How to Make a Sunburst Chart in Looker

A sunburst chart is one of the best ways to visualize hierarchical data without putting your audience to sleep with another bar chart. It’s like a pie chart with multiple layers, perfect for showing how a whole is broken down into its different components and sub-components. This article provides a clear, step-by-step guide to creating your own sunburst chart in Looker Studio and offers some best practices for making it truly effective.

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What Exactly is a Sunburst Chart?

Think of a sunburst chart as a multi-level doughnut chart. It’s designed to display hierarchical relationships in your data. The center circle represents the top level of your hierarchy (the "root"), and each outward ring represents the next level down. Each ring is sliced into sections, and the size or angle of a slice shows its proportion to the parent slice in the inner ring.

For example, if you were visualizing website traffic:

• The center circle could be your total traffic.
• The first ring could be broken down by traffic channel (Organic search, Social, Referral, Direct).
• The second ring could break down each channel into its specific sources (e.g., the 'Organic Search' slice would split into Google, Bing, etc.).

The beauty of a sunburst chart is its ability to contextually show "part-of-a-whole" relationships across multiple levels in a single, compact visualization. Viewers can instantly see the biggest contributors at each stage of the hierarchy.

When Should You Use a Sunburst Chart?

Sunburst charts aren't for every dataset. They excel in specific situations where you have nested, hierarchical data and want to understand the relative size of each component. Trying to force non-hierarchical data into this format is a recipe for confusion.

Here are a few practical scenarios where a sunburst chart shines:

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1. E-commerce Product Sales

Imagine you want to see which product categories are driving the most revenue for your Shopify store. A sunburst chart is a perfect fit.

• Level 1 (Inner Ring): Top-level product categories like 'Apparel', 'Accessories', 'Home Goods'. You can quickly see that 'Apparel' makes up 60% of your revenue.
• Level 2: Sub-categories within each main category. The 'Apparel' slice might be broken down into 'T-Shirts', 'Hoodies', and 'Hats'.
• Level 3 (Outer Ring): Specific products within each sub-category, like 'V-Neck Tee' or 'Classic Snapback'.

This allows you to spot both high-level trends (which categories are most popular) and drill-down insights (which specific product is your bestseller within that category).

2. Marketing Campaign Performance

You can use a sunburst chart to analyze the performance of marketing efforts, showing how leads or conversions are distributed across your campaigns.

• Level 1: Marketing Channels (e.g., 'Paid Search', 'Organic Social', 'Email Marketing').
• Level 2: Specific Campaigns (e.g., 'Paid Search' branches into 'Q4 Holiday Sale - Google Ads' and 'Brand Awareness - Bing Ads').
• Level 3: Ad Groups within that campaign.

This helps you visualize how your budget or results are allocated, quickly identifying which channels and campaigns are contributing the most to your goals.

3. Company Budget and Expenses

Sunburst charts are also great for financial data, such as visualizing how a company's budget is allocated across different parts of the organization.

• Level 1: Departments ('Marketing', 'Sales', 'Engineering', 'Operations').
• Level 2: Teams or Cost Centers within each department ('Marketing' splits into 'Content', 'Performance Ads', 'PR').
• Level 3: Specific line items or projects ('Performance Ads' breaks down into 'Google Ads Spend', 'Facebook Ads Spend', 'Agency Fees').

A Quick Note: Looker vs. Looker Studio

Before we build, it's important to clarify a common point of confusion. Google has two products with very similar names: Looker and Looker Studio.

• Looker: An enterprise-grade BI platform designed for data modeling (using LookML), deep analysis, and embedding analytics. It's a more technical and powerful tool, often managed by data teams.
• Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio): A free, user-friendly data visualization and reporting tool perfect for creating dashboards from sources like Google Analytics, Google Sheets, and Google Ads. This is where most marketers, founders, and business users create their reports.

This guide will focus on creating a sunburst chart in Looker Studio, as it's the more accessible tool for most users looking to build their own visualizations.

How to Make a Sunburst Chart in Looker Studio: Step-by-Step

Let's build one from scratch. For this example, we’ll use a simple dataset of e-commerce sales saved in a Google Sheet. Our data looks like this:

Columns: Product Category (Level 1), Sub-Category (Level 2), Product Name (Level 3), and Sales (our metric).

