Time series in Looker Studio

Time series charts are perfect for observing how your metrics evolve over time.

For these examples, I will keep using the dataset of top movies from 2019. You can visit the post on how to add charts to your report in Looker Studio, if you need a refresher.

1. Example

To see a time series with the number of released movies by date, you need to select Release Date as the dimension and Record Count as the metric within Set-up. Once again, Record Count counts the number of rows, and as we have one movie per row, it’d be the same as number of movies.

This would be the result.

The chart is representing released movies by day, and honestly, it’s not easy to read. So, let’s change the date, which currently shows the day, to show the month and year of release instead. To do this, you need to enable the field labeled Drill down, which allows you to view your time dimension in other temporal dimensions as well. In the dropdown under Default drill down level, select Year and Month.

Here we can see the time series with Year and Month as the default dimension.

Much better, right? Now it’s clear that October 2019 was the month when the highest number of top-grossing movies were released.

2. Specific Customisation Options for the Chart

By default, the chart is a line chart, but within Style, you can convert it to bars. You can also choose to display points (only if it’s a line), data labels, or cumulative by metric.

When you want to show the evolution of two different metrics over time, it’s sometimes advisable to use a line for one and bars for the other. For example, if you add Revenue as a metric to the previous chart, you’ll need to make two modifications:

  1. Change the axis for one of the metrics, as there is such a difference between them that Record Count won’t be visible. You can do this in Style, by going to the metric and selecting Right Axis.
  2. Display the revenue as bars instead of a line.

Remember that the revenue reflects the earnings generated over the months by the movies released in that specific month. If Avengers: Endgame premiered in April 2019, it will reflect the earnings in that same month, not in the months when they were generated. In the chart, the peak in revenue is in July, which is not surprising since the top 2 and 4 movies were released that month (The Lion King and Spider-Man: Far from Home, respectively).

Time series charts are among the most commonly used visualisations in Looker Studio and other data visualisation tools. I hope this post has been useful for learning about the customisation options available.

As always, comments and questions are more than welcome! 😊

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