Walmart Sponsored Product Ads: Guide to Advertising on Walmart

Walmart marketplace is becoming progressively popular with sellers and online shoppers. According to ComScore, Walmart.com sees up to 100 million unique visitors per month. The number of sellers on the platform has reached over 113,000. This number has been rapidly rising over the last few years as shown on the graph below.

The increase in visitors makes the Walmart marketplace an attractive sales channel. The platform provides sellers with an excellent ad opportunity to boost a product/brand’s visibility and conversion with ‘Walmart Sponsored Product ads’. It also provides brands and sellers with smart advertising solutions and sales tools for their products to increase their chances of discovering and matching their products with shoppers’ searches. Walmart aims to provide the best ad experience for brands and sellers to reach potential customers.

In this article, we will be covering in detail the advertising options that are available on the Walmart Marketplace, the benefits of advertising on the platform, how to create ad campaigns, and ad optimization ideas to grow your business on Walmart.

Walmart sponsored product ads also known as performance ads are pay-per-click ads that help brands and sellers promote their products/brand on the Walmart Marketplace. It is the main advertising type for Walmart which helps customers discover and purchase products on Walmart.com. It increases product visibility so that customers can click on your ad and make a purchase.

Walmart sponsored product ads help you get discovered by giving you an instant visibility boost to increase conversions, and drive qualified traffic to your listings and purchases. They promote products throughout desktop websites, mobile platforms, and apps as sponsored products to show your listings and direct traffic to your products.

Walmart sponsored product ads are cost-control ads that operate on a cost-per-click (CPC) model displayed across the Walmart Marketplace. You will pay only when a customer clicks on your ad. You can determine your budget, create your ad campaign, build ad groups of relevant products, choose your keywords to target, and place your bids i.e., decide on how much you are willing to pay for someone to click on your ad.

Unlike Amazon, Walmart does not have many ad types available for retailers but there are Walmart sponsored product ad options available to boost product visibility. Walmart advertising allows sponsored product ads to be displayed on desktops, mobiles, and marketplace apps when shoppers are browsing. Walmart algorithm serves sponsored product ads based on the product’s relevancy and cost per click (bid).

Below we describe the four ad placements that are available for sponsored products on Walmart:

Search In-grid placement

These CPC ads appear within the first three pages of search results in slots 1-12 and drive traffic directly to relevant Walmart product detail pages. This is the most visible and one of the most premium slots. There can be no more than two slots to be filled by sponsored products at one time and there is a maximum of six ads per page. This placement is a great way for shoppers to discover new items in categories that they are already interested in as these placements provide advertisers increased visibility on the first page of search results. This ad placement is available for automatic campaigns which are content driven and manual campaigns that are keyword driven. The minimum campaign spends for this ad type is either $100 for the total length of the campaign or a daily minimum of $50.

To be eligible for search in grid placements,

• Advertised products must appear organically within the top 128 of the search results.
• Products must win the buy box.
• Products need to rank higher than or equal to their organic search ranking.
• Products should be in the same category as the search query.

Product Carousel placement

The carousel allows you to highlight your products at the bottom of the pages within search pages, result pages, categories and product pages for relevant products considered, viewed, and bought by the customers. These ads send shoppers directly to your Walmart product pages and are great for the products that are new to Walmart. Carousels play a vital role in maintaining your visibility, capturing new customers, and product promotion.

Carousel products do not need to appear organically in the first three pages which are within the top 128 of the search results and there is a maximum of 24 sponsored products per carousel. Product Carousel is only available for automatic campaigns.

Buy Box placement

The buy box is located on the product detail page for products that are relevant or complementary to the product shoppers are viewing. This is a highly competitive placement that highlights your product in a highly visible position on product pages and allows capturing customers as they are making their final purchasing decision. This ad placement gives advertisers an opportunity to influence shoppers with products that are complements or alternatives to the product being viewed by the shopper. This placement is available only for automatic campaigns and ads with higher bids and relevancy scores. Being such a coveted spot, the CPC (cost per click) may be higher for this placement.

Learn More: How to Win Walmart Buy Box in 2021

Search Brand Amplifier

This ad placement gives brands a unique opportunity to promote brand awareness by showing multiple products from your array of products. It features your brand’s logo, a custom headline, and up to four products. The ad is placed above the search results so, it is a great form of ad placement to increase brand recognition. These ads are displayed to shoppers who are searching for products that similar to yours on the Walmart Marketplace. This ad placement is only available to 1p sellers and not 3p sellers.

