The mapping
| Question | Chart |
|---|---|
| How has this changed over time? | Time series |
| How do categories compare? | Bar |
| Where is this happening? | Geo map |
| Are two metrics related? | Scatter |
| What is the composition? | Stacked bar — rarely pie |
| How do users move through? | Funnel or Sankey (community) |
Time series
Needs a date dimension and at least one metric. A second metric adds a line; a breakdown dimension splits into one line per value.
A breakdown on something with 30 values produces 30 lines and an unreadable chart. Add a filter to the top few, or use a table instead.
Bar charts
Sort descending by the metric — the ranking is normally the point. Use horizontal bars when the category labels are long, which is most of the time with campaign or page-path names.
Stacked bars work for composition, but comparing the middle segments across bars is genuinely hard because they share no baseline.
Pie charts
Available, and usually the wrong choice. People compare angles poorly, and anything past three or four slices is read more accurately as a sorted bar chart.
Geo maps
The geo field needs a recognised type — country, region, city, or latitude/longitude. Set that in the data source.
A filled map shades regions by a metric. Bear in mind it encodes area as much as value, so large sparse regions dominate visually; a bubble map is often more honest.
Optional metrics
In Setup, Optional metrics lets the viewer add metrics themselves from a menu. It keeps the default chart clean while letting people who want more detail get it — a much better answer than adding six metrics by default.