Area and Area Stacked

Hey everybody. It’s Doug in this video, I just want to go over the area and area stacked visualizations, and we’ll put them into our project. And we’ll just talk about a few little tips and tricks of using each of those. So, both of these, the area and the area stacked are reliant upon other data that we have in a freeform table. So, we do need to create a table of some kind that has your data, and then they can be added to your project. Now, when I add an area graph, I do this right over here. Maybe I’ll add it above top sections there.

Now we notice that it didn’t automatically align itself to top sections. It aligned itself to top pages, which is up here. It doesn’t really know which one I want to align the data to, so I need to choose it. So, I’m going to choose top sections. Next thing is, since I haven’t selected any data in the table, it aligned itself to the first row, which is commerce section and all these different metrics here that are up there in that table. So, I don’t really want that. What I really want to do is just maybe focus on a few of them because you can see that some of these numbers don’t belong together in a graph, right? If you have a giant number for page views and you have a very, very small number for content velocity, those aren’t going to look at together in the same graph, unless you had two different Y axes and that’s for a different video. But in this case, I’m going to select for the commerce section, I’m going to select page views, visits and visitors. And now we have our area graph up here with pages visits and visitors. Now it looks like you only have two, one tall one and one shorter one, but in reality visits and visitors are very close to the same numbers. And so that’s why you only really see two of them there because they’re kind of stacked on top of each other right there. And that’s fine. I might not want to include both of those, 'cause that might be kind of confusing to the end user. Now keep in mind that when you’re using an area graph, even though they’re shaded, they’re not stacked on top of each other, these numbers, it’s more like they are behind each other, right? You’ve got these, you have these small mountains here and you’ve got the big mountain behind it, not stacked on top of it. And so, in my opinion, it’s probably better to use a line graph. If I change the visualization here to a line graph, you’ll see that it just stays in the same numbers and stays in the same area. And people are probably a little more used to comparing lines when they’re in a line graph instead of area. But if you like the look of the area graph, then great, you just need to make sure that your analysts know that those are not stacked. Now let’s go ahead and talk about area stack. So, if I’m going to go to area stacked, it takes these three and does stack them there. Let me just click over here to get rid of that thing. And now you have those three metrics stack together, which is kind of weird, right? Because you don’t need to stack different metrics. Typically, you’re going to stack the same metric with items that should be grouped, right? So for example, if I was in charge of the women’s section, men’s section and children toys section, I might select say page views for that and that one and that one. And then that makes more sense in an area stacked graph, because now these are stacked together and I can see the different sections with women’s and men’s and children and toys. They’re stacked on top of each other. So, I can see the total of them, which is the top line there. And I can also see, you know, which ones are the most. If we get down here and we see that the, this one here with the women’s section is the highest, and then we’ve got the men’s section and then we’ve got the children and toys section there, and we can kind of compare them and say, you know, usually this one’s a lot bigger than that one, and that one’s bigger than this one. And you can kind of look at those and that’s a good way to look at an area, stacked visualization. Again, if you want to see the total of those different items, however, another cool way to look at this. If you would rather compare these three items that you’re responsible for, instead of seeing the total like this, we can go up to the gear and we can choose this 100% stacked. And now we have this stacked graph, it’s all percentages and it’s a 100%. And now you can see how these really do compare to each other on a given time. So now as we move along, we can see that the women’s section is typically right around 50%. It’s really half of our page views when you’re considering these three sections. And so again, if you have different sections like this or different items, I will say that you want to compare than an area stacked and a 100% stacked is going to be really helpful to you. If you really just would like to see the total numbers, then again, go back up to the gear, get rid of a 100% stack like this, and you can see the total numbers together, click out of that. And you can see the total numbers together and how they go up and down, et cetera. So very basic, but some really cool stuff there for your analysis. I hope that was helpful. Good luck. -