I have been honing my charting skills lately, because Bokeh is so amazing, and looking for practical applications (outside my stock trading hobby). Here’s one I found recently. This chart explores the timeless question, “are product sales off because the dealer isn’t supportive, or are vehicle sales off, too?”
I am thinking of protection products, but the same question could be asked of finance contracts or, indeed, anywhere you need to consider “penetration.” That is, the percentage of vehicle sales that are also sales of your product.
Are product sales off because the dealer isn’t supportive, or are vehicle sales off, too?
In this chart, we consider year over year change in contracts relative to the change in vehicle sales for a collection of dealers. Bubble size indicates the size of each dealership in sales volume. We’ll get to bubble color in a minute. Also, note the horizontal and vertical zero lines.
The dealers in the lower left quadrant have an excuse. Riverside, for example, is down 30% in product sales. When you call them, though, they’ll counter that they’re having a bad year. Volume is also down, albeit only 11%.
The dealers in the lower right quadrant have no such excuse. Downtown, for example, is also off 30% but on much improved vehicle sales. So, we can infer that penetration has declined, and color them a darker shade of red. Similarly, although contracts are up at National, they should be up more considering the good year they’re having. So, orange.
O’Malley is green because, while contracts are off a bit, vehicle sales are worse. O’Malley is doing the right thing and ramping up products to compensate for weak sales. What the chart shows on the X and Y axes is straightforward enough, but it shrewdly assigns colors according to the change in penetration.
Bokeh is the visualization library Python programmers use instead of R or Matplotlib. The color scheme here comes from running its red, yellow, green “linear color mapper” diagonally across the chart from lower right to upper left. Dealers where penetration is unchanged from last year are yellow, like College and Bellevue.
Virag Consulting 