One of interesting new features of Google Analytics, we didn’t have time to explore during the March WAW event, is Motion Charts. Motion Charts are a fascinating visualization idea, displaying up to 5 dimensions of data in a very intuitive format. They were pioneered by Dr Hans Rosling in a famous TEDtalk discussing global health and are now available in Google Analytics to visualize web analytics data.
Motion chart or my blog traffic - click to animate
If you are interested to learn more about Motion Charts in GA, click on the image above to see my blog traffic visualized using motion charts and take a look at this training at the Google Conversion University.
The use of Motion Charts in not limited to Google Analytics however. They are also part of the visualization tools in Google Docs (see an example by the guys from Efficient Frontier) and can be accessed through an API. A good example for using the motion chart API is Eric Peterson’s Twitalyzer tool, that measures users influence on Twitter, and visualizes changes in influence over time. These interfaces open a wealth of interesting usage areas for data analysts, that can be integrated in dashboards and client presentations.
Now here in an idea: Use motion charts to visualize online buzz!
In China, product related discussions happen mainly BBS’s and sometimes on blogs. So these are the platforms we spent most of our time tracking and analyzing for our clients. to visualize user discussions on these two platforms, I propose the following motion chart setup:
| Data points in the Chart: | Topics / Keywords (e.g. product names ) |
| X-Axis: | Number of posts using the keyword |
| Y-Axis: | Reply rate (Replies / Post using the keyword) |
| Size of the bubble | Page Views on the articles using a keyword |
| Color of the bubble | Aggregate sentiment of posts & replies using the keyword |
| Time | Time of data collection (daily / weekly / monthly) |
The idea, of course, is to use this visualization to identify trending topics that need to acted upon. Those topics would clearly show in the top right corner (many posts, attracting many responses responses) of the chart with large bubble sizes (many page views) and red color negative aggregate sentiment).
I you have any ideas on visualize social media tracking data? Let us know in the comments!
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- Video of March WAW with Google’s Stephanie Hsu (longmarch.chinalytics.com)
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Just received a copy of this book:
http://www.jonathanmacdonald.com/?p=2900
I’ve only read the first few chapters but it seems to goes in to quite a bit of detail about social media metrics. May be of interest…
Thanks Patrick for the pointer. I will take a look. Let me know what you think about the book, once you through with it.