The Eight-Hour Time Warp of One New Google Analytics Feature
Thursday, March 5th, 2009By Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Search Strategist
One of the more subtle, but ingenious changes to the free analytics package flagship of Google Analytics Enterprise was the inclusion of the motion charts that help visualize data in five dimensions.
Yes, you have read that right—five full dimensions: the standard x- and y-axes, bubble size, bubble colors, and time. Now, you could get all technical and note that the fourth dimension is really space-time, and that time should be merged with something, such as ‘bubble-time’ or ‘time-bubble’ (which actually is an accurate analysis of what you will be in when playing with motion charts), but let’s not quibble with these semantics, let’s stick to the motion charts as being five-dimensional.
The beauty of what Google did was to take the semi-used bubble charts and push them beyond the envelope by figuring out how to visually make something appeal to a larger audience, not just to nerds who played text-based MUD games in the 1990s or created their own 4×4 four-dimensional tic-tac-toe game (guilty as charged). Instead, the Google Analytics team figured out how to make a chart visually appealing, and just as importantly, useful to a large group of Google Analytics users—all for free.
The subtle brilliance of Google Analytics’s motion chart is in its ability to easily change scales such as the standard linear x-y axis to logarithmic x-y axis or variables from revenue to average time on site with a simple drop-down menu. Even (space-) time is made to look like a simple calculus formula by allowing the user control over the speed of the integral time period and pause at any interval to note any singular events.
The lightness of the program is a thing of beauty from which you can never escape, as you watch up to 50 data points flying around like fireflies in the night sky. Yet, the motion chart is better used for differentiating two themes across different metrics or KPIs in a kind of multi-variable A/B test. Nonetheless, as a caution to spending your time playing with this program, it is advisable to fiddle with it after work as you can quickly lose track of time until your boss comes around and yells at you for what he perceives as you playing a game on company time.
Take a look for yourself of Google Analytics’s motion chart below:



















