How to Make a Waterfall Chart in Looker
A waterfall chart is one of the best ways to visually tell the story of how you got from a starting value to an ending value. Instead of just showing the numbers, it illustrates the journey, breaking down the positive and negative contributions that occurred along the way. This article provides a clear, step-by-step guide to building a powerful waterfall chart in Google Looker (formerly Looker Studio) to analyze your business performance.
What is a Waterfall Chart?
Think of a waterfall chart as a visual running total. It shows how an initial value is affected by a series of intermediate positive and negative values, leading to a final value. Each column "floats," starting where the previous one left off, creating a cascading look that resembles a waterfall.
Each bar represents a change, colored to indicate whether the change was positive or negative. Typically, green represents a positive change (like revenue or new customers) and red represents a negative change (like expenses, refunds, or canceled subscriptions). It's an incredibly effective tool for illustrating financial statements, analyzing campaign performance, or tracking inventory changes.
When Should You Use a Waterfall Chart?
Waterfall charts aren't for every dataset, but they are uniquely suited for specific analytical stories. They excel when you need to:
- Tell a Financial Story: The most common use case is for profit and loss (P&L) statements. You can start with gross revenue, subtract the cost of goods sold, subtract operating expenses, and arrive at net income, with each step clearly visualized.
- Break Down Performance: Show how different marketing channels contributed to a final traffic or conversion number. You could start with total website sessions, then show gains from organic search, paid ads, and social media, creating a complete picture of your traffic composition.
- Analyze Inventory and Headcount: Track changes in inventory from a starting number, adding new stock and subtracting sold items to arrive at the ending inventory. Similarly, you can visualize changes in a company's headcount, showing new hires and departures over a quarter.
- Track Project Budgets: Start with the initial budget, then subtract costs as they are incurred over the project's lifecycle to show the remaining funds.
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Preparing Your Data for a Waterfall Chart in Looker
Before you can build anything in Looker, your data needs to be structured in a way the visualization can understand. For a waterfall chart, this is particularly important. Looker needs a clear dimension for the categories and a clear measure for the values, where negative values are inherently understood as subtractions and positive values as additions.
Your ideal dataset for a waterfall chart in Looker should have at least two columns:
- A Dimension (Text): This column defines the "steps" or categories of your waterfall chart. These are the labels that go along the bottom axis, such as "Starting Revenue," "New Sales," "Cost of Ads," "Refunds," and "Final Net Profit."
- A Measure (Number): This column contains the numerical values corresponding to each category. It's critical that you use negative numbers for items that decrease the total (like costs or refunds) and positive numbers for items that increase it (like sales or new sign-ups). Looker's visualization depends on the signs of these numbers to know whether to make an "up" bar or a "down" bar.
For example, if you're analyzing monthly business profit, your data might look like this:
Category, Amount Initial Cash, 50000 Product Sales, 25000 Service Revenue, 15000 Ad Spend, -8000 Salaries, -10000 Software Costs, -2000 Final Cash
Notice that expenses like "Ad Spend" and "Salaries" are represented as negative numbers. Looker will use this to automatically build a decreasing bar. The "Final Cash" row is left blank, as we'll use a Looker feature to make this a total column.
Step-by-Step: Building Your Waterfall Chart in Looker
With your data properly structured, you're ready to start building. Follow these steps to create your waterfall chart.
Step 1: Start in an Explore
Navigate to the Looker dashboard or Explore where your data resides. An Explore is Looker's interface for querying and visualizing data, so this is where all the building happens. If you're starting from scratch, select the data source you want to use and open it in a new Explore.
Step 2: Select Your Dimension and a Measure
In the field picker menu on the left side of the screen, find the dimension and measure you prepped earlier.
- Click on your dimension field (e.g., "Category").
- Click on your measure field (e.g., "Amount").
You only need one of each to start. Looker will automatically treat the first dimension as the x-axis and the first measure as the y-axis.
Step 3: Run the Query
After selecting your fields, click the Run button in the top right corner. This will query your database and return the data in a table format in the "Data" pane below. You must run the query before you can start building the visualization.
