Winery advertising: Google Ads and social media for wineries

What winery advertising covers

Winery advertising is paid search and paid social aimed at the people most likely to buy your wine or visit your estate. For most wineries it comes down to four kinds of campaign:

• Branded search, so your name, your wines and your tasting room stay yours on Google
• Wine tourism search, for tastings, tours and events near the estate, sent straight to a booking page
• Meta and Instagram campaigns built around a release, a harvest weekend or a visit
• Remarketing to site visitors, email subscribers and past buyers, who convert best of all

Every campaign follows the alcohol rules of the market it runs in: the CAP Code in the UK, the loi Évin in France and a 21 and over audience in the US. I set those rules out, platform by platform, in wine advertising rules for wineries.

How the spending starts

Small, and on the people who already know you.

The first campaigns go to branded search and to your own audiences: visitors to the site, people on your list, people who bought once. That traffic converts, so we learn what your ads really earn while the budget is still modest. It also keeps your own name yours in search results, which matters more than most wineries expect once a retailer starts bidding on it.

From there we widen. Search campaigns on your wines and on wine tourism near the estate. Meta and Instagram built around a release or a visit rather than a general brand message, because a specific offer is what persuades a stranger to join a list.

Each campaign gets a landing page of its own. Paid traffic sent to a homepage is mostly wasted.

What I need from you

A budget you are comfortable testing for three months, and the patience to leave it alone through the first one.

The compliance facts for each market you ship to: where you can sell, and the age and labelling rules that apply. Access to your ad accounts, your site and your shop, so tracking runs from the click through to the order.

And your honest view of what a new customer is worth over a few years rather than on the first order. That number decides what a click is allowed to cost, and everything else follows from it.

Who this suits

Wineries that can ship to the people they advertise to, and that have somewhere for a click to land: a shop, a club, a booking page.

It suits you best if your average order runs to several bottles, because wine advertising has to cover the shipping and the platform fee before it covers itself.

If your allocation sells out to the list every year, you do not need ads yet. You need the list to grow, and there are cheaper ways to do that.

How you will know it is working

A monthly report with real money on both sides: spend, orders, revenue, and new subscribers with what each one cost.

Wine takes two or three orders to become profitable, so the first month usually looks worse than the third. I will show you both rather than presenting the good one.

If a channel is not paying, I turn it off and tell you, instead of quietly moving the budget and hoping.