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Posts Tagged ‘Motion Charts’
Fall In Love With Motion Charts
Have you used Motion Charts yet? If not, it’s a little like playing an instrument. It takes a little practice, but once you get the hang of it, it’s the best thing you ever did – fun and informative and you’ll want to do it daily. Create them and watch them reveal patterns you weren’t aware of in your keyword activity or some other area that is important to your site.
We’ve written a few posts on Motion Charts and made a video, and now we wanted to refer you to a great article called How To Use Google Analytics Motion Charts To Maximize Results, on Searchengineland.com, written by one of our Authorized Consultants, Daniel Waisberg from easynet search marketing in Israel.
Daniel discusses both how to use Motion Charts and also what metrics to designate as which elements of the chart to best use the feature for optimizing your online marketing. In his example, Daniel chooses to have conversion values as the size and color of the bubbles so you can easily spot them for optimization opportunities. For instance, for an e-commerce site and a motion chart showing keywords with the y-axis as visits and the x-axis as bounce rate, Daniel says:
Ecommerce conversion rate (color of bubble) shows the conversion rate for a keyword. This is important since you might have high converting keywords that are not receiving enough traffic. Look for red-small bubbles located close to the x-axis—these keywords should get priority optimization treatment. Tip: focus on these and related keywords on your PPC campaigns.Revenue (size of bubble) shows the amount of money this keyword is driving to your website. Look for big-blue bubbles—this is a signal that a keyword brings lots of money but could bring even more if it converted better. Tip: optimize the pages related to these keywords to improve conversion.
Daniel also goes into detail about how to share motion charts with others. If you’re ready to try Motion Charts today, his article is your next step. Then, for more inspiration, here are a few more examples of using them.
Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team
Motion Charts
What are Motion Charts?
Motion Charts allow you to visualize your data in 5 dimensions. You select metrics to be represented on the X and Y axis and by the size and color of the dots. And you can see how the data changes over time. A Motion Chart can help you identify patterns and relationships in your data that you might otherwise miss.
Accessing Motion Charts
Access Motion Charts by clicking Visualize. The Visualize button is available in most reports that show tables.
What You’ll See on the Motion Chart
Each dot on the Motion Chart will be a data point from the report that launched it. So, for example, if you click Visualize on a Keyword report, each dot will be a keyword. You can mouse over each dot to see its label and by clicking it, you can make the label stay visible as we’ve done here for the keyword “google store”. In this chart, the X axis is Pages per Visit and the Y axis is Visits. The color of each dot represents the Average Value. The size of the dots represents the bounce rate. In this Motion Chart, you can see right away that one keyword is much more valuable than the others.
How to Select Metrics
Menus are available on each axis and for dot color and size so that you can select metrics.
How to View Data Over Time
You can view the data over time by either dragging the slider or by pressing the Play button. You can also change the scale of the X and Y axis to linear or logarithmic.
Plotting a Data Point’s History
By selecting Trails and dragging the slider, you can plot the history of one or more data points over time.
Saving a Motion Chart
You can save the settings of any Motion Chart so that you can access it later. To do this, click Link to Chart and copy and save the link that’s provided.
Example Visualization: Keywords
Let’s use Motion Charts to analyze two keywords from the Google Store. The slide compares two Motion Charts side by side– one chart for each keyword. The same metrics are used in both charts. By comparing the size of the dots, we can see that the keyword on the left attracts much less revenue than the keyword on the right. But even though it brings in less revenue, the conversion rates on the left are much higher — indicated by the warmer colors. So, it might be appropriate to try to attract more traffic on this keyword by buying it. The keyword on the right is clearly valuable because it brings in so much revenue. But the low conversion rate suggests that it would be better to attract this traffic organically rather than through paid search. Both keywords are attracting mostly new visitors, so it might make sense to create promotional programs for existing customers.
