technology and business Google Analytics 4.0 Set to Disrupt Data Collection, E-Commerce and Marketing Initiatives

Any Business that Uses Google Analytics to Track Website Views, Purchasing or Omni-Channel KPIs Will Lose Data Come July 1, 2023

Michelle Kaufmann

Editor’s Note: The following was adapted from a presentation at the Wine Industry Financial Symposium. Wine Business Monthly wants to thank Michelle Kaufmann for bringing this new issue to our attention and allowing us to print her speech.

As an elder Millennial, it’s been so exciting watching the wine industry finally embrace the 21st century. The pandemic landscape enabled us datadriven digital marketers to thrive and C-Suite executives to finally see the bigger picture behind the “digital revolution” when restaurants, hotels and our tasting rooms were closed. For the first time ever, in 2020, buying wine online was easier than it was in-person. Think about that. In uncertain and highly stressful times, instead of not buying wine, people purchased it online.

For our wineries, because we’d been investing in our digital spaces, datadriven insights allowed us to experiment, carefully measure outcomes and painstakingly analyze our results. We saw in real time how the latest technology and tactics could be prioritized into growth strategies, optimizations, and value—no longer were we spending thousands of dollars on marketing campaigns and left to wonder the true ROI.

Now, nearly three years later, online sales are slowing and normalizing into new benchmarks. Life today isn’t locked down, like it was in early 2020, or semi-normal as it was in 2021. We can see that transition in our online sales. The recent Q2 2022 DTC Report from Enolytics and Wine Direct showed online sales down 22 percent versus the first half of 2021 but noted they’re still up massively from 2019. We have an opportunity to regain those losses by nurturing our digital ecosystems, making it easier for our consumers to navigate our online presence.

“But how?” you say. Start by building a marketing ecosystem, not a marketing funnel. At the heart of that ecosystem is your website. It’s the field where the game is played. The past two years have shown that an integrated digital approach—meaning a healthy mix of traffic coming to our website via organic search, direct traffic, paid search, email, social, etc.—will pay real dividends because we’re creating more cohesive, omni-channel campaigns.

Your digital campaigns should feed your digital ecosystem. For every campaign, there should be eight smaller content pieces that tie back: things like blogs, long-form video, short-form reels, still imagery, e-commerce promotions/announcements, PPC campaigns, etc. Each component of the strategy needs to interact with the others so you can cultivate your audience, and above all, everything must be digitally tracked.

And this is where we pivot.

There’s a storm brewing on the horizon, and it will fundamentally shift how we talk about data collection, measurement and analysis. “Big Data” has been a bit nefarious at times, and consumers—me included—are concerned about how their data is collected and used. We’ve seen a litany of ever-changing privacy and data policies, like General Data Protection Regulation (known as GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act, come into effect.

In response, Google is officially ending the Universal Analytics that we datadriven marketers have come to know and love.