How to Make a Bubble Chart in Google Sheets

A bubble chart is one of the most effective ways to show the relationship between three different sets of data on a single visualization. Unlike a standard scatter plot, it adds a third dimension - bubble size - to help you spot patterns, outliers, and correlations much faster. This article is your step-by-step guide to wrangling your data and building a beautiful, insightful bubble chart right inside Google Sheets.

What Exactly is a Bubble Chart?

Think of a bubble chart as a smarter, more informative version of a scatter plot. A scatter plot uses dots to show the relationship between two variables, plotted on a horizontal (X) and vertical (Y) axis. A bubble chart does the exact same thing but adds a third numeric variable that determines the size of each dot, turning it into a "bubble."

This allows you to communicate three dimensions of data at a glance:

• X-axis Position: The first value.
• Y-axis Position: The second value.
• Bubble Size: The third value.

Optionally, you can even add a fourth dimension using color to group bubbles into different categories. This turns a simple chart into a rich, multi-layered report that can quickly answer complex questions.

When Should You Use a Bubble Chart?

Bubble charts are perfect when you need to compare entities (like products, marketing campaigns, or a list of competitors) across a few key metrics. They help you quickly identify high-impact areas by making the most significant items literally bigger.

Some common business use cases include:

• Marketing Campaign Analysis: Compare campaigns by plotting Cost Per Click (CPC) on the X-axis, Conversion Rate on the Y-axis, and using Total Budget Spent as the bubble size. You'll quickly see which campaigns are both cheap and effective, and which are taking up the most budget.
• Sales Performance Review: Plot Number of Deals (X-axis) against Average Deal Size (Y-axis), with Total Revenue as the bubble size for each sales rep. This easily highlights reps who close many small deals versus those who close fewer but larger deals.
• Market Research: Analyze competitors by charting Market Share (X-axis), Customer Satisfaction Score (Y-axis), and Company Valuation or Revenue as the bubble size.

Preparing Your Data for a Bubble Chart in Google Sheets

The single most important step in creating a flawless bubble chart is structuring your data correctly. If your data isn't organized properly, Google Sheets will get confused and produce a chart that looks like a mess (or just won't work at all). A bubble chart needs, at a minimum, three columns of numerical data, plus one column for labels.

Here’s the ideal data structure:

• Column 1: ID/Labels: The name of each entity you are analyzing (e.g., Campaign Name, Product Name, Sales Rep). This will be used to identify each bubble.
• Column 2: X-Axis Values: The first numerical value you want to plot.
• Column 3: Y-Axis Values: The second numerical value you want to plot.
• Column 4: Bubble Size Values: The third numerical value that will determine the size of each bubble. Bigger numbers mean bigger bubbles.
• Column 5 (Optional): Category for Bubble Color: A text value used for grouping and color-coding your bubbles.

Example Dataset for a Marketing Report

Let's imagine we're building a report to analyze the performance of several marketing campaigns. We want to understand which channels are the most efficient. Here's how we'd set up our data in Google Sheets:

Our data columns will be:

• A: Campaign: The campaign name.
• B: Average Cost Per Click (CPC): Our X-axis value.
• C: Conversion Rate (%): Our Y-axis value.
• D: Total spend ($): Our bubble size value.
• E: Channel Type: Our optional category for coloring.

With data organized this way, Google Sheets has everything it needs to understand how to plot your chart.

Creating a Bubble Chart in Google Sheets: The Step-by-Step Guide

Once your data is clean and organized, creating the chart is just a matter of a few clicks. Follow these steps to build your initial visualization.

Step 1: Select Your Data

Click and drag your cursor to highlight all the cells containing the data you want to use, including the headers. In our example, you would select cells A1 through E7.

Step 2: Insert Chart

With your data selected, navigate to the main menu at the top of the screen and click Insert, then select Chart from the dropdown menu.

Step 3: Choose the Bubble Chart Type

Google Sheets will try to guess what kind of chart you want, but it often gets it wrong initially. A Chart editor sidebar will pop up on the right side of your screen.

In the Setup tab, click the dropdown menu under Chart type. Scroll down to the Scatter section and select Bubble chart.

Step 4: Configure Your Data Series Correctly

This is where you tell Google Sheets which column goes where. If you formatted your data as recommended, Google Sheets is pretty good at figuring this out automatically. However, it's always smart to double-check these settings.

Still in the Setup tab of the Chart editor, look at the series configuration:

• Data range: This should already be filled with the cells you selected (e.g., A1:E7).
• X-Axis: Make sure this is pointed to the correct column for your horizontal axis. For our example, this should be Column B (Average CPC).
• Y-Axis: This should be set to your vertical axis data. For us, it's Column C (Conversion Rate).
• Series: This will be your ID column (our campaign names). After the update from the Y-axis data, Google might not pick one for you automatically. Click Add Series and select your ID column (Column A).
• Size: This is the key setting for a bubble chart. Ensure it points to your size metric. For our example, it should be Column D (Total spend).

