Introduction
Week-over-week (WoW) analysis shows how a given variable increases or decreases from one week to the next. For example, a 4% WoW sales growth would imply that the current week sales increased by 4% percent when compared with the previous week sales
Visually, such data would be presented as shown below.
(Which shows the daily sales, over the two periods – i.e., current week sales against the previous week sales)
The problem with this presentation is that it doesn’t quantify what this growth is – and therefore in this short article I am going to share three ways to do WoW analysis in Tableau.
A Quick Way
One of the ways you can compute the WoW growth is by using the WTD (Week-to-Date) values and PWTD (Previous Week-to-Date) values.
In a simple calculation, this is how you can compute the WoW growth, assuming you’ve already computed WTD and PWTD values.
WoW Growth = ((WTD Value – PWTD Value)/PWTD Value) *100
The problem with this approach is that it locks the computation to a single section of the timeline (i.e., current week against the previous week based on the current date), unless you use a parameter to enable dynamic selection of the week you would like to evaluate.
A More General Approach
A more general approach to computing WoW growth, would be by comparing all weeks against the previous weeks for the entire data at ago, rather than evaluating one week at a time.
To do this using the Sample-Superstore dataset.
Add Order Date to the row shelf (change the level of detail to WEEK)
Add Sales to the text/label shelf
(To show the Sales by week – filtered by year)
Next compute previous week sales using the following calculation.
(This LOOKUP function basically returns the Sales value in the previous row – which is simply the previous week Sales)
Next drag the above calculation to the view to see.
Now using this calculation, one can compute the week-on-week change using the calculation below.
Dragging the above calculation to the view, we’ve.
(Which shows how the sales increases or decreases from one week to the other)
A Simpler Approach
A simpler approach would be creating the table first - by.
Adding Order Date to the row shelf (change the level of detail to WEEK)
And Sales to the text/label shelf
(To show the sales by week – filtered by year)
Next add a table calculation ‘Percent Difference’.
(This computes the percent difference table (down), relative to the previous week – which simply put is comparing the week’s sales to that of previous week, returning the same results like in the previous case)
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