happened on the same day. It doesn’t tell you one caused the other. Launch a campaign on Black Friday and it will look like a genius move, whatever it actually did.
Watch for three traps:
- Stacked events. A campaign, a discount and a new product on the same day give you three suspects and no verdict. Stagger launches when you can.
- Seasonality. Compare against the same weekday or the same week last year, not just yesterday.
- Vanity metrics. A marker next to a sessions spike is exciting. A marker next to flat revenue is the real story. Put annotations on sales, conversion rate and AOV first, as we argue in Measure Revenue, Not Vanity Metrics.
So treat annotations as your hypothesis generator. When a result matters, like a pricing change or a new checkout offer, confirm it with a proper test. Our guide to A/B testing on Shopify walks through how.
Your five-minute checklist
- Turn on Show annotations in your sales, conversion rate and AOV reports, and save them.
- Check which of your apps add annotations (email, loyalty, subscriptions, reviews).
- Filter out event types that are pure noise for you.
- Review the daily view every Monday: every big move gets a marker or a question.
- Send anything high-stakes to an A/B test before you scale it.
The goal isn’t more data. It’s fewer arguments about what worked, and faster decisions about what to do again.