Events

Within Cobalt, you can document events that are meaningful to you and can help provide insights and context to your graphs. By annotating specific dates with custom notes, you can capture key moments, external factors, or occurrences that help explain data variations.

Why Use Event Annotations?

Data doesn't exist in a vacuum. Use Events to give your audience (or to remind yourself) of the WHY behind an unexpected spike or dip in your data. This could be related to:

• Promotions like lightning deals or coupons
• Events like Prime Day
• Change in advertising strategy or adding in an automation
• Change in your listing, such as testing a new title
• Product launches
• External factors (Covid, wildfires, etc)
• Stockouts
• Price changes
• Supplier Changes

Events help you connect the dots between data points and real-world context.

Creating Custom Events

1. Navigate to ‘Events’ in the left hand navigation pane
2. Click ‘+ Add New Custom Event’
   
3. Configure your Custom Event
   • • Title - Use the ‘Event Description’ box to add a title for your event. This is what will show up on each of your graphs.
     • Associated with - Here, you can associate your event globally, which means it will be available and will show up across all relevant features in your account. Alternatively, you can get more specific and choose exactly what you want to associate the event with. This will restrict this event to only show up in the associated feature for the selected data point. Available features include Advertising Accounts, Portfolios, Campaigns, Ad Groups, Products, Product Ads, Keywords, and SOV or Tracked Keywords.
       
       
       • If an associated resource besides Global is selected, you will be further prompted to add information such as the specific campaign, product or keyword you want to associate the Event to.
         
     • Date - Enter the date of the Event. This is the date that the Event will show up in each of your graphs. Currently, you can only set a single date, not a date range.
     • Notes - Enter any notes corresponding to the Event that you want to document.
4. Click ‘Create Custom Event’

You will now see your newly created Event within the Events table

The Custom Events table shows all custom Events created along with corresponding information.

You can delete events using the trashcan icon to the far right.

Creating a Custom Event from a Widget

If you are working within a dashboard, you can create a Custom Event directly from the widget. Hover over the date you want to add an Event and click ‘+Event Annotation’. This will bring up the event creation model, which allows you to set up the event’s specifics.

Editing Custom Events

After an Event is created, only the Description and Notes can be edited. From the Custom Events table, hover over and click on the Description or Notes, make your desired edits, and click the check mark to save.

To change the Associated Resource (where the event will show up), Resource Type, or Date, you’ll need to recreate the event with the correct information and then delete the old event.

Viewing Custom Event Annotations on your Graphs

Once you have your Event set up you can then add it to your time series graphs by toggling on ‘Event Annotations’ from the widget configuration menu.

You’ll need to toggle this setting on for any widgets where you want your Custom Events to be visible.

Once ‘Event Annotations’ is toggled on, you will see all Events that fall within the date range shown in the widget that are either set to Global or to the specific Resource used in the widget.

The Events are signaled using the small gray flag. Toggle over the date of the event to see its title.

Best Practices and Troubleshooting

Q: I created a custom event, but it's not visible on my graphs. Why not?

A: Once you create an Event you’ll need to enable Event Annotations on the widgets you want it visible on. To do this, edit your widget and then toggle on ‘Event Annotations’. See above for further instructions and images.

A: If you have Events associated with specific resources, you will need to filter the widget to show only that specific resource (like a product or a campaign) to see the event annotation. As a best practice, we advise making most of your events global so that there will be no need to filter down to this level.

For example, a time series chart with multiple products will only show Global Events. A product specific annotation will only appear if the time series chart is filtered to only show that product.

Q: How can I view all events that exist? When multiple Events occur on the same day or the titles are long they get cut off and are difficult to read. Is there a way to export or generate a report of all Events for better visibility?

A: There is no export functionality at the moment. To view all Events, navigate to the Events section in the left hand navigation panel and use the Custom Events tab to see all Events created.

Q: Can I add multiple annotations for the same date? A: Yes! You can add multiple events to a single date to capture comprehensive context.

Q: Can I add an event as a date range?

A: No, right now, each event can only be associated with 1 date. You can create multiple events, each with one date to cover a date range or create two events, one for the first date of the range and one for the last date.

Q: Are annotations visible to my team?

A: Yes, all events created will be available for your team to use in their widgets and, depending on the widgets' settings, visible on shared or public dashboards.

Q: I am an agency and I created an Event at the parent Org level, can my child orgs see the event? 

A: No. All events are specific to the org they are created in.