Overview
Visualizing your data is a powerful way to uncover insights, track key performance indicators (KPIs), and make data-driven decisions with confidence. With Polar, you have access to robust visualization tools that enable you to customize your reports and dashboards, integrate multiple data sources, and share insights with your team seamlessly. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of visualizing your data in Polar Analytics.
The "Dashboards" section gives you tools to build both high-level views of your business metrics, as well as deep dives with tables and charts.
Key Indicator Sections
You can add Key Indicator Sections to dashboards to visualize metrics and track how they shift over time using charts. Here’s how to enable and use these visualizations:
Add a Key Indicator Section to any dashboard.
Toggle the "Show Chart" option at the top of the dashboard to enable visualizations.
Once enabled, individual trend lines for each metric will appear, offering a clear view of performance over time compared to your Targets. These visualizations provide valuable context for analyzing trends within a specific time period.
Key Points to Remember:
The dates in these trend lines align precisely with the date range set in the top-right corner of your dashboard.
A dotted line represents the comparison period (either the previous period or the previous year, based on your selected date range).
The color of the line reflects how your performance compares to your target:
Green: Overall performance for the range is above the target.
Red: Overall performance for the range is below the target.
Tables and Charts
In addition to Key Indicators, you can visualize data in a Tables or Charts for deeper analysis. The charts feature allows you to create line, bar and pie charts that track changes in metrics over time.
Once you've added metrics, you can select the Table drop down to change to a bar, line or pie chart of your metrics.
Choosing the Right Visualization Type
Polar offers a variety of visualization types to suit different business needs. Below are the available options and when to use them:
Tables: (Default) Provide a detailed view of raw data, great for operational or granular analysis.
Line Charts: Best for analyzing trends over time, such as revenue growth or website traffic.
Bar Charts: Ideal for comparing metrics across categories, like top-performing products or sales by channel.
Pie Charts: Useful for understanding distributions, such as customer segments or regional performance.
Pro Tip: Choose a visualization type that aligns with the question you’re trying to answer. For instance, use a line chart to assess growth trends but opt for a bar chart to compare performance across marketing channels.
Custom Chart Features:
Add multiple metrics to a single chart. Each metric will be represented by a distinct colored line.
A key at the bottom of the graph identifies which color corresponds to each metric.
Hover over any data point to view a pop-up displaying the totals for each metric.
Impact of Date Range on Visualization:
Entire Range: Displays the bar chart option
By Day: Displays individual days on the x-axis.
By Month: Shows data points based on the first day of each month.
These customizable options make it easy to analyze data trends in the granularity that suits your business needs.
