Is there a web statistics service or software that allows inserting custom events into the graphs for quick reference?
I would like to be able to insert an event like "on March 3rd, we changed the color of the background" and see directly in the graph that right after we did this, site visits went up 10%. I know it can be done with external tools, perhaps even Excel, but I'd love to have this right inside the web stats interface.
To see what I'm talking about - Google does this with Google Finance. This is exactly what I'm talking about. A graph on the left, news on the right with links into the graph. So the graph would be my web statistics and the news would be whatever I put there, likely changes I did to the website in question.
Google Analytics now supports adding "annotations" into the statistics graphs. Multiple annotations can be added for each day. Exactly what I wanted.
Not sure if you are looking for a hosted solution, but we use Omniture Sitecatalyst and it has the ability to add calendar events which shows up in any report you run.
Try http://piwik.org/ - it's got an rss feed widget plugin that might fit your needs. *Note: you would want to read up on the API/plugins for incorporating the dates from the feed into the graph.