Walmart Sponsored Products have specific eligibility requirements in order to maintain the reliability and authority of their search results. They must be relevant to the search keywords and organically perform well on the site. Some of the strict eligibility criteria of Walmart Sponsored Products are:

• To be eligible for the sponsored products auction you must win the buy box.
• The advertiser with the most relevant product along with the highest bid wins the sponsored product placement.
• You must have a verified Seller Central account.
• You need to have high shipping standards and competitive price points.
• You are required to ensure your product is always in stock and has positive reviews.
• You should commit to a minimum of $1000 monthly spend with a $100 daily spend.

Those who can meet the eligibility criteria can apply for Walmart Sponsored Products Ads. To advertise with sponsored products, you must be a Walmart supplier or marketplace seller. As a Walmart supplier, you will create and use a Walmart account to access the platform and as a marketplace seller, you will use your seller central credentials.

The sellers that meet the criteria can set up their Walmart Sponsored Product Ads by following these steps:

• Step 1: Apply for a seller account by providing the required information about your business.
• Step 2: Upload your products to Walmart Marketplace.
• Step 3: Once you have set up your seller account you need approval to access the Walmart Advertising platform.
• Step 4: After you are approved, you can create and implement your Walmart Sponsored Products ad campaign. This includes choosing your campaign types and bidding on keywords.
• Step 5: You can measure the performance of each Sponsored Product ad and then launch the campaign.

The sponsored product ad campaign type that you can choose to support your goals are: Automatic Campaign and Manual Campaign

Automatic Campaign

An automatic campaign provides maximum exposure and is perfect for brands that are new to advertising, launching a product, and willing to drive new customers. Walmart determines desirable placement for ads based on product information contained in the product title, PDP (product detail page) content, category, and related pages when launching an automatic campaign.

• It does not require keyword management
• The set-up is easy
• It has a high impression volume

Manual Campaign

Manual campaigns involve bidding on specific keywords. It offers maximum control over which search Walmart ads appear in. It is suitable for products with a long history on Walmart or brands that are aware of keywords used by customers.

• You are allowed to select your own keywords
• It has access to Walmart’s Keyword Analytics tool
• You have full control over campaigns

Walmart Sponsored Product Ads is an excellent way to increase your product impressions, boost conversions, increase clicks, and get more sales. The platform provides your tools to view your performance metrics to see how well your ads are working. It allows you to reach and engage shoppers at every stage of their journey. Some additional benefits of Walmart Sponsored Products ads are:

• Sponsored products make the product stand out against other listings which can convince potential customers to click on them. This gives you more exposure and increases product visibility and discoverability in the marketplace.
• It allows you to test out brand new products, and generate sales for top-selling or seasonal items by getting them in front of potential customers.
• Sponsored Product Ads ease the customer journey and enhance customer experience by taking online shoppers directly to the product of interest leading to an increase in conversion and sales.
• You can access data and analytics on your ad impressions, views, clicks, and conversions to track performance metrics, measure ROI, and adjust CPC budget and keywords which helps to plan your future ad strategy.
• There is less competition for advertising space as retailers must meet certain requirements before utilizing Sponsored Product ads.

As a seller, you need to apply various strategies and optimization ideas to improve your organic search rank and to grow your market share by increasing page views and share of voice. Listed below are some ideas to optimize your sponsored product ads when creating your ad campaigns.

• Optimize your listings regularly and improve your product information consistently to ensure they are operating at full potential and your spending matches your goals and strategy. Use clear and specific titles, high-quality images, key features, and optimized product descriptions to optimize your products.
• Enroll with a multiple listing so that you can see trends across multiple items and gather data to measure and prioritize them according to traffic and ROAS. Multiple products give the Walmart algorithm more options to optimize your placements.
• Use bid multipliers for automatic campaigns to increase bids and capture high conversion placements like the first page of search results and the Buy box banner.
• Reserve up to 30% of your sponsored products budget for tests and use various reporting tools to measure results and discover new opportunities.
• Run content-driven auto campaigns to identify new customers and important search data. And, run keyword-driven manual campaigns and spend more of your budget on manual campaigns for more budget control and drive conversion.
• Where possible, try to offer your customers Walmart free two-day delivery to distribute your products and fulfill orders.

Walmart sponsored products ad can provide you with the required visibility in the Walmart Marketplace. They are a great way to increase visibility, boost conversion, and better understand your target audience.

GrowByData Marketing intelligence software can help advertisers on the platform gain a competitive edge to beat competitors. The tool can analyze your product detail pages and let you know which features of your product content need improvement. It can make sure your prices are competitive in the market using robust dynamic pricing strategies. The Walmart Marketplace Intelligence tool also measures your share of voice on keywords so that you can better understand your product visibility to increase your presence in the marketplace.