If you’re looking to take your eCommerce business to the next level, Walmart’s marketplace is a prime destination for sellers. With over 200 million active customers and a strong brand reputation, the platform offers a vast and diverse audience for you to reach.
But how do you make your products stand out and drive sales in a crowded marketplace? That’s where an effective Walmart advertising strategy through their Walmart Connect platform comes in.
Creating Walmart advertising campaigns can help you target the right consumers, measure the impact of your ads, support your organic growth, and get visibility for new and low-performing products.
Using the platform’s advanced targeting options and detailed analytics, you can optimize your Walmart advertising campaigns and drive more sales.
In this ultimate guide to Walmart advertising, we’ll delve into the benefits of selling on Walmart Connect and how you can build your Walmart advertising strategy to grow your business.
From targeting the right customers to boosting the performance of new and low-performing products, we’ll show you how to make the most of your advertising efforts on Walmart. So, if you’re ready to take your eCommerce business to new heights, let’s get started!
Why start Walmart advertising campaigns?
As one of the world’s largest and most well-known retailers, Walmart offers a vast and diverse customer base for sellers to tap into. With millions of shoppers visiting the platform daily, you can reach a broad audience and target specific consumer groups with the right Walmart advertising strategy. Additionally, Walmart’s advanced targeting options allow you to tailor your ads to the right customers, ensuring that your products are seen by those most likely to be interested in them.
Walmart’s advertising program can help give new and low-performing products a boost by increasing their visibility and driving more traffic to your listings. This can be especially useful if you have a product struggling to gain traction or launching a new product and want to get it off to a strong start.
The platform also offers opportunities for organic growth through SEO and customer reviews. Optimizing your product listings and encouraging customer feedback can increase your visibility and sales on the platform without needing paid ads.
Overall, a large customer base, strong brand reputation, and opportunities for organic and paid growth make Walmart’s marketplace a prime destination for sellers looking to reach new heights with their business.
How Walmart advertising works and how to start
Walmart advertising campaigns allow sellers to promote their products on the platform and drive sales through several ad types. Walmart Connect works similarly to other eCommerce advertising programs, such as Amazon advertising, allowing you to bid on specific keywords and target specific customer groups. Walmart gives you a range of options to effectively target your audience and display your product.
Setup your product feed
To get started with Walmart Connect, you’ll need to set up a seller account on the platform and enroll in the Walmart Connect platform. From there, you’ll need to create a product feed that includes all the products you want to advertise. Once you have your account and product feed set up, you can create your first advertising campaign.
Set a campaign objective
When creating a campaign through Walmart Connect, you’ll need to choose a bidding strategy and set a bid amount. Walmart offers several bidding options, including cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-impression (CPM), and target return on ad spend (ROAS).
Establish your bids and budget
The bid amount you choose will depend on your budget and how competitive your chosen keywords are. You’ll also need to select the ad format you want to use, such as sponsored products, sponsored brands, or display ads.
Optimize your advertising workflows
To grow with Walmart Connect, consider implementing the following strategies:
1. Keyword research and targeting:
Conduct keyword research to identify the terms and phrases that are most relevant to your products and target audience. Use these keywords in your product titles, descriptions, and ad copy to improve your search visibility and attract qualified traffic.
2. Listing optimization:
Make sure your product listings are accurate, complete, and visually appealing. Use high-quality product images, descriptive titles, and detailed descriptions to showcase the features and benefits of your products.
3. Manage inventory:
Make sure you have enough inventory to meet demand and prevent stock from running out. Monitor your inventory levels and adjust your ad spend accordingly to avoid overspending or underperforming.
4. Seek efficiency at scale:
As your business grows, it’s essential to look for ways to streamline your processes and increase efficiency. This can include automating tasks, outsourcing tasks to third parties, or finding tools and partners to help you scale.
By implementing these Walmart advertising strategies, you can effectively grow your business through Walmart advertising and reach a broader audience on the platform.
Select ad type
To help support your different products, it’s best to understand what types of Walmart Connect campaigns you can run.
Walmart Sponsored Products – Search In-Grid Results: These ads are individual product listings in the search results grid alongside other products. These ads target specific keywords and customer groups and drive traffic and sales to your product listings.
Walmart Sponsored Products – Carousels: These ads are similar to search in-grid results, but they are displayed in a carousel format, allowing shoppers to scroll through a selection of your products. These ads target specific keywords and customer groups and drive traffic and sales to your product listings.
Walmart Sponsored Brands: These ads are displayed at the top of the search results and look similar to a banner display ad. These are pay-per-click ad types and are also triggered by specific keywords.
Buy Box Banner: These ads are banner ads that appear on the product page of a specific item. These ads increase the visibility of particular products and drive sales.
Offsite Display Advertising: These ads are banner ads that appear on websites and apps outside Walmart’s platform. These ads can target specific keywords and customer groups, increase your brand’s visibility, and drive traffic to your product listings.
