Visualizing Google analytics report: motion chart with drilldowns

Below is a motion chart with drilldowns visualizing Google Analytics report for a fictional website. Click and hold on any bubble to see acquisition and conversion details for a specific channel: Direct, Organic Search, Referral, Social.

Why motion charts?

Motion chart allows efficient and interactive exploration and visualization of multi-dimensional data and can make it easier to notice an important trend. Google has done a great job explaining how motion chart can be useful in web analytics and providing a tool for building motion charts based on analytics reports.

Interactive charts in online presentations

Earlier this year, we posted a small research on US and Canada immigration patterns. Let's make a simple online presentation from it.

Using slides.com

We will be using slides.com, which is probably the most flexible and powerful online presentation engine these days. We will re-use all charts from our earlier post without modifications - they are already published and ready to be embedded. The presentation is available here:

http://slides.com/chartecaguy/us-canada-demographics#/

A few things worth noting.

1.  All charts are interactive - move mouse pointer over the curves and see.

2. All charts are embedded with style="width:100%" attribute, which makes them scalable: try running the presentation in full-screen mode or resize your browser window - you will see charts changing their sizes accordingly.

A screenshot of the slides.com editor with embedded chart:

Other online presentation tools

Are there any other online presentation tools that support HTML embedding from arbitrary sources? Unfortunately, not many. So far I have come up with this list:

• Emaze - NO
• Google Slides - NO
• Haiku Deck - NO
• Prezi - NO
• Slides.com- YES
• Sway - NO
• Slidebean - NO
• Visme - YES

World Health Organization (WHO): spotting spending patterns in 2000-2015

It took me a while to find and groom WHO spending numbers. All financial reports I used can be found here. There were a few challenges, here are some worth mentioning.

1. Between 2000 and 2011, the WHO published two-year financial reports, and in 2012, they switched to one-year schedule.

2. The list of expenditure categories was changing from year two year. As a result, I could not break down equipment and supplies category into meaningful groups, so medical supplies and furniture fall into the same category. Same with the "Other" category: it includes grants, research contracts, local subsidies and what not.

3. Since 2008, WHO financial reports stopped providing staff costs breakdown, so "Stuff costs" category includes full-time and part-time employees, consultants and even governing body delegates.


Below is the two-axis chart that shows absolute spending numbers as bars and the share of some spending categories as lines:



Key observations:

• the WHO is drifting towards outsourcing some of the activities: watch the staff+equipment spending go down while contractual services going up;
• the share of travel expenses grew three times between 2000 and 2015.

It turned out both observations make sense: just google "world health organization outsourcing" and "world health organization travel expenses".