Reason out the Hike or the downfall of the trend in a better manner: Another Dashboard Tip
- Contributed by Gunjan Aggarwal
In earlier blogs, we learn how to create interactive charts with the help of checkboxes. Those who have missed that blog post can read the article on using check boxes for a neat treat .
It’s very much necessary for a web analyst to analyze the trend and figure out the reason for the hike or fall in the traffic at a given point of time. If it’s a Normal Trend Chart, we can insert a text box (Auto shape) with added comments beside it to reason out the Hike or the downfall. But if in case we are using Interactive Chart alone with Check Boxes, then inserting an Auto Shape for comments would not be the right thing to do, because it remain constant and appear on other section graph when selected.
To overcome this limitation, we will show you in this post how to add comment in interactive charts, without affecting any other graph.
In the above chart, you can see a hike in organic Search traffic on 14th of December. To add a comment directly at the point of Hike, Please follow the steps jotted below:
1) Select that data point.
2) Right click on data point
3) Click on “Format Data Point”.
4) Select “Marker Options” -> Built-in ->Type “circle” ->Size 7
5) From “Marker Fill” select required color
6) Your Data point will look like this
7) We have highlighted the point of hike. But now to add “comment” go to source data
Instead of Date “14th Dec” write the reason behind the hike, I have written “High Traffic due to Key phrase ‘Outsource Web Analytics’
On that Particular data point again right click and select “Add Data Label”.
9) By Default, it gives value of that point. Again right click and select “Format Data Label”.
10) Select “Category Name” under Label Contains section
11) This is how your trend line with comment would look like
12) You can also format and move the comment box
13) After formatting, our final chart will be
Just tryout and please leave your valuable feedback.
If you need a sample report on any of these dashboard tricks, please leave your email id in a comment. And we will mail it over to you.
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Anonymous says:
April 9th, 2010 at 9:02 am
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