Walmart Marketplace Advertising & Promotions: A Complete Guide for Sellers

Selling on Walmart Marketplace is an incredible opportunity for eCommerce businesses to reach millions of customers. Walmart Marketplace's extensive customer base provides sellers with the opportunity to expand their reach and drive more sales. As the world’s largest retailer, Walmart provides robust tools and advertising options to help sellers improve product visibility, increase sales, and grow their brand.

In this complete guide, we’ll walk through everything sellers need to know about advertising and promotions on Walmart Marketplace, including Sponsored Search, Display ads, Brand Shop and Shelf, and campaign optimization techniques.

Introduction to Advertising on Walmart Marketplace

As a Walmart Marketplace seller, you can leverage various advertising solutions through Walmart Connect, Walmart's advertising arm. By utilizing Walmart Connect, you can access a range of ad solutions, including Sponsored Search and Walmart Onsite Display campaigns, to reach your target audience and boost sales. These solutions help sellers put their products in front of high-intent shoppers and increase discoverability.

Sponsored Search vs. Onsite Display Ads

Walmart Connect's Sponsored Search advertising helps place your brand and products in front of customers actively searching and browsing on Walmart’s website and app for similar items. This type of advertising targets customers actively searching Walmart Marketplace with the intent to buy through searching for items by specific keyword, product or brand name and SKU. You’re only charged when a shopper clicks on your ad.

There are three types of Sponsored Search advertising:

• Sponsored Products: The foundation of Walmart ads
• Sponsored Brands: Build brand awareness
• Sponsored Videos: Engage shoppers with multimedia

Onsite Display advertising uses precise audience targeting and eye-catching visuals to inspire customer discovery and consideration throughout Walmart’s website, mobile app and in Walmart stores. The keyword targeting for Onsite Display campaigns work similarly to a search campaign. They both operate from a list of target keywords or behaviors, however, the keyword targeting for display campaigns will reveal a creative display ad instead of a sponsored item.

Shopping Journey and Ad Placement

Understanding the shopping journey of your target customers is crucial to effective Walmart advertising. By placing ads in strategic locations, such as search results, product pages, and category pages, you can increase the likelihood of customers clicking on your ads and making a purchase. Walmart Onsite Display campaigns allow you to target customers with personalized ads at every stage of their shopping journey, both on Walmart.com and the Walmart app. By leveraging Walmart Connect’s ad solutions, you can reach your target audience and drive sales, while also gaining valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences.

Walmart Brand Shop and Shelf

Brand Shop and Shelf pages are not paid advertising, but they act as landing destinations for various advertising formats, including Walmart Sponsored Brands and Onsite Display campaigns. Think of Brand Shop as your virtual storefront on Walmart Marketplace. It is a page for brand owners to showcase and promote their business with engaging lifestyle images, promotional or seasonal images, hero image carousels, banners, videos and more. Paired with it is the Shelf — a digital aisle that features a curated selection of your products and can be linked directly from your Brand Shop. Both tools work together to enhance your brand presence on Walmart and maximize your conversion rate.

Brand Shops are discoverable via product pages on Walmart Marketplace and through the Brand Shop directory, located at the bottom of every page on the site. When you set up your Brand Shop, you’ll receive a custom URL to share online or link directly to your Shelf. You can also include links to multiple Shelves within a single Brand Shop.

While each brand can only have one live Brand Shop at a time, there’s no limit to the number of Shelves you can create. If you own multiple brands, you can feature items from all of them in the same Brand Shop or Shelf, offering flexibility in how you present your product lines.

To start building your digital storefront, use the Shop Builder tool in Walmart Connect that offers performance reporting such as sales, orders, product views, unique visitors, units sold, average sales per order, and more — giving you valuable insight into your brand's performance on Walmart.

Optimizing Product Listings for Advertising on Walmart

To maximize the effectiveness of your Walmart advertising campaigns, it’s essential to optimize your product listings. This includes using relevant keywords, creating eye-catching product titles and accurate descriptions, and ensuring high-quality product images. By doing so, you can increase the visibility of your products in search results and attract more customers to your listings. Additionally, optimizing your product listings can help improve your chances of winning the Buy Box, which can lead to more sales and increased revenue. As a Walmart Marketplace seller, you can use tools like the Seller Center to manage and optimize your product listings, and gain access to valuable insights and seller performance data.

