Blog / Free Advice and Other Musings

Three Google Analytics (GA4) checks to help you spot opportunities, fix disappointments, and make your holiday shopping promotions count.

During the holiday shopping season, are people visiting your website to buy presents, choose their own next read, or take advantage of an offer to buy several books?

Those are three different shopping situations. Yet it’s easy to put a bow on everything in November and assume we’re talking to gift buyers.

Adobe’s US holiday forecast offers a useful reminder: some shoppers will use Cyber Week discounts to stock up on everyday essentials. Books aren’t body wash, so we shouldn’t borrow the forecast wholesale. But we can borrow the question: what is this purchase for?

In December Isn’t the Main Event Anymore, Patrick Gilbert makes a related distinction. Someone waiting for a deal on something they want may respond differently from someone who needs the right gift delivered before the holidays. He argues that extending discounts and advertising spend through December without checking current performance can eat into returns.

That isn’t a reason for every publisher to stop discounting on December 1. It’s a reason to look.

Before deciding what holiday shoppers need, look at what they’re already doing on your website. Then fix the obstacles and make your promotions fit the opportunity.

Google Analytics can’t reliably label a visitor as “buying for myself” or “shopping for Dad.” It can help you investigate gift-guide visits, title and series pages, cart activity, coupon use, and purchases before shipping deadlines.

Here are 3 checks I’d start with.

1. Hunt down the disappointments

A visitor arrives from Google. What happens next?

I enjoyed RESONEO’s investigation of NavBoost and Glue, which examines the behavioural signals Google records around its search results. Its practical suggestion is to look for pages attracting Google visitors whose visits seem too brief for what the page is meant to do.

That’s a useful starting point for a publisher. An old gift guide may still attract readers. A backlist book may be getting renewed attention. A series page may bring in people who can’t tell which book comes first.

In GA4, start with your Landing page report and narrow it to google / organic using the Session source / medium dimension as a filter or secondary dimension. The one-minute tip below walks you through it.

Look for pages with enough sessions to matter, then consider engagement alongside key events (like purchases) or other useful actions. Don’t begin by sorting for the shortest sessions: a page with three sessions is unlikely to be your biggest opportunity.

One caution: the Landing page report’s Average engagement time per session measures the time your site was in focus during the entire session (meaning the window was open and active). It isn’t a reading of time spent on that individual page. Because of this, don’t compare it directly with an estimated reading time and declare the page a failure (Google’s report definitions). In this report, metrics and events are session-scoped; they reflect the whole session that started on that landing page, rather than only actions that happened on that specific page.

Instead, of getting stuck in the data, open the page on your phone and ask:

• Does it deliver what the search listing promised?
• Are the products/books available, with the format and price clear?
• Can someone quickly find the purchase button or buy links?
• Is an old shipping deadline or expired offer getting in the way?

In previous years, All Lit Up’s and 49thShelf’s curated book lists provided a concrete example of helping holiday shoppers choose by connecting recommendations to specific interests, from True Crime to books by Anne Carson. The guides also acknowledged that you might be buying for yourself. That’s a useful point to make when curating your own site’s recommendations.

When review the Google Analytics data for those types of pages, a short visit followed by a bookseller click may be a perfectly good result. 

Your next move: choose one well-visited page where the next step is unclear. Fix the obstacle, log the date the change was made, and watch what happens 7 days later, 28 days later, etc.

2. Find your list’s holiday shopping calendar

Comparing November with October can tell you that activity changed. It doesn’t tell you whether that change is unusual for your holiday season.

Start with last year’s October-to-December traffic and purchases. Then look at the year before, if you have comparable data. Review by week and mark when you sent promotions, launched gift guides, received significant publicity, or reached your shipping cutoff.

The timing may differ by list. In a historical analysis of 2007–2016 Canadian English-language print trade sales, BookNet Canada found holiday sales began climbing as early as 10 weeks before Christmas for Juvenile/YA, with notable increases around seven weeks before Christmas for Non-Fiction and five weeks before for Fiction. That’s context, not a 2026 forecast or a prediction for your own store. (BookNet has removed the search function from their site. It would be great if they re-ran these numbers, but here’s the link I found: BookNet Canada: When does holiday shopping begin? and a more recent post Unwrapping holiday sales for Children’s books).

The useful question is whether your website shows a similar build, a different pattern, or no clear pattern at all.

Did gift-guide visits rise before purchases? Did a promotion produce more orders, or mostly more browsing? Did direct sales fall after your shipping cutoff while bookseller referrals continued?

Compare equivalent holiday shopping moments as well as dates. Black Friday moves, and a major release, stock shortage, or publicity hit can distort a year-over-year comparison. Check changes in tracking too: missing purchase data is not a marketing trend 😉

Your next move: identify when interest and purchases picked up previously. Use that as a starting point for this year’s timing, then adjust to what you’re seeing now. If delivery becomes the obstacle, clearer shipping information, or a ShopLocal link may be more useful than another coupon.

3. Make sure your coupon codes leave a trail

Before you judge a promotion, check whether Google Analytics is recording its coupon codes.

The report is oddly easy to miss:

1. Open Reports → Monetization → Overview.
2. Find Purchase revenue by Order coupon.
3. Click View order coupons.

The report shows purchases and revenue associated with the recorded codes. It relies on your site sending an order-level coupon parameter; automatic markdowns may not appear as codes. Google’s Order coupons report

For easier access, an Editor or Administrator can go to Reports → Library, edit a published collection, add the Order coupons report to a topic, and save. Google’s navigation instructions

Compare a code you know was redeemed with your store’s order records. Missing codes warrant a tracking check before you draw conclusions about the offer. GA4 can’t reconstruct coupon details your site never sent.

Then ask what job the offer was meant to do. Encourage a larger basket? Move selected backlist titles? Give newsletter subscribers a reason to buy directly?

Coupon revenue alone won’t tell you whether those customers would have paid full price. Nor will it tell you your margin after the discount, shipping subsidy, and fulfilment costs. Your store’s records belong in that conversation too.

Your next move: confirm the codes are appearing, then assess the offer against its purpose. An order is good. An order that gives away more margin than you intended deserves a second look.

In summary

If you have half an hour this week, use it to inspect one landing page, identify the timing of your previous holiday-shopping pickup, and check one redeemed code. That’s a manageable starting point for deciding where your next hour should go.

Here’s the 1-Minute Marketing Tip