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Ranking volatility & top-selling products: A just-for-fun shared report with Looker Studio

Ranking volatility & top-selling products: A just-for-fun shared report with Looker Studio

Here comes a new just-for-fun shared report designed with Looker Studio. This time, we are going to talk about visualisation around ranking volatility & top-selling products of an eCommerce website.

Mindset and inspirations

As usual, this kind of report is a playground to:

  • Address real needs in data visualization and exploration
  • Push the limits of Looker Studio as far as possible & find new hacks
  • Break away from the usual aesthetics of the work typically done for clients

The same clients who also give our brains something to chew on. The thoughts I share below about the layperson’s approach of displaying ranking volatility were originally sparked by discussions with Yehoshua Coren as part of a our project work for one of 🥷 Analytics Ninja‘s clients, a large retailer with significant ecommerce presence. The project led to a very innovative solution… and more ideas kept sprouting…

Some say data is our fuel. My favorite fuel is the business questions from the stakeholders I work with, the conversations they spark with my friends & peers, and the solutions they give birth to.

Now, back to our just-for-fun shared report.


Goal of the report & use case: Ranking and volatility

Let’s start with the purpose of the report: The goal is to represent the evolution of a ranking over time and to convey the concept of volatility to any audience using an interactive Looker Studio report, without requiring statistical knowledge or advanced data visualizations.

The topic of ranking the best-selling products on an ecommerce website 🛒 was the easiest to implement for this shared report, but we can easily imagine applying the same approach to track the performance of critical keywords for traffic acquisition, or the fluctuation of sports rankings. It’s clearly applicable in many different contexts.


Graphical Design: 70’s comics & pop art

In this context, for the visual environment and aesthetic choices, I wanted to work on an atmosphere inspired by old comics from the 60s and 70s, with all the pop art influence that notably permeated the advertisements of the time. Let the vivid colors burst forth! …but always in the service of readability.

Graphical Assets: Boom! Spatch! Viz!

Data of ecommerce product sales

The data displayed comes from a fictional ecommerce website that sells time machines. If you follow me, chances are you’ll hear about this site again in the future… hehe… in the future…

So imagine a product catalog where sales fluctuate over time, influenced by trends, shooting stars, and timeless classics…

E-commerce products from a fictional website

To analyze the evolution of these product sales, I chose to use a daily time granularity. However, in most cases, it’s more relevant to use this type of visualization over longer periods (weeks, months, quarters)… It simply requires adjusting the temporal aggregation of the data.

Once the scope was defined, it was just a matter of building the dataset using a model designed to facilitate the progressive visualization of each product over each period, including information about both the previous and upcoming rankings.

BigQuery Reporting Table for the Looker Studio Data Source

Data viz: Between bar chart and dump chart

In this context, I tried to combine bar charts with a bump chart.

The vertical bar chart is the most straightforward type for displaying an easily readable ranking. The bump chart, less well-known, is highly effective at showing fluctuations across multiple points in time.

Bump Chart - Credits: Data Viz Project
Bump Chart – Credits: DataVizProject.com

For this combo, the compromise I chose was to limit the number of periods to enable vertical reading of successive rankings (in this case, 3 periods), resulting in a highly visual output. This is complemented by linking the same product across periods to highlight changes in position, allowing for a horizontal reading focused on its evolution.

However, unlike a bump chart, showing all the links at once in this custom visualization was not an option due to readability concerns.

Bar Chart with Ranking Path

Moreover, dynamically selecting the desired product also helps guide the reader through a progressive exploration of the data.

And since the product is chosen interactively and used to draw the links, it makes sense to also use that information to enhance the visual experience by applying the product’s color 🎨 to highlight that dimension, and enforce general consistency of the data viz.

Obviously, this type of report should also allow the user to select the period to display. Even more technical challenges!

Product and Day selection

Bonus: Chart comments

And to wrap up the building of this Looker Studio report, I’d like to introduce you to Anna and Don.

They could have been working at the Daily Planet 🌐, but luckily for us, they chose instead to comment the Looker Studio report with a few dynamic data. Between us, I suspect that they are part of the Sales team of the Time Traveling Store…definitely, they are not data analyst…

Dynamic comments of the report

Ingredients: Looker Studio features

To build this interactive reports, a lot of features from Looker Studio have been used:

  • Most of available chart types: Bars, Lines, Tables, Bubbles, Pies
  • Query result variables for the Anna’s comment and the dates above the data visualisation
  • Parameters
  • A BigQuery data source
  • Some calculated fields and chart fields
  • …but no data blending

Access to the Looker Studio Shared Report

Voilà. Now it’s time to see all these elements and thoughts in action by accessing the shared report




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