A Toast to the Path to Purchase: Insights on Wine Buyers' Digital Journeys
What does a customer do between their first search and the moment they buy?
Most brands can describe their own website traffic in detail. What happens before someone arrives, and everywhere else they go along the way, is usually a guess. Luth Research tracked the digital behavior of 1,200 wine shoppers across every site, app, and search they touched to map that path to purchase from start to finish.
Why Memory Makes a Poor Map
Most research on shopping behavior still relies on people remembering what they did, in what order, and why. That's a lot to ask of anyone, and it leaves real gaps. Passive digital tracking removes the guesswork entirely, capturing every site visited, every app opened, every search typed, and every purchase made, across PC, mobile, and tablet, as it happens.
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Who Wins Wine Shoppers' Attention
Total Wine had the highest reach of any wine site or app on both mobile and PC, with the average shopper visiting about once a week
Vivino pulled in nearly as many visits as Total Wine, but the average visit lasted only half as long
Wine Insiders reached just 5% of shoppers, yet the ones who did visit came back nearly four times a month, a sign of a small but highly loyal audience
Four Shoppers, Four Completely Different Paths
A 38-year-old woman searches Google seven separate times, checks Groupon and RetailMeNot for discounts, then lands on Wine Insiders and buys within ten minutes of arriving.
A 52-year-old woman starts on her iPhone one evening searching for wine shops near her, drifts into content about wine tasting, closes her phone, then picks the same search back up the next morning, clearly shopping for an experience as much as a bottle.
A 31-year-old man starts browsing late at night, follows an organic trail through cigar pairings, sparkling wine reviews, and producer videos, showing exactly how content and video pull an engaged shopper deeper into a category.
A 33-year-old man searches for champagne, then for champagne near him, then for the best champagne for a wedding proposal. His search terms alone reveal something no survey would ever capture.
From First Search to Checkout
Because Luth's ZQ Intelligence panel follows the same shoppers from first search to checkout, every stop along the way can be tied to what they bought, including the ones no one would think to mention in a survey, like a coupon site checked right before buying.
One Framework, Every Category
This same approach works well beyond wine. The same search and behavior model has been used to study how doctors search for information to refine outreach, and how shoppers research and purchase auto insurance and mortgages. Any category with a real path to purchase can be mapped this way, at the aggregate level for competitive benchmarking or narrowed down to a single shopper's individual path.
Map Your Own Category's Path to Purchase
Luth can trace the paths your shoppers take, from category-wide benchmarks down to individual journeys.
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