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:
x-axis y-axis color of bubble size of bubble To begin using your Motion Chart,
follow these steps - also below:
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:
