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G'day friend,

Every quarter I look back at the most popular issues of this newsletter and a theme that comes up over and over is that some of our most popular content talks about experiments we’ve run and what we learned from them. Part of writing a great newsletter about an experiment is visualizing the data in a way that makes sense to readers.

For example, back in September I told the story about how we increased engagement with our newsletter. A chart like the one below doesn’t just tell that story, it shows a story of consistent, incremental growth. Really emphasizes the point.

But it’s easy to use the wrong visualization for the story you’re attempting to tell. In the very email I mentioned, I didn’t use the line graph above. I used a bar graph to compare year over year performance.

Although it’s simple, and does communicate growth, it misses so much of the real interesting story.

It doesn’t clearly show that there’s a consistently upward trend. It also misses the interesting stories of the dips where we’ve made mistakes (like got clipped in gmail - we’re working on a little feature so that never happens to anyone using AWeber again) and what we’ve learned from them.

I’m going to walk you through some of the most common charts and graphs, what they’re good at, and when you should avoid them.

Bar Charts

What They Do Best: Bar charts are great for showing how different things compare to each other. You can see which items are bigger or smaller by looking at the length of the bars, which can go up and down or side to side.

When to Avoid: Bar charts aren't good when you have a lot of different items to compare because they can get too crowded and hard to read. They also aren't the best choice for showing changes over time because the order of the bars might suggest a connection that isn't really there.

Example: If your newsletter talks about technology, a bar chart could help show the most upvoted apps on Product Hunt.

Line Graphs

What They Do Best: Line graphs are perfect for showing how things change over time, like tracking changes in open or engagement rate.

When to Avoid: Don't use line graphs if your data are just individual, unrelated points. This could make it look like there's a connection or trend when there isn't one.

Example: If you're showing how the number of readers of your newsletter has grown each month, a line graph would be a good choice.

Pie Charts

What They Do Best: Pie charts are good for showing how a whole is divided into parts, like what percentage of your audience likes different kinds of content.

When to Avoid Them: Pie charts can be misleading if there are too many slices or if the slices are very uneven. They aren't great for showing small differences between slices.

Example: If you write about fitness, you could use a pie chart in your newsletter to show what percentage of your readers read healthy recipes vs suggested workouts.

Scatter Plots

What They Do Best: Scatter plots let you see if there's a relationship between two things, like studying time and test scores.

When to Avoid Them: They're not helpful for data that don't have numbers or when there are too many data points that just make a big jumble.

Example: If you write a science newsletter you could use a scatter plot to show distribution of height by age.

Stacked Bar Charts

What They Do Best: Stacked bar charts show how different parts add up to a whole, and they let you compare these totals across categories.

When to Avoid: These charts can be hard to read if there are too many layers or if the colors are too similar. It’s also easy to get distracted by whatever value is at the top of the stack.

Example: If you write about technology, you could show total spending on mobile apps broken down whether they're in the Apple or Google app store.

What’s the best story you’ve illustrated with a chart? What do you think made it work as well as it did? Reply and let me know.

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As always, thanks for reading!

- Chris V. and the rest of the AWeber team