3 Crucial Google Analytics Reports for Wineries

There are no longer any excuses (were there ever any?) for a winery not to install and invest time in Google Analytics.

It’s free, easy to install, largely intuitive, and regularly rolls out new features that can make your marketing strategies even more tailored and precise. With the COVID-induced move to online shopping, not having Google Analytics is akin to driving blind. You have a destination in mind, but you can’t be sure you’re going the right way.

If you’re new to the platform, click here to access one of my favorite guides to installing the code on your website and familiarizing yourself with the interface.

Many of the essential reports are pre-installed, but the wonderous thing about the software is that most reports can be customized to your needs.

In future posts we’ll highlight some custom reports most useful for small- and medium-sized wineries, but for now let’s highlight 3 readymade reports that will give you immediately actionable information for how to allocate your marketing dollars.

1 – Goal Conversions from Referral Traffic

Google Analytics allows you to establish goals, or outcomes, that you want visitors to complete when visiting your site. One of the most common goals is completing an online order.

This particular goal allows you to detect potential friction points in the checkout process by showing you where visitors most drop off. Is there confusing language on that page or a glitch in the shopping cart? Google Analytics raises these red flags for you to address.

Google Analytics also lets you see where these conversions are coming from, including third-party websites that drive traffic to your site. In the example above, we see that referral traffic resulted in 4 completed online orders during the week of Sept. 23-29.

That’s 6% of your online sales for the week, a small enough percentage to be sure, but once you isolate which sites are driving that qualified traffic, you can shift marketing dollars to promotions that 1) drive more traffic from those sites and 2) increase their order amounts.

Let’s say the local chamber of commerce website, where you have a landing page, drove two out of the four paying referrals. Perhaps add a promo code for free shipping to your landing page for a set period of time and see if that has any impact on your bottom line.

2 - Social Value

Have you not invested time or money in social media channels because you believe it’s not possible to track the ROI? Think again. Google Analytics’s Social Value report shows not only which platforms are driving the most traffic but also which lead to the most conversions (sales).

When a social network leads to a “contributed social conversion,” it means it played a role, but it wasn’t the last interaction prior to the conversion. For example, if someone visits your site from Facebook and leaves without converting, but then comes back later and converts, that would be a “contributed” or “assisted” conversion.

In the example above, $40,556 worth of conversions was reported the week of Sept. 23-29. Social networks contributed to $1,303 of that.

Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn contributed to visitors ending up on TripAdvisor, which is where the entirety of the revenue was generated.

Based on this data, it might be worth paying for a TripAdvisor ad or boosting an Instagram post, since these are biggest social conversion drivers.

3 - Site Speed

In my experience, this is one of the most important but also most neglected Google Analytics reports.

Websites that load too slowly will cause potential buyers to bounce without engaging. 53% of mobile site visits—where most browsing now occurs—are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.

That’s bad enough, but Google will also de-rank your page if loading times continue to lag.

The good news is that Google Analytics reports on the load times of each of your pages and offers suggestions for improving them, such as compressing images.

It also assigns a score to each page that reflects the extent to which you can improve a page’s load time. A score above 85 is optimal. Low scores mean you have some work do.