Update: Google Analytics Team, please don’t do this anymore. I just turned on the ‘compare to past’ feature and noticed that you are doubling up series on the sparklines. This is a big no-no as far as I am concerned because the sparkline with mutliple series on it just ends up looking like a squiggle. The data from the second series actually becomes chart junk!

If your a visual analysis wonk like me you probably couldn’t help but be excited with the new version of Google Analytics and the introduction of Sparklines. To me, it comes across as a major endorsement of sparklines as a business tool.

But, for this implementation to be a useful endorsement of sparklines, they have to show value as a tool and I don’t think the GA implementation is quite there - yet. Remember the new version of GA is in Beta so the team has lots of opportunity to improve.

From the Visitor Summary Report…

In this case, the shaded area is not useful, it’s distracting. The reason for this is relatively simple - it’s shading the area under the curve (plotted line) in the case of a sparkline, the shaded area should code more or different information. I’d really like so see this shaded area represent some UCL and LCL data, for instance the standard deviation (plus or minus) from the mean of all values.

The value currently associated with the sparklines are the total or total average for the period represented when they should be the current (or most recent) value.

I’d like to see some data markers on the chart - current value, high water mark and low water mark. Of course, the markers should be color coded to their value on the right. So, for instance the most current data point marker could be red and the current value would also be in red. The high and low water marks would be different colors and their associated text would be those colors to tie them together.

If that’s as clear as mud, here’s a quick example:

Notice that my example is a bit longer, this is because Tufte recommends shooting for a 45 degree angle on the line slopes (it eases understanding)

1. The gray area represents the ‘normal’ distribution of visitors - the "biorhythm" as Avinash would say and it is the mean +/- 1 Standard Deviation
2. Both the oldest point (starting point) and newest point (end point) are marked in red
3. The watermarks (high and low) are marked in green
4. For each of the data points that are marked (except for the starting point) an associated value is presented to the right and is color coded so that associations between the chart and the values are easily made

Finally, I’d like to see the sparklines be more contextual to the report or dashboard that they are in. For instance, I’m not quite sure why total page views is reported in the Visitor report. Also, is that average page views per visit or page views per visitor? I’d rather see average visits per visitor and average usage days per visitor (daily visitors divided by absolute unique visitors) than some of these other metrics.

What do you think of the Google Analytics sparklines?