New Chart Type in Looker Studio: Timeline Chart
Timeline charts let you visualise the relationships between groups of events and compare the timespans over which these events took place. It’s basically a Gantt chart.
How Would I Use a Timeline Chart?
At first I struggled to see how I would use this type of chart in my marketing dashboards, but they do look good and I would really like to squeeze one in somewhere, if possible. After some testing, I realised I didn’t have much data configured in the right way. Timeline charts require a row label (dimension), a start date, and an end date or duration to function. I would likely have to create a custom data set on Google Sheets in order to utilise them. Having said that, there are plenty of use cases I’d be open to incorporating into my marketing dashboards.
Campaign Calendar/Plan - having a yearly plan of campaign activity would be smart, and helpful. It would be useful for everyone involved to have a overview of what’s coming up, and how long campaigns are expected to run for. This would also work for individual campaigns to show when each element of the campaign is going live.
Content Calendar - similarly, a timeline chart could be used to showcase content themes. I would apply a static duration of 30 days, or similar, to each of the row labels where there are no set dates.
Content Production - a log of new content could be helpful to understand changes in traffic, and just to gauge the frequency of new content. The end date could be =today().
Changes Log - a record of major changes alongside performance would aid with understanding data.