By understanding the different types of ads available on Walmart Connect and how they work, you can choose the ad format that best fits your business goals and effectively promote your products on the platform.
Manual versus auto campaigns
When creating a campaign on Walmart Connect, you’ll need to decide whether to use an auto or manual campaign. Leveraging both in the right way can ensure that you maximize your output based on your experience, resources, and objective.
Auto campaigns are easy and hassle-free, they allow you to set a budget and let Walmart’s algorithm optimize your campaigns. With auto campaigns, you don’t need to adjust your bids or targeting options constantly – you can set your budget and let the algorithm do the work for you.
This can be a good option for sellers new to developing Walmart advertising strategies or for those who don’t have the time or resources to manage their campaigns manually. As you acclimate to the marketplace, you’ll want to start to manually control elements to optimize your spend towards more hands-on targeting.
With manual Walmart advertising campaigns, you can fine-tune your bids to optimize your campaigns for specific keywords. This is a common tactic for sellers who are more experienced with advertising on Walmart Connect, have the time to manage their target keywords, and can analyze the data in a quick and accurate manner.
Ultimately, auto campaigns are a good way to get started, while manual campaigns are more suitable for serious sellers looking to grow profitably through advertising.
Get the best of both with advertising automation
How can you get the user-friendliness of auto campaigns and the profitably of manual campaigns at the same time? By using Trellis’ ads automation. It works like a supercharged manual Walmart advertising campaign but without the maintenance. Let us explain.
At the heart of manual ads management is keyword research, daily bid optimization, and campaign creation. A user must do all of these things well and maintain them on a daily basis for their advertising to be profitable. These are often hard to do with lean marketing teams and large product lines.
Ads automation leverages AI to make this more feasible for everyone. Software like Trellis are able to automate the creation of the most effective campaign structures, find new keywords based on your search terms, and change bids based on your results.
We overcome human indecision by making choices based on statistical significance. Our system looks at each keyword, digging deep into your search term reports to find opportunities that will be profitable with confidence.
This process leads to finding champion keywords more frequently in higher quantities. Once we’ve done this, we can begin to layer in bidding tailored to your goals, and a campaign setup that ensures that you aren’t wasting a penny.
Walmart advertising automation supports your strategy
Walmart advertising and automation can benefit a variety of sellers looking to grow their business profitably. Some ways you can benefit from Walmart advertising campaigns and automation include:
Increase overall market share: New marketplaces come with the obvious added benefit of opening yourself to new customers that might not be on your current marketplaces. Combining that with ad automation, you are able to adapt as your category changes while finding new ways to undercut competitors in times of stagnancy.
This is possible as ad automation continuously looks for new keywords your customers are using that might shed light on new habits and trends.Take advantage of new profit avenues: Less mature Amazon and DTC eCommerce sellers may find that penetrating these markets and maintaining their respective marketing channels is costly and comes without a likely guarantee of success.
With Walmart being a new landscape for a lot of sellers, everyone is coming in on the ground floor right now. Whether you’re a big or small retailer, there’s likely an avenue of profit for your Walmart advertising strategy that you can develop and own into the future by establishing your content, your analytics, and your products now.
Managing multiple channels with less: If you’re already selling on various channels and find it challenging to manage your campaigns manually, automation can help you streamline your efforts and save time.
Trellis pulls both your Amazon and Walmart accounts into one place where you can manage them next to each other. Automation also frees your team up from daily management to think strategically about all of your marketplaces individually and holistically.
Launch more confidently: If you’re new to Walmart advertising, a platform like Trellis can provide the support and guidance you need to launch your first campaign with confidence.
Ads automation can help make these new marketplaces less intimidating and give you more comfortable going forward knowing that you have always-on advertising optimization by your side.
If one or all of these use cases apply to you, it may be worth getting started with your Walmart advertising strategy.
How to get started with automated Walmart advertising campaigns
Walmart Connect is a powerful e-commerce platform with a vast customer base and a wide range of advertising opportunities. Yet, after some time you may find that you are not growing as fast as you’d like.
Automation can help. Scale your Walmart Connect campaigns efforts by automating tasks such as bid management, targeting, and ad creation. Using a tool can save time and resources while maximizing your ad performance.
Starting is simple.
Getting started with Walmart advertising automation in 1, 2, 3
1. Onboard
Request access below. We are currently providing personalized onboarding so getting started is easy.
2. Connect Accounts and Historical Data
Our API partnership with Walmart Connect Partner Network will ensure a seamless transition. If you’ve been running campaigns we can leverage your historical data right away. Otherwise, we will be connected to your account and ready to launch ads.
3. Create a Campaign
First, decide what your high-priority products are. Then choose an objective for each product: are you looking to launch a product, generate sales, or grow profitably? Select the objective and begin creating comprehensive ad campaigns for your products.
