Google Maps brought Looker Studio’s map visualisations to a more advanced level. There are several types available, and in this post, we’ll review the bubble map.
As we saw in the first post about maps, Looker Studio initially only offered the Geo Map.
For the examples, I’ll keep using the H&M store data.
Visit the post on how to add charts to your report in Looker Studio, if you need a refresher.
Remember, you can add charts in two ways:
From the top menu, go to Insert and select the chart you want to work with.
From the secondary top menu, click Add a chart and select the one you’re interested in.
1. Bubble Map

This type of map displays bubbles at different geographical points, where the size and color of the bubbles represent different dimensions or metrics. It’s recommended when you want to visualise the variation in value or magnitude of a specific metric at various points on the map.
2. Example
We’ll use this map to show the number of H&M stores by city and the average number of hours they’re open on weekends. The size of the bubbles will represent the number of stores, and the color will indicate the average weekend hours.
Here’s how you can set it up:
After adding your map, in the Set-up section, choose City as Location, Record count for Size, and Weekend total opening hours as the Colour metric. The data source contains one store per row, so Record count represents the number of stores.
You need to change the aggregation for the weekend hours metric to show the average. As I explained in a previous post about modifying metrics data types, click on SUM to the left of the metric in Set-up, and under Aggregation, choose Average.

In Europe, there are so many H&M stores that the map becomes hard to read without zooming in. Fortunately, with Google Maps, we can zoom in to street level, something that’s not possible with Geo maps.
If you zoom in on the Madrid region, you’ll see that the city of Madrid has the highest number of stores, but they all have roughly the same average weekend hours (all the bubbles are the same shade of blue).

If you zoom in on South America, you’ll see that only four countries have H&M stores: Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Uruguay.

Interestingly, Brazil shows a store in the city of Vitoria. This actually belongs to Vitoria in Spain, but Looker Studio displays the bubble in both countries because there’s nothing in the City field specifying which country it belongs to. The way to fix this is by working with longitude and latitude, but this wouldn’t allow us to analyse the total number of stores by city, as it would plot a bubble for each coordinate.
You can enhance the map by adding dimensions in Tooltip and Colour dimension within Set-up. Both must have a one-to-one relationship with the location. For example, Store type wouldn’t work in this case because each city may have stores of more than one type.
In the next example, I chose Continent as Colour dimension and City in Tooltip.

When building this map, you may notice that selecting a colour dimension removes the option to add a colour metric, and vice versa. You can’t use both at the same time.
You might also notice that Vitoria in Brazil appears in blue, which represents Europe, and some cities in Africa are colored as though they belong to Asia. This is due to the error I mentioned earlier, where the same city is plotted in multiple countries.

As always, your comments and questions are more than welcome 🙂