How to Create a Donut Chart in Looker

Donut charts are a fantastic way to show how different parts make up a whole, adding a clean and modern touch to your dashboards. If you're looking to visualize proportions in your data, such as traffic sources or sales by category, you’ve come to the right place. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to create, customize, and perfect a donut chart in Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio).

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What is a Donut Chart and When Should You Use One?

A donut chart is essentially a pie chart with a hole in the middle. Like its filled-in cousin, its main job is to display the proportions of different categories that contribute to a total. Each "slice" represents a category, and the size of the slice is proportional to its percentage of the whole. The open center isn't just for looks, it provides a great space to add a key performance indicator (KPI), like the total value of all the slices combined.

These charts are at their best when you need to quickly show compositional data at a glance. They work well because humans can easily interpret angles and areas to understand relative size.

Best Case Scenarios for a Donut Chart:

• Website Traffic Breakdown: Displaying the percentage of sessions from different channels (e.g., Organic Search, Paid Social, Direct, Referral).
• Sales by Product Category: Showing which product lines are contributing the most to total revenue.
• Survey Responses: Visualizing the distribution of answers to a multiple-choice question.
• Budget Allocation: Breaking down how a budget is distributed across different departments or initiatives.

When to Use a Different Chart:

As useful as donut charts are, they aren't always the right tool for the job. Here’s when you should consider an alternative:

• If you have too many categories: Donut charts become cluttered and hard to read with more than 5-6 slices. If you have many categories, a bar chart is a much clearer option.
• When comparing data over time: To show trends, a line chart or an area chart is far more effective. Donut charts only show a snapshot of a single time period.
• To compare similar values precisely: It's difficult for the human eye to accurately compare the size of two similarly-sized slices. A bar chart makes it much easier to see small differences in value.

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Preparing Your Data

Before you jump into Looker Studio, make sure your data is structured properly. The good news is that donut charts require a very simple data format. You just need two things:

• A Dimension: This is your categorical data - the labels for each slice. Examples include 'Marketing Channel,' 'Country,' or 'Product Name.'
• A Metric: This is your quantitative data - the numerical value that determines the size of each slice. Examples include 'Sessions,' 'Revenue,' or 'Number of Responses.'

Your data source, whether it's a Google Sheet, a database, or Google Analytics, should have this information readily available in distinct columns. For example, a Google Sheet might look like this:

Clean data is happy data. Make sure your metric column contains only numbers and that your dimension columns have consistent naming to avoid Looker Studio accidentally splitting a single category into two.

Step-by-Step: Creating a Donut Chart in Looker Studio

Now for the fun part. Let's build the donut chart from scratch. We’ll use a common scenario: visualizing website traffic data from Google Analytics.

Step 1: Get Started and Connect Your Data

First, open Looker Studio and create a new blank report. You'll immediately be prompted to add a data source.

1. In the "Add data to report" panel, find and select the Google Analytics connector.
2. If you haven't already, you'll need to authorize Looker Studio to access your Google Analytics account.
3. Navigate through the prompts to select your desired Account, Property, and View.
4. Once selected, click the Add button in the bottom right corner.

Looker Studio will now load your Google Analytics data into the report, ready for visualization.

Step 2: Add and Place the Donut Chart

With your data source connected, it's time to add an empty chart to your canvas.

1. In the main navigation bar at the top, click on Add a chart.
2. A dropdown menu with various chart types will appear. Hover over the "Pie" section and select the Donut chart icon (the one with the hole).
3. Your cursor will turn into a crosshair. Click and drag on the report canvas to draw the shape and size of your chart.

Looker Studio will automatically place a default chart, likely using a random dimension and metric from your data source. Don't worry, we'll configure it next.

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Step 3: Configure the Dimension and Metric

With your new chart selected, a 'Chart' configuration panel will appear on the right side of the screen. This is where you tell Looker Studio what data to display.

• Under the Data tab:

As soon as you set the dimension and metric, your chart will instantly update to show a proper breakdown of your website sessions by channel. Easy as that!

Step 4: Customize Your Chart's Appearance

Now, let’s make it look great. Switch from the 'Data' tab to the Style tab in the 'Chart' panel.

Slice Coloring & Labels

Under the "Pie Chart" section, you have control over the colors and labels:

• Slices: You can choose how many slices to display. For a channel mix, showing the top 5 or 6 and grouping the rest into an "Others" category often works best to keep the chart clean.
• Color: The default is to color by 'Dimension values', which is usually what you want. Click the color boxes next to each dimension value (e.g., 'Organic Search', 'Direct') to set custom colors that match your brand or reporting standards.
• Labels: You can choose what information the labels show. 'Percentage' is often the most useful for a donut chart. You can also adjust the font size, color, and style to improve readability.

The Donut Hole

The "Slider" for the inner radius is what makes it a donut! You can drag this slider to make the hole bigger or smaller depending on your aesthetic preference.

Legend Positioning

In the "Legend" section, you can fine-tune where the category legend appears. Setting the position to the 'Right' or 'Bottom' often works well. You can also customize the font and alignment to integrate it smoothly into your dashboard design.

Advanced Tips and Tricks

Ready to level up your donut chart? Try these professional touches.

Add a Scorecard in the Middle

That empty space in the middle is prime real estate! A common practice is putting a Scorecard chart right in the center to display the total metric.

1. Go to Add a chart > Scorecard.
2. In the 'Data' panel for the scorecard, set its metric to Sessions (the same metric as your donut chart).
3. In the 'Style' panel for the scorecard, remove the metric name and center-align the number. Remove the background color so it is completely transparent.
4. Drag the scorecard directly over the hole in your donut chart. This gives your audience the context of both the individual parts and the total in one compact visual.

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Make it Interactive with Filters

A static chart is good, but an interactive one is even better. Add a Date range control from the "Add a control" menu in the toolbar. This allows you (or your stakeholders) to see the channel breakdown for any specific time frame - last week, last month, or all of last year.

Sort Your Data Logically

By default, Looker Studio will often sort your slices automatically, usually from largest to smallest. You can take control of this in the Data tab of the chart setup panel. Scroll down to the 'Sort' section and choose to sort by your metric ('Sessions') in descending order for a clean, consistent look.

Final Thoughts

You’re now equipped to build beautiful and insightful donut charts in Looker Studio. By structuring your data correctly and leveraging the style customizations, you can transform simple proportional data into a key component of any high-impact dashboard.

While Looker Studio provides powerful tools for manual chart creation, we know that building reports - even simple ones - can quickly consume your day. We created Graphed to remove the friction of setup and customization. Instead of clicking through menus to connect data, select chart types, and configure dimensions, you can simply ask for what you want in plain English. For example, you can tell Graphed: “Create a real-time dashboard with a donut chart showing sessions by channel group from Google Analytics for the last quarter,” and our AI analyst will build it for you in seconds, automatically keeping the data refreshed as your performance changes.