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Step 1: Get Your Data into Looker Studio

First, you need to connect your data source. If you’re just starting, Google Sheets is a great place to begin.

1. Open Looker Studio and click Create > Report.
2. You'll be prompted to add a data source. Find and select Google Sheets.
3. Choose the spreadsheet and specific worksheet containing your sales data. Make sure "Use first row as headers" is checked.
4. Click Add to connect it to your report.

Step 2: Add a Sunburst Chart to Your Report

Once your data is loaded, Looker Studio will likely drop a default table onto your blank report canvas. You can delete this.

1. In the menu bar, go to Insert.
2. Scroll down and find Sunburst in the list of chart types. Click it.
3. Click anywhere on your report canvas to place the chart.

You’ll now see a very basic sunburst chart. Don't worry, we're about to make it useful.

Step 3: Configure Your Dimensions and Metric

This is the most important step. With the sunburst chart selected, look at the Setup panel on the right side of the screen. This is where you tell the chart how to structure the data.

1. Metric: This is a numerical value that determines the size of each slice. Drag your Sales field from the "Available Fields" list into the Metric box.
2. Dimensions: These are your hierarchical categories. You need to add them in order, from the highest level to the lowest.

Your chart should now update to reflect this hierarchy. You will see an inner ring for categories, a middle ring for sub-categories, and an outer ring for individual products, all sized according to sales.

Step 4: Customize the Style and Formatting

Now that the structure is right, let's make it easy to read and visually appealing. Click on the Style tab in the right-hand panel.

Here are a few things you’ll want to adjust:

• Sunburst Colors: You can choose "Dimension values" to assign a consistent color to each unique category value (e.g., 'Apparel' is always blue) or "Slice order" for rainbow-style colors. Using colors tied to dimension values usually makes the chart easier to interpret.
• Labels: You can customize what text is shown on the chart itself. Choose to display the percentage of the parent, the absolute value, or just the text label. For complex charts, sometimes showing this on the tooltip and keeping the chart clean is a better option.
• Tooltip: By default, hovering over a slice shows you the hierarchy and the value. You can add more metrics here if you want to display, for instance, profit alongside sales.
• Legend: Adjust the legend's position and alignment to best suit your dashboard's layout. For crowded charts, you may want to hide it completely and rely on tooltips.

Best Practices and Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Just because you can make a sunburst chart doesn't always mean you should. Here's how to use them effectively and avoid common mistakes.

DO: Limit the Number of Levels

Sunburst charts become cluttered and unreadable very quickly. As a rule of thumb, stick to three or four levels of hierarchy at most. Anything more, and the outer rings will become a mess of tiny, unreadable slivers.

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DON'T: Use It for Time-Series or Negative Data

Sunburst charts are for showing proportions and breakdowns at a single point in time. They cannot show trends over time effectively — a line chart is much better for that. They also cannot represent negative values, as you can't have a negative-sized slice.

DO: Consider Grouping Small Slices

If you have many small categories at an outer level that just create visual noise, consider creating a calculated field to group them under an "Other" category. This cleans up the chart and allows the viewer to focus on the more significant segments of the data.

DON'T: Forget About Your End User

To someone unfamiliar with the data, a sunburst chart can be intimidating. Always include a clear title, helpful labels, and maybe even a brief text summary explaining what the chart shows. Never assume your audience knows how to interpret it.

Final Thoughts

You’ve now learned what a sunburst chart is, when it works best, and how to create your own in Looker Studio. This visualization is a powerful tool for explaining complex, hierarchical data in a way that is intuitive and easier to digest than a packed spreadsheet or a series of bar charts.

Of course, building visualizations like this in Looker Studio requires you to pull, clean, and organize your data first, and then click through setup menus for every chart you need. We built Graphed to simplify that whole process. Instead of manually setting up dimensions and metrics, you can just ask in plain English, "Show me a sunburst chart of Shopify Sales by product category and sub-category," and have an interactive dashboard generated in seconds. By letting you explore data conversationally, we help you get to your answers faster so you can spend less time building reports and more time acting on the insights.