How to choose a wine marketing agency: 7 questions to ask

To choose a wine marketing agency, ask seven questions before you sign: who runs your campaigns, what wine work they have done, how they get alcohol ads approved, how they track bookings made off your site, who owns the accounts, how they plan around wine seasonality, and what they report on. A good partner answers all seven in plain language, without a deck.

I run paid media for wineries and wine tourism operators, so I have been on the other side of these calls many times. These are the questions I would ask if I were hiring someone for a winery.

1. Who will actually run my campaigns?

This is the question most wineries forget to ask. In many agencies, the senior person who pitches you is not the person who builds and optimises your campaigns. The day-to-day work often goes to a junior account manager who is learning on your budget.

Ask for the name of the person who will log into your ad accounts every week, and ask to speak to them before you sign. If that is not possible, you have your answer.

2. What wine or wine tourism work have you done?

Wine is not a generic ecommerce category. A tasting room booking, a wine club sign-up and a case order are three different sales, with different audiences, prices and timing.

Ask for examples in wine or wine tourism specifically, and ask what the campaigns were meant to sell. "We work with drinks brands" can mean a spirits label sold in supermarkets, which is a very different job from filling a tasting room in Sonoma or the Douro.

3. How do you get wine ads approved on Meta and Google?

Both platforms treat alcohol as a restricted category. On Meta, wine ads must be age-restricted to the legal drinking age of each country, which is 21+ in the US, and must follow local alcohol laws. Most rejected winery ads come from setup mistakes: the wrong age limits, a country that is not allowed, or a landing page that breaks a rule.

A good answer names the rules and explains how they set up accounts to stay within them. If the agency has never had a wine ad rejected, they have probably not run many. I cover the details in how Meta handles wine ads and in the wine advertising rules for the US and EU.

4. How will you track bookings and orders that happen off my website?

Most wineries sell tastings and wine through a third-party platform: Tock, FareHarbor, Commerce7, a Shopify store or a regional booking system. When the sale completes there, Google Ads and Meta often never see it. The campaigns then optimise for clicks instead of bookings, and the report cannot tell you which ads made money.

Ask how they will connect your booking or ecommerce platform to your ad accounts, and what they will do if a direct connection is not possible. If the answer is "we'll look at clicks and traffic", the agency cannot tell you what your budget is buying. Here is how I track tour and tasting bookings from ads.

5. Who owns the ad accounts and the data?

You should. Your ad accounts, your pixel, your Google Analytics property and your ad spend billing should all be in the winery's name, with the agency added as a partner.

Some agencies run clients inside their own accounts. It is convenient for them, but if you leave, your campaign history, audiences and data can stay behind. Ask this directly, and get the answer in writing.

6. How do you plan around wine seasonality?

Wine sells in seasons: spring visits, summer tourism, harvest, holiday gifting, trade fairs, wine club shipments. A campaign plan that spreads the budget evenly across twelve months ignores how your customers actually buy.

Ask to see how they would plan your year. A good answer shows where budget goes up and down, and why. It should look like your calendar, not a template.

7. What will you report on, and how often?

Ask for a sample report. It should lead with business results: bookings, orders, wine club sign-ups and revenue, next to the spend that produced them. Reach, impressions and likes belong further down, as diagnostics.

Also ask how often you will hear from them, and whether a monthly report comes with a conversation or just a PDF.

Agency or specialist?

It depends on what you need. If you need branding, packaging, design, PR and ads at the same time, an agency with a team for each makes sense. If paid media is the main job, a specialist gives you senior hands on your account every week, with no layer of account management in between.

I work as the second kind. I run every campaign myself, for wineries and wine tourism operators in Europe and the US. You can see some of that work in the California Wine Institute, Frog's Leap Winery and Vinhos do Alentejo case studies.

Red flags to watch for

• They cannot name the person who will run your account.
• They promise a return on ad spend before seeing your data.
• They want the ad accounts in their name.
• Their reports lead with reach and likes.
• They have never dealt with an alcohol ad policy.

Next step

Use these seven questions on every call, including one with me. If you want a second opinion on what you have today, I start every engagement with a free audit of your ads, tracking and direct bookings.