Creating widgets displaying data over time

This guide explains how to create widgets that display data over time.

Introduction

To display data over time, create a chart widget to visualize the data for a specific time period. For example, you can create a widget to show the number of clicks an ad received in a given month.

This guide uses the example of a Facebook Ads datastream. The procedure described below is similar in all other datastreams.

Prerequisites

Before you complete the procedure in this guide, perform all of the following actions:

• Create a Facebook Ads datastream. For more information, see Collecting data from Facebook Ads.

• Apply the correct Data Mapping for your datastream. For more information, see Introduction to harmonizing data.

• Transfer data from this datastream to Explore & Present.

• Ensure that your Facebook Ads data extract contains the following fields:

  • clicks

  • impressions - Impressions are used to calculate click-through rate (CTR).

• Ensure that your data extract contains several months of data.

Populating a table widget with data to display

To populate a table with data to be displayed in the chart widget, follow these steps:

1. In the platform navigation menu, click Explore.

2. Select the workspace you work with in Explore & Present.

3. Next to the View tabs at the top of the page, click Create new view.

4. In the Dimensions panel, click Datasource to see the options for this field. Click Remove.

5. In the list in the left navigation panel, click Time.

6. From the expanded list of Time dimensions, select Monthly.

7. In the list in the left navigation panel, click Facebook Ads.

8. From the expanded list of dimensions and metrics, select the following:

   • Clicks

   • ƒ CTR (%)

As a result, a table widget is created and populated with data on a month-by-month basis.

Creating a widget that displays data over time

To create a widget that displays information from two data sets on a month-by-month basis, follow these steps:

1. In the data table that you have created in the middle of the page, click on one of the values in the Clicks column to see visualization options. Click Monthly.

2. In the data table, click on the values in the CTR (%) column and in the visualization options, click Monthly.

As a result, Adverity creates a line chart widget displaying two data sets on a month-by-month basis. Find the newly created chart widget under the data table widget.

To change how the data is displayed, follow these steps:

1. To enable the drill-down feature for the widget, follow these steps:

   1. Below the data table widget, find the Data sets section of the page.

   2. In the Clicks data set, click Drilldown.

   3. (Optional) Repeat steps 1-2 for the CTR (%) data set.

2. To change a line chart to a bar chart, follow these steps:

   1. To the right of the chart widget, in the Settings drop-down menu, click Clicks: Monthly.

   2. In the Chart type drop-down menu, select Column.

3. To change a line chart to an area chart, follow these steps:

   1. To the right of the chart widget, in the Settings drop-down menu, click CTR (%): Monthly tab.

   2. In the Chart type drop-down menu, select Area spline.

As a result, the chart widget displays two data sets in two different ways that make your data easy to view. You can now add the widget to a dashboard. For more information, see Creating widgets and dashboards.