Like the scorecard, the bullet chart in Looker Studio is often used for your most important metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The advantage of bullet charts is that they provide context to the metric being analysed by displaying alongside the target or benchmark in the form of a horizontal bar.
In this post, I used data from Spotify to develop the examples.
1. Example
Imagine you work for Spotify, and one of your company’s goals is to increase the number of times songs are streamed. To track this, you have a dashboard that includes a bullet chart showing the number of streams per song. Here, we’ll see how to create this visualisation.

Visit how to add charts to a report in Looker Studio, if you need a refresher.
Once you’ve added your bullet chart, set the Date Range Dimension to Release Date (under Set-up), as we will only be looking at songs released in July 2023, the latest month with data. To filter for this month, go to Default Date Range in Set-up and select it in the calendar under Custom.

For the metric, choose Streams (millions). However, since we want the average number of streams per song, you’ll need to change the aggregation. Click where it says SUM next to streams (millions), and select Average under Aggregation (I explain the different types of aggregation in another post).

If you’ve followed the steps so far, you’ll notice that the chart doesn’t make much sense. The X-axis only goes up to 3, while the average streams per song for the most popular tracks are in the tens of millions.

In the chart’s set-up, there’s an option to set ranges, and by default, their limits are set to 1, 2, and 3.

Change them to 15, 30, and 45. With this adjustment, you should now see that the blue bar on your chart is at 42 (millions), which is the average number of streams per song for those released in July 2023.


2. Specific Customisation Options for the Bullet Chart
In addition to the ranges we just discussed, you can also draw a target line. You can do this under Set-up, below the ranges. Let’s say the goal is 35 million streams per song. It would look like this.

Remember that the streams metric is in millions, so you just need to enter 35 without any zeros.

What do you think of the bullet chart? Do you prefer this one, the scorecard, or the gauge with ranges for your Key Performance Indicators?