If you included an optional category column for color, you might need to adjust things slightly. In situations where Google doesn't seem to recognize the data properly, click Add Series in series section for your color column (and your ID). Google should start pulling that data as independent entities within your chart.

Once these are set correctly, a basic bubble chart will appear on your sheet! Now it's time to refine it.

Customizing Your Google Sheets Bubble Chart to Tell a Clearer Story

A default chart gets the data on the page, but great customizations make it easy to understand. Click on the chart, then on the three vertical dots icon in the top right corner and choose edit chart or simply double click on a section of a chart you're working with. Then navigate to the Customize tab in the Chart editor to start making improvements.

1. Add Clear Chart & Axis Titles

Your chart needs context. Select the Chart & axis titles section.

• Chart title: Give your chart a descriptive name, like "Marketing Campaign Performance: CPC vs. Conversion Rate."
• Horizontal axis title: Label your X-axis clearly. For example, "Average Cost Per Click (CPC) in USD."
• Vertical axis title: Label your Y-axis, such as "Conversion Rate (%)."

Clear labels immediately tell your audience what they are looking at.

2. Adjust the Series to Improve Readability

The Series section allows you to format the bubbles themselves.

• Color: If you didn't use a category column, you can manually change the color of all bubbles here. If you did, each category will be listed, and you can assign a distinct color to each one.
• Opacity: This is a very useful setting if some of your bubbles overlap. Reducing the opacity to 60-80% allows you to see where bubbles intersect.
• Data labels: You can add data labels in various ways within Chart Editor, from within Series Settings. Ticking 'Data Labels' while in an individual series will add the bubble's id, Y & X axis measurements inside their bubble, or next to it with a bubble call-out.

3. Position the Legend

The legend is vital for explaining what each color or bubble represents. In the Legend section, you can change its position (Top, Bottom, Right, Left, etc.). Choose a position that doesn't cramp the chart itself. "Right" or "Bottom" are often good choices.

4. Tweak the Axes for Better Scale

Sometimes your data range can make the chart feel skewed or empty. For example, if all your CPCs are between $1 and $2 but the axis runs from $0 to $5, your bubbles will be clustered together. In the Horizontal axis and Vertical axis sections, you can set a custom Min and Max value to "zoom in" on your data's active range.

If you're dealing with values that have a huge range (e.g., spend from $100 to $1,000,000), consider ticking the Log scale checkbox. This can make charts with large outliers more readable.

Common Challenges and Troubleshooting

Even with a good guide, you can run into a few common issues. Here’s how to fix them.

My chart looks wrong or is just a scatter plot!

This nearly always traces back to one of two things: your data structure is incorrect, or the Size field in the Chart editor is not properly configured. Go back to the Setup tab and make sure the Size dropdown is pointing to the numeric column you intended to use for bubble size.

Some bubbles are huge and others are barely visible.

Google Sheets scales bubble size based on the range of your data. If one value is drastically larger than the others (e.g., a $1M spend campaign next to a few $5k campaigns), it will dominate the chart. The easiest fix here is often to simply adjust opacity so you can see smaller, overlapping bubbles. For advanced users, you could create a new 'normalized' size column using a formula to even out the scale, but this is less direct.

All my bubbles are the same color. How do I group them?

This happens when you don't have a categorical column for color. Make sure you've added a fourth text-based column to your data (like our "Channel Type" example). With at least a couple of categories, Google Sheets will automatically use this fourth column to apply distinct colors for each series type. If Google does not do this successfully at first, you may have to go to Chart Editor -> Customize -> Series and then, within the apply to all series drop down, pick a series like social, for example, to color fill manually. By the time that you create several of these, your series legend for sorting bubble color would pop on the card as well, helping you in your analysis.

Final Thoughts

With its ability to layer three or even four dimensions of data into one view, the bubble chart is an incredible reporting tool. By carefully structuring your data and leveraging the customization options within Google Sheets, you can transform a plain spreadsheet into a powerful visual story that highlights performance, identifies opportunities, and answers complex business questions at a glance.

However, we know that after doing this a few times, manually pulling data from different places - Google Analytics, social ads, Shopify, your CRM - and wrestling with it in a spreadsheet can get repetitive and drain valuable time. At Graphed, we automate all that data connection and wrangling. You simply connect your tools once, describe the dashboard you want in plain words (like "show me ad spend vs revenue by campaign"), and get a live dashboard that updates in real-time, no spreadsheets required.