Bar and Bar stacked visualizations

Hey, everybody. This is Doug. In this video, I want to talk about the bar visualization, bar stacked visualization, horizontal bar, and horizontal bar stacked. Like some of the other visualizations, these four are reliant on a freeform table and having data in a table that we then associate them with. And you probably know when to use a bar chart and you’ve probably used them a million times. So, I guess I won’t lecture you on that , but when we have a regular table with some items and a few metrics, then it’s a great reason to have a bar chart, to be able to visualize that data. So, let’s just drag it in, put it right above that marketing channels table.

And tip number one, you need to make sure that it is associated with the right table. And this one is not 'cause you can see here, it’s associated with top pages and I want it associated with marketing channels. So, I’m just going to fix that in two seconds right there. Now, while I’ve got this open, and again, if you ever want to change any of these data source options here, you just click on that little dot right there, and you can do that. You can even get rid of the data source or get rid of the table if you only want to see the graph. But I’m going to leave it there for now. So, I’m just going to kind of click out of that one. And again, now we have our bar graph and again, I think it’s really good when you’ve got some items and you’ve got a few metrics. A bar chart is obviously really great when you’re focusing on the item or at least a combination of the item and metrics. If you’re really focusing on a metric, you might want something like a donut visualization, but again, if you’re focusing on the items or the items and metrics where you can look at the difference between the metrics per item, or even look at the differences in a metric per item like this, then this is a great visualization to use.

Now, one of the things you can do is if you want to kind of look at different ways to look at this data, you don’t have to go up to the visualizations and drag in for example, a horizontal bar, just to see what it would look like, back and forth. You can actually go up to the gear on the right-hand side here and change it. And so, I can go, you know what do I like it bar or do I like it horizontal bar? And so you can just select it right there and then kind of look at that and see which one you like the best. I can tell you that if I had, instead of five items here, if I had 50 or even less than that, then I would definitely want to go with horizontal bar because you can always scroll, but you really only have so much left to right room here. And people are far more used to scrolling up and down. And so, if you do have a lot of items that you’re going to use this on, then I do like the horizontal bar instead of the regular vertical bar. But when you have only a few items like this, personally, I kind of like the other one, but you choose. So, I’m going to go in here and I’m going to choose the bar chart for this. I might also say that if you have a really long names on each of these, then sometimes that works better with horizontal as well, because you’ve got a little more room for the horizontal nature of the label than here where you’re trying to smash them in to the bottom area here. Now what about bar stacked or horizontal bar stacked? Well, I can easily change this and let’s go ahead and just change this to bar stacked.

But to me, this doesn’t really make a lot of sense because I’m stacking things that shouldn’t really be stacked. I’m stacking page views and visits and visitors. And these are not the same kinds of things. Where you really want in a stack is things that are very similar. So, kind of groups of things compared with the next group and compared to the next group and compared to the next group. So, it’s fine that we have different marketing channels down here, but I don’t really like again, the way that we’re stacking page views, visits and visitors in here. So, let’s change our metrics to something that might be a little more appropriate for stacking. So I’m going to go up here to my components and I’m going to get rid of a couple of these guys am a drag over mobile visits, bear with me and I’ll explain it in a minute and desktop visits and just get rid of regular unique visitors right there. Now I have here a mobile visits metric and a desktop visits metric. And now these make sense because I’m basically comparing these different types of visits and they do belong together because it’s mobile visits and desktop visits. So, they’re all visits, different kinds of visits. So now I can see the total number of visits for internal is the highest. The total number of visits for referring domains is next on down over here. So, I don’t have to do the math over here between these. I can just stack them and see the total number of visits. And in this case, it kind of equals all my visits where you got mobile visits and non-mobile visits. And so, these are very effective, especially when the different parts add up to a whole. Now, where did I get mobile visits and desktop visits from as metrics? Well, you can see over here in the metrics list that these are calculated metrics. I created these, I built these in the calculated metric builder. And so if I go over here to mobile visits and I click on this little i, right here for information, you can see that it’s visits from mobile devices and it’s a segment this segment with the visits metric in it. All right. So, it’s definitely a segmented visit right here. And the same thing with the other one desktop visits. If I click on that one, it’s the segment of visits from non-mobile devices and with the visits in there. So, it’s using a segment in the calculated metric builder to create a metric that has that segment applied to it already. Let me scroll down a little bit because I’m going to show you another way that you can do it. Right below it here I have the same thing I’ve put visits in here, and then I’ve dragged that segment from the segment area over here. I’ve found visits from mobile devices and I just dragged it over here and dropped it right below visits. So, I put visits in twice, then dropped those segments right in here. So that’s actually a pretty quick way to add a segment to a metrics column. And it would have the same result here for our stacked bar graph or horizontal stacked bar. So really that’s kind of the way to do it if you’re going to use what is in essence kind of a breakdown report, you have to do it as a segment in the metrics column here because whatever is in these column areas here, that’s what’s going to get stacked in a stacked report. And whatever’s down here in the rows is going to be the different items down here. Now let’s make one more change that is very cool. I’m going to go up here to this gear I’m going to select 100% stacked. So, you see it takes each one of these. And oops, didn’t mean to get rid of desktop visits. You can get rid of them, by the way, if you accidentally click on one, it’ll go away. But that doesn’t help us when they’re 100% stacked. We need both of them. So we got mobile visits, desktop visits, and out of 100% stack, you can see for each of these marketing channels, what is a percentage that is mobile and what is percentage that is desktop. So, keep in mind that that is the percentage per item. So, you can’t really compare here and go, “Oh, look, I mean, social networks has more mobile visits than direct visits.” 'Cause it looks like this is bigger than that one. But in essence, when we look down here, direct mobile visits are 4664 and social network visits are 124. So again, if you’re doing this 100% stacked, then you are looking at per item, 100% items. So, you’re comparing really these two, you’re not comparing across them if you do the 100% stacks. So, I’m going to get rid of that for a minute so we can just see the totals again, click out. And then one more thing to show if I scroll down here, another thing that you can do with the bar stacked and the horizontal bar stacked is if you have some metrics that perhaps are conversions on your site. So if I have lead form completions and I have newsletter signups, and I have subscriptions, and I want to add those together as my conversions on my site and see which of these marketing channels is resulting in the most conversions total for my site, then this is a good way to look at that as well, because now I can see that referring domains has the largest total. I’m stacking these, it has the largest total, and then internal and direct natural search and social networks. So, I can see how those add up for all of them when I am adding up again, all of these items here, 'cause these ones make sense to add up into one stack here. 'Cause they’re all conversions on my site. So, in any case, I hope that helps to give you an idea of when to use bar stacked and how to use bar stacked as well as bar and horizontal versions of each of those in analysis workspace. Have a great day. -