Wine and spirits is one of the toughest verticals in e-commerce: complex regulations, uneven margins, and highly variable intent. VersaFeed has supported wine and spirits merchants for over 15 years, and one pattern is constant—if you don’t control waste in your media spend, nothing else matters.
In this first part of our series, we’ll focus on protecting your ad budget.
1. Cut Low-Intent Traffic
A common problem: campaigns spending heavily on people who browse high-end bottles but rarely buy. You’ll see this in:
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Rising CPCs
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Low conversion rates
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Short time on site / high bounce rates
You can’t remove all of this, but you can reduce it:
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Review search terms regularly and add negative keywords that clearly indicate research-only intent (e.g., review-type phrases).
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Lower bids or pause products that drive clicks but almost never convert.
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Watch device and time-of-day performance; in some accounts, certain combinations are consistently unprofitable.
The goal is simple: shift spend toward queries and products that actually generate orders.
2. Exclude the Wrong Products
Not every bottle belongs in paid campaigns.
Use your feed to exclude products that don’t fit your online strategy:
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Value / sub-premium bottles If your store doesn’t ship these or the margins can’t support paid ads, exclude them at the feed level instead of wasting budget on traffic you can’t monetize.
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Cult wines and premier crus If rare or collectible bottles are central to your business and you have depth and strong pricing, advertising them can make sense. If you only carry a few and they mainly attract research traffic, consider excluding them or bidding very conservatively—they often generate expensive clicks and very few orders.
3. Segment by Price, Margin, and Inventory
The most effective wine merchants don’t just run “all products” campaigns. They structure feeds so they can control bids by business reality, not just by guesswork.
Typical segmentations:
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Price bands (e.g., under $20, $20–$50, $50–$150, $150+)
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Margin tiers (low / medium / high)
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Inventory depth (one-offs vs items you can reliably promote)
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Channel priority (products that perform well on Shopping vs social vs specialty channels)
In practice, we often use custom labels in the feed to tag each SKU with these tiers. That allows you (or your agency) to:
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Set higher bids on high-margin, high-inventory products
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Keep low-margin and one-off items present for coverage, but with lower bids or limited exposure
4. Focus Spend on the Right Locations
For wine merchants, geography is not just about performance—it’s often about legality. (We’ll dive deeper into rules and regulations in Part 4.)
From a pure performance standpoint:
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Prioritize ZIP codes and regions with strong historic ROAS and higher average order values.
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Allocate more budget around your physical stores, where omnichannel behavior is strongest.
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Reduce or exclude regions that consistently generate poor performance.
From a compliance standpoint:
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Do not advertise in states or counties where you cannot legally ship or sell.
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Use the most granular geo controls the platform offers to align your ads with where you can actually fulfill orders.
What’s Next
In Part 1, we focused on where your money is going. In Part 2, we’ll focus on what you’re showing: how to structure titles and images in your product feed so that the right buyers find the right bottles.