Types of Advertising on Walmart Marketplace

Each of the advertising formats available on Walmart Marketplace offer unique benefits and can be used in combination with one another to create a comprehensive advertising strategy. Let's dive into the different types of advertising, how they work, and the eligibility requirements.

Sponsored Search Advertising

The three Sponsored Search ad types (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Videos) available on Walmart Marketplace are all based on cost-per-click, which means you only pay when a shopper selects your ad. However, they each have different use cases and benefits, so which types of Sponsored ads you decide to use, depends on your business goals.

1. What are Sponsored Products?

Sponsored Products are pay-per-click (PPC) ads that appear in prominent, high traffic spots such as the home page, search results, product detail pages, and category pages. You set a maximum bid you are willing to pay when a customer clicks on your ads but you only pay what is needed to win the auction. Relevancy plus bid price determines the auction winner: The most relevant product with the highest bid wins the ad placement. Sponsored Product ads look like regular listings but are labeled as "sponsored."

Why Use Sponsored Products:

• Boost product visibility by showcasing your listings in search results
• Reach high-intent shoppers
• Improve sales velocity and organic rankings

Tips for Running Effective Sponsored Product Campaigns:

• Optimize product listings: Make sure your titles, descriptions, and images are clear and keyword-rich.
• Use automatic and manual targeting: Start with automatic campaigns to gather data, then shift to manual targeting to optimize performance. Automated, dynamic bidding helps optimize ads based on your campaign goals. With manual campaigns, you can use Walmart Connect's bid suggestions and keyword recommendations to select the right keywords.
• Adjust bids strategically: Monitor performance metrics and adjust bids based on ROI.
• Focus on top-performing SKUs: Promote products that already have good reviews and competitive pricing.

Sponsored Products Eligibility:

To be eligible for Sponsored Products, your item must meet the following criteria:

• Product is in stock
• Product is winning the Buy Box
• Product listing is published on Walmart.com

2. What are Sponsored Brands?

Sponsored Brands are banner ads that appear at the top of search results, showcasing a collection of your products along with your brand logo and a custom headline. These ads are great to drive brand awareness for smaller brands, newer brands and brands with new products that may not yet have good organic search rankings yet in Walmart search results.

Benefits of Sponsored Brands:

• Build awareness for new or smaller brands
• Promote multiple products at once
• Drive traffic to a curated brand page
• Reinforce brand identity

Best Practices for Sponsored Brands:

• Use a compelling headline: Highlight your unique selling points.
• Choose cohesive products: Select products that complement each other.
• Leverage brand pages: Direct traffic to a well-designed brand page for better conversions.

Sponsored Brands Eligibility:

You must be the brand owner or an authorized reseller for a brand and meet the following requirements:

• Based in the United States, China, Hong Kong, United Kingdom or India
• Rights owner registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office
• Registered with the Walmart Brand Portal, Walmart’s intellectual property rights management platform

3. What are Sponsored Videos?

Sponsored Videos are autoplay video ads that appear in the search results. They capture the shopper’s attention through motion and sound, and help customers understand product features and benefits quickly.

Why Use Sponsored Videos:

• Stand out in search results
• Deliver engaging content
• Explain complex products easily

Tips for Creating High-Converting Sponsored Videos:

• Create an engaging thumbnail image
• Keep it short and clear (15-30 seconds)
• Focus on key features and benefits
• Use captions for sound-off viewing
• Include a clear call to action (CTA)

Sponsored Videos Eligibility:

You must be a brand owner or authorized reseller and meet the following requirements:

• Based in the United States, China, Hong Kong, United Kingdom or India
• Rights owner registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office
• Registered and onboarded to the Walmart Brand Portal

Onsite Display Advertising: Expand Beyond Search

Onsite Display ads are excellent for retargeting and prospecting new customers, as these campaigns allow sellers to attract shoppers at every stage of the buyer journey. With this type of advertising, sellers create engaging visuals and use Walmart's first-party data to run customized and personalized campaigns.

Sellers manage Onsite Display campaigns by setting up a base and maximum bid as well as a daily or lifetime budget strategy. Then, you select from various different targeting tactics:

• Contextual: Your ad appears on search or product pages in your category.
• Behavioral: Your ads are shown to customers based on their online and in-store shopping behavior.
• Keyword: Your ads appear on search pages for specific keywords you choose.
• Run-of-site: This strategy allows you to reach a wide variety of Walmart customers with no targeting applied. Your ad simply appears all across the Walmart site or app, with the exception of the home page.

