Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:48:51 GMT

You’ve probably noticed the new button at the top of many reports. Clicking Visualize activates Motion Charts for the report data. You can click the Play button at the bottom to see an over-time animation of your data, but you’ll first probably want to experiment with your X and Y axis settings, and the color and size of the dots. You can revert back to your original report view, so don’t worry about messing anything up.

So, what are Motion Charts?

Motion Charts provide a multi-dimensional, over-time analysis of the data in your report. So, if you click Visualize from the Keywords report, each dot will represent one of your keywords. If you click Visualize from the Referrals report, each dot will represent a referral. By selecting metrics to be represented on the X and Y axis and by the size and color of the dots, you plot each dot in four dimensions. Press Play or drag the slider at the bottom of the chart, and you’ll see the data change over time, thereby adding Time as the fifth dimension.

(For developers: Motion Charts use the Trendalyzer Flash widget, which is available for you to use as a gadget in Google Spreadsheets or as a visualization API.)

What can Motion Charts add to my analysis?

The basic premise of Motion Charts is that it makes it easier to notice an important trend. Visualizing data across five dimensions can help you to uncover insights and patterns that would be difficult to discover using traditional two dimensional charts. For example, looking at the traditional keyword report, it’s difficult to see how performance metrics pertaining to keywords combine, interact, and change over time.

You might want to find out, for example, over the past three months, which of the top keywords you’re buying are sending new visitors that are highly engaged with the site. And you might want to compare those keywords to ones which are sending visitors that bounced consistently. And importantly, you want to know when exactly keywords shift into these patterns. With a Motion Chart, you can identify the keywords (or any metric) that perform well across multiple dimensions, such as conversions, repeat visitors, and pageviews. You can plot a few things or hundreds of things at once and watch for patterns or outliers as their performance over time is animated. And you can pause and manually rewind or go forward at any time.

Once you notice a pattern or a break in pattern – such as related to a keyword’s performance – and when the pattern happened, that’s when the investigation begins. You can look at your reports to analyze the origins of the traffic, and then replicate conditions that caused a beneficial pattern, or instead make needed improvements. In this sense, a Motion Chart shows a richer picture of your data that you may be able to profit from.

How do I use Motion Charts?

Each dimension, or metric, can be selected easily with drop down menus around the chart’s graph area. There are four metrics:

1. x-axis
2. y-axis
3. color of bubble
4. size of bubble

To begin using your Motion Chart, follow these steps – also below:

1. Click the “Visualize” icon from any report that has a table displaying segmented data (you can always revert to the traditional graphs in your Analytics Reports by selecting a particular report from the lefthand side menu).
2. Once the Motion Chart loads, you’ll see an array of bubbles. Each bubble represents a different keyword from your report.
3. Now select the four different dimensions to plot your data: X-axis, Y-axis, Color, Size. Click on each control to see a menu of metrics you can select from. The X-axis control is underneath the graph area, the Y-axis is to the left, and the Color and Size controls are to the right of the graph area. Let’s look at one of these controls to give you the hang of modifying the chart.

   The Y-axis control is noted on the left in the screenshot below.

   
   Once you click on any part of this vertical bar, it will expand to show you the variables you can choose from for the Y-Axis. Here is the expanded area, with the rest of the graph grayed out:

   
   Pageviews is being selected. Now, obviously, the higher up a bubble (denoting a keyword in this case) is in the chart, the more the average pageviews for that bubble. You select the other variables in the same way – just click them and select your choice.

4. Press “Play” at the bottom of your chart to see how your keywords perform over time. If you click on a bubble and check the “Trails” box
   underneath the Size control, you can map out the bubble’s movement over time.

Take a look at the following video – it examines each component of this feature so that you can learn how to get at-a-glance insights from the data you’re seeing.

Let’s look at an example: keywords with high or low conversion rates.
(This example and more are also in this help center article.) We’ll finish this example with action-oriented insights you can take away from a Motion Chart.

The data is taken from a Google Analytics account that tracks the e-commerce activity for the business called ‘Google Store’ (www.googlestore.com). We’ll look at a Motion Chart on keywords by clicking “Visualize” on the Keywords report under Traffic Sources. In order to find keywords that have the best conversion rates, we would set up our Motion Chart like this: