Ridgeline Outdoors online store
Website traffic slide with sources drawn as a waffle of 100
Traffic sources are shares of a whole, and a hundred squares make a share feel like a quantity in a way a pie never does. This slide splits a quarter of sessions at Ridgeline Outdoors, a fictional online store, across four source groups.
What is on the slide
- Headline
- Where the Traffic Came From, with the framing line noting every square is one percent of 148,000 sessions.
- Waffle
- One hundred squares in four colours: organic search 44, paid search 23, social and referral 19, email 14.
- Source cards
- Organic search 44%, up 6 points since the buying guides went live. Paid search 23%, flat and the dearest channel per order. Email 14%, two sends a month to 31,000 subscribers. Social and referral 19%, social 11 points and partner blogs 8.
- Takeaway
- Organic and email now carry 58 percent of sessions, so pausing paid search costs less than it did a year ago.
When this is the right slide
A waffle suits a share story when the audience needs to feel the proportion, with four or five groups and a total that is stated once in words.
What to swap it for
Metrics: Bullets Left, Pie Right. Swap to bullets beside a pie when the slide needs a commentary column of several points rather than one short note per source.
What this slide shows
The headline reads Where the Traffic Came From with the unit sentence underneath. The waffle sits on the left: a ten by ten grid of rounded squares, each representing one percent, filled from the bottom up so the largest group forms the base. Organic search takes 44 squares, paid search 23, social and referral 19 and email 14. On the right, a small uppercase label reads SHARE OF SESSIONS, followed by four cards. Each card carries the percentage at display size, the source name, and one line of trend or detail. Under the cards a takeaway sentence sets out what the mix means for the next quarter. The four colours come from the theme's element palette rather than from a channel convention, and each card takes the colour of its block, which is what lets the slide work without a separate legend strip.
Who this slide is for and when to use it
Marketing reviews, ecommerce trading meetings and any board update where channel dependence is a risk worth naming. A waffle is best when the audience is not analytical by trade, because it turns a percentage into a countable quantity. That also makes it the wrong chart for precision work. If two channels are three points apart, a reader will not be able to tell which is larger by looking, and the numbers on the cards do the real work. It is also the wrong slide when the interesting story is change rather than composition. Four quarters of channel share belongs on a stacked column or a set of lines, with the waffle kept for the single period that needs to feel concrete.
How to adapt it
First, group to four or five categories and say how you grouped. Analytics tools report more channels than a slide can hold, and folding the tail is honest as long as the card names what went into it. Second, change the unit sentence when the base changes, for example to one square is one percent of revenue rather than of sessions, because the grid looks identical either way and the reader has no other way to know. Third, keep the takeaway a consequence, not a summary. If the mix has not changed in a year, the takeaway should say so and the slide might not be worth showing. One export note is worth knowing: the waffle is the only chart kind with no native PowerPoint equivalent, so it becomes a picture in an editable export while the other nine chart kinds stay editable charts. One last habit worth keeping is to write the figure for the total sessions in the same place every quarter, because a reader comparing two versions of this slide needs to know whether a share moved because a channel grew or because the total shrank.
What makes this slide work
The unit is defined before the chart is read
Every square is one percent of the 148,000 sessions the store had last quarter, stated in a single line under the headline. Without that sentence a waffle is a decorative grid, and with it every square has a value of 1,480 sessions that a reader can hold in their head while looking at the blocks.
Four groups, and the tail is named
Social and referral are grouped into one nineteen point block rather than being split into two thin bands, and the card says how the group divides: social eleven points, partner blogs eight. Grouping the tail keeps the waffle legible while the card keeps the detail available to anyone who asks.
The takeaway states a consequence
Organic and email carrying fifty eight percent means a paid search pause is affordable, which is a decision rather than an observation. A takeaway line that only restated the largest share would have been redundant next to a chart that already shows it.
Questions people ask
Why use a waffle instead of a pie for traffic sources?
Because a hundred squares reads as a count and a pie reads as an area. Readers judge angles poorly and count blocks well, so a waffle makes fourteen percent feel like fourteen of something. It also degrades gracefully in a thumbnail, where pie wedges become unreadable slivers and the labels collide.
How many traffic sources should be shown?
Four or five blocks. This slide uses four and names what went into the grouped one. A waffle with eight colours forces the reader to match shades to a key, which is exactly the work the format is supposed to remove. Anything under about five percent should be folded into a named group.
Should direct traffic be its own category?
Only if you are going to say something about it. Direct is often a mix of brand recall, app referrals and untagged campaigns, so a block labelled direct can mislead a non technical audience. Grouping it and explaining the grouping in the card is usually more honest than giving ambiguity its own colour.
Does the waffle need to add to one hundred?
Yes. The grid has exactly one hundred cells, so shares that do not sum to one hundred either leave blank squares or get rounded into each other. Settle the rounding before you build the slide, and if a rounding adjustment was needed, put it in the speaker notes rather than pretending the arithmetic was exact.
How do you show change alongside the mix?
In the cards, as this slide does with up six points since the buying guides went live. The grid itself is a snapshot. If change is the main argument, use a stacked column per quarter or one line per channel, and keep the waffle for the slide that establishes what the mix is today.
Does a waffle survive a PowerPoint export?
It survives as an image. Nine of the ten chart kinds map to a native PowerPoint chart in the editable export, and the waffle is the exception, so it is rasterised. If the file has to be edited later by someone in PowerPoint, a donut or a bar chart will hand over better than a waffle will.
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