Want to guess what the red line in this image (above) represents?

First let me tell you what the four graphs mean. They’re an anonymized representation of a California winery’s DTC data over the past two years, segmented by four KPIs:

1. Net Sales. For this winery, business keeps growing through overall DTC sales in the wine club, website, telemarketing and tasting room.

2. POS Net Sales pulls out tasting room performance only. As you can see, it’s fallen off a cliff.

3. AOV, or Average Order Value, is rising (promisingly IMO). It’s a metric that correlates with the Net (overall) Sales in the top graph.

4. Club Growth is down considerably, not surprisingly, given its symbiotic relationship with tasting room sales shown in the second graph.

By now you’ll have guessed that the red line in the image designates the onset of COVID earlier this year. We’ve set up a fundamental dashboard of these KPIs as an overall snapshot of the health of this winery’s DTC business. You can see at a glance where things stand.

That’s pretty cool in itself and, if your winery sells through DTC channels, we’re set up to quickly visualize your data also. The backend that we’ve built enables such clear and easy-to-read visualizations that, unless you’re willing to spend hours or days pulling this data together, you’d have a hard time seeing otherwise.

In addition, we think that there’s significantly more to say that’s also important beyond the “headline” of COVID’s ultra-prominent impact.

This is where the synthesis of the data comes in.

Every wine business has data. Not every wine business knows what to do with it, or how to interpret it into actionable steps forward.

A few examples that we can also read in these graphs:

• This winery could have seen that they were in trouble long before the “break” of the red COVID line. Why? One reason is that the blue lines designate rolling twelve month analysis of the business, which removes the element of seasonality. The line should be smooth and it should increase steadily over time. If you see a sharp decline at any point, it’s an early warning sign. This winery would have seen the POS (tasting room) and Club Growth numbers declining slightly since the middle of last year, and they could have implemented corrective action long ago.

• Have you noticed the numbers in the column to the right of the image? They show the change (the delta) over the same, Previous Period last year. The graphs on the left show trends over the last two years, whereas the four metrics to the right are updated daily. It’s another tool for investigating changes to your business at a granular level. They are also interactive, meaning you can easily define the period to investigate, such as Yesterday, Month to Date, Year to Date, Last Month or any other selected date range.

• Of these four graphs, the one we would personally want to understand better immediately is the third one, or AOV (Average Order Value). We’re seeing an 18.6% increase over the same period last year. How can we sustain that growth? Is it simply a result of COVID, or are there other variables? What are those other variables? How can my marketing efforts reflect the uptick I was already starting to see pre-COVID? What were we doing right then, that I can continue to do now and moving forward?

You can see, I’m sure, the two layers of interpretation here. The first is easily discernible visually and the second, just under the surface, is a few clicks away via the dynamic dashboard.

Does that make sense?

I hope so, and I also hope you’ll let me know how we can help to synthesize data for you.

As always, thank you for reading.