Since the early 1960s, Walmart has been a mainstay of most American consumers’ shopping experiences. In fact, with over 4,700 stores across the U.S. in addition to the brands’ ever-growing digital presence, it’s estimated that 90 percent of America shops at Walmart for everything from groceries to home goods.
While Amazon has long been the leader of third-party selling platforms, Walmart has been consistent in building its digital presence via its website, app, and omnichannel experiences, as well as focusing on convenient services like curbside pickup and enhanced digital experience within physical stores. So while Amazon might still reign supreme as America’s go-to for ordering goods from within the comfort of their own homes, Walmart is quickly catching up.
For retailers, the rapid rise in popularity as a third-party seller means that listing products with Walmart are becoming just as important as selling on Amazon, and focusing on Sponsored Products within the Walmart Connect PPC advertising space has become crucial for standing out in Walmart shoppers’ search results.
Here’s how to get started with Walmart Connect’s PPC advertising.
What Is Walmart Connect?
Launched in January 2021, Walmart Connect is the new name of Walmart Media Group, the advertising branch of Walmart, one of America’s biggest retailers with a third-party sales platform that has quickly come to rival Amazon.
With the launch of Walmart Connect, the company plans to focus on offering better targeted, omnichannel experiences to the 150 million shoppers who visit Walmart’s stores and digital properties weekly.
What kind of ads does Walmart Connect offer?
Walmart Sponsored Products offer an array of ads, similar to those that appear on Amazon. These ads are sold based on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, meaning that advertisers only pay for the ads that get seen by potential customers. These ads are sold based on keyword bids.
Walmart Sponsored Products can appear in several different positions within a Walmart search, including in-grid (within the grid of a customer’s search results), in the “buy box” beneath the product details of an item a shopper has clicked on, or as a product carousel of multiple items at the top of search, browse, category, or product page.
Who can advertise with Walmart?
In order to get started with Walmart PPC advertising, retailers must first sign up to become Walmart sellers. Apply using Walmart.com by providing your business information via the online form. After Walmart approves your application, create a product catalog. This process involves listing each of your products in Walmart’s marketplace, providing information such as keyword-rich product details, price, photos, and reviews, along with other information, including backend keywords and product tags. If you have the option, add a short video of your product to make your product stand out even further.
Once your products are listed in Walmart’s marketplace, Walmart Connect says you need a few more qualifications to become a Walmart advertiser:
- Appear within the top 128 organic search results
- Rank higher than or equal to their organic search ranking
- Be of the same category as the search query
- Be of same product type as at least one non-sponsored product in the top 20 results
How can advertisers get started with Walmart PPC advertising?
There are two main ways to get started building your Walmart PPC advertising campaign: automated and manual.
Automated campaigns are the easiest way for advertisers new to Walmart PPC to bid on relevant keywords. With automated bidding, sellers simply enter all of the pertinent information for each product they’d like to advertise, and the Walmart search algorithm then suggests the keywords most relevant to the product. From there, sellers start their bidding at 30 cents a keyword and then work their way up to stay competitive. In the Walmart PPC model, ads go to the highest bidder.
For more experienced Walmart PPC advertisers, manual bidding offers more control over Sponsored Product campaigns. To bid manually, advertisers select the keywords on which they’d like to bid, adjusting bids based on the popularity of the keyword, which can fluctuate based on factors like seasonality. Walmart PPC analytics tools also allow manual bidders to search and eliminate keywords that aren’t performing to expectations, as well as testing keywords for efficacy.
Once you’ve successfully created and launched your campaign, Walmart provides metrics such as impressions, clicks, units sold, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and other useful data, tracking campaigns against all its digital properties and 4,700 thousand Walmart stores.
Generally, auction-based publishers either start this way or change to the second-price model during a major overhaul of their platform when many other variables are changed — a precise determination of its impact isn’t always clear.
In order to stand out in Walmart’s ever-growing marketplace, many brands work with agencies to optimize and automate campaigns using up-to-the-minute insights around how multiple campaigns are performing twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Target and reach your best customers on Walmart with Skai
Make the most of your Walmart Connect campaigns with Skai.
As part of Skai’s intelligent marketing platform, our Retail Media solution empowers brands to plan, execute, and measure digital campaigns that meet consumers when and where they shop. Built with best-in-class automation and optimization capabilities, our unified platform allows you to manage campaigns on 30+ retailers including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart all in one place.
For more information on how Skai’s Retail Media solution can help you master retail media advertising, please reach out to schedule a quick demo.
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