The Client
Liquor Royale is an online spirits store in San Diego, shipping nationwide from a Shopify storefront. "Spirits fit for Royalty": allocated and hard-to-find bourbon (Blanton's, Buffalo Trace, Eagle Rare, E.H. Taylor, Weller), top-shelf tequila (Fortaleza, Don Julio 1942, Clase Azul), Japanese whisky, cognac and gift sets.
When the owner came to us in March 2025, the store was brand new. No sales history, no customer list, no advertising data. Eighteen months later our ads have driven $2,257,891 in revenue across 6,937 orders, and a single month, December 2025, brought in $337,236.
It is also the first client we run as a complete package. Google Ads, Meta Ads, Microsoft Ads, Klaviyo email and the video ads themselves are all built and managed by us, so every channel works from the same customer data and the same product priorities.
"A store with no sales in March 2025. A $337,000 month by December."
The Challenge: Building a Liquor Store from Zero
- No history to learn from. Smart Bidding, Performance Max and Meta's algorithm all learn from purchase data. A new store has none, so the first months go into building the signal the platforms need.
- A regulated category on every platform. Alcohol ads are age-restricted, Merchant Center flags spirits by policy, and Google does not allow remarketing or customer lists for alcohol at all.
- A Meta account that did not survive the first week. The store's original Meta business account was disabled in April 2025, just as we were ready to launch. It had to be rebuilt from scratch before a single ad could run.
- Negative keywords working against the store. The inherited Google setup blocked "delivery" as a broad-match negative, plus "alcohol delivery" and "liquor delivery", which is exactly what an online liquor store sells.
- An email list close to the blacklist. Before we took over Klaviyo, the list was being blasted every other day with duplicate sends. Spam complaints and unsubscribes had pushed the sending domain close to being blocked by Gmail.
Our Approach: One Team, Every Channel
Google Ads: Search, Shopping and Performance Max
Performance Max split by what the store actually sells: a top-of-funnel campaign, a best-sellers campaign, a whiskey campaign and brand-specific ones, each bid to maximize conversion value. Search campaigns on exact product and commercial-intent terms ("buy bourbon online", "blanton's single barrel", "eagle rare 10 year"), protected by universal negative lists for jobs, education, recipes, DIY and wholesale traffic. The negatives that were blocking delivery intent came out on day one, and brand searches now run in their own campaign so product campaigns bid on products, not on people who already know the store.
Microsoft Ads: Remarketing Where Google Won't Allow It
Google does not allow remarketing for alcohol. Microsoft Ads does. It went live in April 2025, remarketing first, so visitors who left without buying see the store again on Bing and its partner network.
Meta Ads: Catalog Plus AI Video Ads
Once the rebuilt Meta account was approved, we launched in April 2025 and scaled into the holidays, from $538 in the first month to $22,632 in December 2025. Catalog ads carry the range. AI video ads, produced by us, carry the brand.
Klaviyo: Rebuilding the List Before Selling to It
We took over Klaviyo in June 2026 and rebuilt every segment and every flow: welcome, abandoned checkout, browse abandonment, post-purchase and win-back. Campaigns were cut back to one or two targeted sends a week until the domain's reputation recovered.
The Results: From Zero to $2.26M
| Milestone | Revenue from our ads |
|---|---|
| First month (March 2025) | $3,223 |
| First $50,000 month (August 2025) | $59,261 |
| First $200,000 month (November 2025) | $242,858 |
| Record month (December 2025) | $337,236 |
| Holiday season (October to December 2025) | $669,271 |
| All of 2025 (March to December) | $885,067 |
| 2026 so far (January to August) | $1,372,824 |
| Total, 18 months | $2,257,891 |
Eight months of 2026 have already produced 55% more revenue than all of 2025. From November 2025 through June 2026 our ads brought in between $169,000 and $337,000 every month.
Across Google Ads and Meta Ads the account has returned 5.7x on $394,684 of ad spend, with Google Ads at 6.2x. Microsoft Ads runs alongside as remarketing and is not included in these totals.
Email: Fewer Sends, Better Results
Sixty days before our Klaviyo rebuild compared with sixty days after it:
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Emails sent | 279,944 | 62,680 |
| Open rate | 19.7% | 40.4% |
| Click rate | 0.95% | 2.28% |
| Campaign revenue per recipient | $0.10 | $0.33 |
A fifth of the email volume, twice the opens and clicks, and 3.3 times the revenue per recipient on campaigns. The best sends were the narrowest: a Fortaleza restock email to 472 tequila buyers returned $2.77 per recipient.
AI Video Ads for Liquor Brands
We produced these AI video ads for Liquor Royale's Meta campaigns. No film crew, no studio: the product, the story and the edit, built from the same performance data we optimize the account against.
- Doc Holliday, 67 seconds. The gift case opens, the revolver parts float out and lock together into the decanter's gun cork, and it ends on a smoked Old Fashioned. 41% of viewers stopped for it and 59% of those watched it through, the strongest hold rate we have recorded.
- Blanton's Gold, 15 seconds. An allocated bourbon revealed on a gold marble staircase, no voiceover and no text, built to stop a collector mid-scroll. A 16.2% click-through rate.
- Fortaleza Reposado, 6 seconds. The bottle in rippling water, agave stopper first, made for the feed with the sound off. 15.3% of viewers clicked.
What's Next
A cash-back membership program, built with the owner, is close to launch. It turns one-time buyers into repeat customers, and it gives every channel we run a stronger offer to lead with.
Key Takeaways
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A new store can scale fast when every channel is run by one team. Google, Meta, Microsoft and email working from the same product priorities and the same customers took Liquor Royale from no sales to a $337,000 month in nine months.
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Remarketing for alcohol lives outside Google. Google blocks it for the category; Microsoft Ads and Meta do not. A liquor store that only advertises on Google is leaving its warmest traffic on the table.
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AI video ads for liquor brands perform. Three ads, three different lengths, 6.5x to 9.7x on Meta, with click-through rates of 12.6% to 16.2%.
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Less email can mean more money. Cutting volume by 78% doubled engagement and tripled revenue per recipient on campaigns, and pulled the domain back from the edge of Gmail's blocklist.
About This Campaign
Live PPC Ads has managed this account since March 2025 across Google Ads, Meta Ads, Microsoft Ads and Klaviyo, and produces its video ads.
Industry: E-Commerce: Wine & Spirits Platforms: Google Ads (Search, Shopping, Performance Max), Meta Ads, Microsoft Ads, Klaviyo Location: United States (nationwide shipping) Account Duration: March 2025 to present