Step 4: Choose the Waterfall Visualization Type
Once your data appears in the table, look at the Visualization pane. Along the top, you'll see a series of small icons representing different chart types (Bar, Column, Scatter, etc.).
Click the ellipses (...) on the far right to open the full selection of visualizations. From this menu, select the Waterfall chart option. Looker will automatically attempt to render your data as a waterfall chart. It might not look perfect yet, but we'll fix that in the next step.
Step 5: Edit and Customize Your Waterfall Chart
This is where you'll fine-tune the chart to make it clear and insightful. Click the Edit button in the upper right corner of the visualization pane to open up the settings menu. You’ll see several tabs like Plot, Series, and Y. Here are the most important settings to configure:
Under the "Plot" Tab:
- Colors: This is a key setting. You'll see inputs for "Up Color," "Down Color," and "Total Color." Set these to convey meaning instantly. A standard convention is green for positive values (up), red for negative values (down), and blue or gray for the total bar.
- Show Totals: Ensure this toggle is turned on. Looker will then automatically add a total bar at the very end of your chart if your data's running sum doesn't end at zero (which is often the case). This is very helpful for P&L statements.
- Total Bar Label: You can provide a custom label for the automatically generated total column, such as "Net Profit" or "Ending Balance."
Under the "Values" Tab:
- Value Labels: Toggle this option on to display the numerical value of each bar directly on the chart. This saves your audience from having to estimate heights using the y-axis.
- Value Colors and Font Size: You can customize the color and size of the value labels to ensure they are easy to read against the column colors.
Under the Y and X Tabs:
- Axis Labels and Names: Use the Y and X axis tabs to add labels to your axes (e.g., "Amount ($)" for the Y-axis and "Category" for the X-axis). This provides critical context for anyone reading your chart.
- Gridlines: Adjust or remove gridlines to create a cleaner, less cluttered look.
Once you've adjusted all the settings, click Run again to apply the changes, and you'll have a professional, easy-to-read waterfall chart ready to be added to a dashboard.
Advanced Tips and Common Issues
Building a basic waterfall is straightforward, but you might encounter a few common hurdles. Here’s how to handle them.
Customizing the Order of the Bars
A common issue is that the bars on your chart are out of order (e.g., "Salaries" appears before "Product Sales"). A waterfall chart tells a story, and the sequence matters.
The order of the bars is determined by the sort order of your query. By default, Looker will sort by either the dimension or the measure. To force a custom chronological order, you sometimes need to create a new dimension in your underlying LookML code that assigns a numeric order to each category. For example:
dimension: category_order {
type: number
sql: CASE
WHEN ${TABLE}.category = 'Initial Cash' THEN 1
WHEN ${TABLE}.category = 'Product Sales' THEN 2
WHEN ${TABLE}.category = 'Service Revenue' THEN 3
...
ELSE 99
END
}You can then sort your Explore by this new "category_order" dimension while hiding it from the final visualization, ensuring your waterfall flows logically.
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Creating Sub-Totals within Your Waterfall
What if you want to show a sub-total in the middle of your chart, like Gross Profit (Revenue - COGS), before moving on to operating expenses? You can handle this by creating a calculated "Total" row within your data. Add a row for "Gross Profit" in your dimension column, leave its measure empty, and then configure it as a "total" step in your visualization or using table calculations for a running sum up to that point.
Final Thoughts
Creating a waterfall chart in Looker is a fairly accessible process once you understand how to structure your data. By feeding it a simple dimension and a measure with positive and negative values, you can leverage Looker's built-in visualization settings to quickly tell a powerful visual story about change over time.
While Looker is a robust tool, the process of navigating Explores, editing visualization settings, and potentially writing LookML to get your chart just right still requires manual effort and a certain level of technical comfort. For us, having a tool that could generate these same powerful visuals just by understanding plain English was essential. By connecting your sources to Graphed, you can simply ask, "Create a waterfall chart showing last month's profit and loss," and we instantly build a live, interactive chart for you. We are designed to give you direct access to the insights without the prerequisite hours spent learning a new software's interface.
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