Back to Basics: Understanding Advertising on Walmart Marketplace

What does online shopping mean? In a world that favors native advertising, what are the most significant benefits that a customer can receive from online shopping? The answer is simple: online shopping represents a time-saving and research-driven solution for every need, whether you want to be inspired or informed or simply don’t have time to go shopping in a physical store.

Online shopping, in short, is about convenience and relevance. 

According to Walmart Connect, 90 percent of Americans shopped on Walmart in 2020 and more than 150 million customers visit Walmart or Walmart.com each week, making Walmart the largest omnichannel retailer in North America.

Every second, there are 185 searches being made on Walmart.com, and standing out on this high-demand platform is challenging. If you are a first-time seller or you want to increase your  sales, you need to ask yourself these questions:

1. How can you ensure your company/brand presence on Walmart?
2. How do you create strategies that will reach more customers and ensure better results and higher sales?

Let’s dive into these questions:

How can you ensure your company/brand presence on Walmart?

First, you need to create an account. The application process should take up to 15 minutes. After the application and registration process, you need to continue building your product catalog on Walmart. The next step is to request advertising access from Walmart Media Group. You may complete all these processes by yourself in-house or partner up with an advertising agency that can guide you through the process and further manage all your ad campaigns and eCommerce initiatives.

How to create strategies that will reach more customers and ensure better results and more significant sales?

To answer the second question, as sellers, you need to grasp and better understand the new buyer’s journey of the Walmart customer. Every shopper has three mindsets you need to consider: inspiration, research and task (brand awareness, consideration, and purchase), which Walmart is fulfilling, as the research shows.   

You can gain exposure to potential customers at each phase of the consideration journey with Walmart pay-per-click (PPC). Walmart.com ads are designed to appear within the organic search results, product detail pages and category pages on Walmart.com. These ads can provide instant visibility for high-intent searches.

Walmart offers different ad placements that ensure the best exposure of the products, such as search in-grid, brand amplifier, product carousel and buy box.  All of which can be used in different campaign types.    

Sponsored products ads are content-driven (automatic) or keyword-driven (manual) targeted ads that drive traffic to the Walmart product detail pages. They’re aimed at increasing product visibility and organic ranking on Walmart.com. 

Automatic Campaigns

Automatic campaigns are the first type of campaign that you can create to expand the reach of the ads to the most relevant customers and through the buyer’s journey. They combine the most pertinent keywords identified from product titles, descriptions, product listings, product categories and related products. All company products can be included in an automatic campaign.

The better the structure and the greater the details of the campaigns, the better you can generate visibility, control and relevancy.

Ensure that all of the relevant IDs and SKUs are included in the campaigns. Campaigns ad groups should be divided and organized by product categories. Campaigns can be created only for base ID items (primary items), not for variants’ ID.

The daily budget is a minimum of $50, and the total campaign budget is $100. This budget is just insurance that assets are reserved for advertising.

The performance of the automatic campaign is greatly affected by the product detail page, its optimization and the keywords used. The bid and product detail page optimization ensures the most relevant ads show up in the searched in-grid, homepage and buy box on the product description pages. To ensure the chances of winning searched in-grid and buy box, you may use bid multipliers to get premium ad placement, better click-through rates and improved conversion. 

An additional purpose of the automatic campaign is to create relevant results in terms of keywords. So, first, perform optimization for the product detail page with the best-performing keywords. And then, deepen the customer journey and brand connection when creating the manual campaign. 

Manual Campaigns

This type of campaign gives us more precise targeting, leading to more conversions in front of customers who are more likely to buy. You may reduce or pause low-performing keywords in the manual campaign to ensure maximum and most efficient spending. This campaign is shown only in search in-grid and product carousels. 

Walmart marketplace’s most rewarding ad strategy and best advertising practices have shown that the combination of automatic and manual campaigns gives the best results and highest product sales. 

As mentioned before, ads on the Walmart marketplace have several different placements in the search in-grid, carousel and buy box to ensure the best ad placement provides the best experience.

Search in-grid appears on the first page of search results (in slots 3, 5, 6 or 12). Sponsored products will fill the position of only two places at any given time. Eligible products must appear organically within the top 128 results (first three pages) and win the buy box. This placement is available for automatic and manual campaigns.

Sponsored Product Carousels are located within search results, categories and product pages. These kinds of placement don’t have the clause of organically ranking in the top 128 (3 pages) of organic results to appear in the carousel. This is an excellent opportunity for sellers that are bringing new SKUs.

Buy Box Banner is the most expensive placement has a minimum of $1 CPC due to high visibility on the product detail page. This placement banner is used to “distract” the buyer from purchasing the competitor’s product. 

To better understand the campaigns and their management, you need to understand the campaign reports and metrics. The report can be generated after 24 hours of launching the campaign. The campaign reports have a standard 14 sales attribution window, but Walmart provides three days and 30-day attribution window.

In the Summary view, the basic eight metrics provide framing for all campaigns, but you can see direct attribution clicks, offline clicks and brand clicks in the revenue view. Depending on the marketing strategy, you can choose different report types, such as daily performance, A.D. group performance, keyword analysis, brand performance, platform performance and so on.

If you choose to manage it in-house, Walmart is offering Support Team Introduction/Feedback Channel9. Still, if the company decides that this requires too many resources, always consider the help of experienced eCommerce marketers who can take over the project.

Conclusion

If you are considering advertising your products on Walmart Marketplace, decide between tackling the task yourself or working closely with an advertising agency.

If you choose to keep everything in-house, then remember that catalog and product detail page optimization is one of the primary focuses of the campaign. The optimized page will be vital in creating automatic campaigns and the organic ranking of the product, which will be critical for allowing the manual campaigns to go live and perform well.

Create well-structured and detailed campaigns for greater visibility and control over the advertised products. And test, test, test. You never know how the new strategy, campaign, keyword research or expansion will connect with the potential customer. See you at Walmart!