Use Cases:

• Target recent buyers
• Retarget users who viewed but didn’t purchase
• Attract new customers based on behavior, lifestyle, life stage or demographics
• Support seasonal or promotional campaigns

How It Works:

After setting up your Walmart Onsite Display account, you can easily bid on available display inventory, create custom ad creatives, and launch campaigns with complete control over your budget and pricing. These campaigns operate on a Display Auction system based on eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions), meaning you pay for every 1,000 times your ad is shown.

Walmart Onsite Display campaigns use dynamic bidding to automatically adjust your bids up or down depending on how your campaign is performing. They also follow a first-price auction model, where the highest bid wins and the winner pays their actual bid amount—never exceeding their maximum bid.

Through the self-serve Walmart Connect Ad Center, you maintain full control over every impression, allowing you to efficiently manage and optimize your campaigns

Onsite Display Eligibility:

Walmart Onsite Display is a self-serve offering, only available to Marketplace brand owners and authorized resellers registered with the Walmart Brand Portal. While there is no minimum spending requirement to use Onsite Display, Walmart suggests spending a minimum of $4,500 per campaign each month.

Pro Tip: Work with an approved Walmart Media Partner for creative campaign and targeting expertise.

Promotions on Walmart Marketplace

Advertising is only part of the equation. Walmart also allows sellers to run promotions to increase conversions and competitiveness. Promotional pricing allows you to offer customers great deals on the products you sell. The Promotionspage in Seller Center allows you to create and view Active, Scheduled, Draft, Expired or Canceled Promotional Pricing.

Promotions are identified on Walmart Marketplace with a Reduced Price or a Clearance flag and a strikethrough on the Was Price or List Price. Walmart sellers can reduce the price of their items by offering a percentage off or a dollar amount off. The "Rollback" tag is not available to Marketplace sellers; it is only for items sold directly by Walmart.

Best Practices for Promotions:

• Promotion updates can take up to four hours to publish. Therefor, you should create your promotion in Seller Center at least 24 hours before you want the promotion to begin.
• Plan ahead for seasonal events (e.g., Black Friday, Cyber Monday)
• Stack promotions with ads for better impact
• Monitor inventory to avoid stockouts

Walmart Advertising Campaign Optimization Strategies

To make the most of your Walmart advertising budget, continual optimization is key.

Key Optimization Tactics:

• A/B test creatives: Try different headlines, images, and video thumbnails.
• Monitor performance regularly: Use Walmart Connect’s dashboard to analyze impressions, clicks, ROAS, and conversions.
• Refine targeting: Use keyword reports and search term analysis to improve targeting.
• Adjust budgets and bids: Allocate more budget to high-performing campaigns and reduce spend on underperformers.
• Leverage analytics tools: Consider third-party platforms that offer advanced insights and automation.
• Test new keywords and target new audiences: Discover growth opportunities and improve campaign performance by diversifying your advertising strategies.
• Partner with an Advertising Agency: Ad agencies provide expert guidance and support to implement and optimize ad campaigns for better results.

Common Mistakes to Avoid:

• Ignoring mobile optimization
• Failing to update creative assets
• Neglecting to test multiple ad formats
• Not aligning ads with promotional calendars

Measuring Ad Performance and ROI

To ensure the success of your Walmart advertising campaigns, it’s essential to measure ad performance and ROI. Walmart Connect provides closed-loop measurement, allowing you to track the impact of your ads on sales and revenue. By monitoring key metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on ad spend, you can optimize your ad campaigns for better performance and maximize your ROI.

As a Walmart Marketplace seller, you can use the Seller Center to access detailed performance data and make data-driven decisions to improve your advertising strategy. By continually monitoring and optimizing your ad campaigns, you can drive more sales, increase brand loyalty, and grow your business on Walmart Marketplace.

Advertising Tools and Resources

To succeed on Walmart Marketplace, use the tools provided by Walmart Connect and other third-party platforms:

• Walmart Ad Center: Set up and manage all campaigns
• Walmart Brand Portal: For brand page customization, content control and intellectual property protection
• Third-Party Tools: SellCord, Skai, Teikametrics, and others

Helpful Resources:

• Walmart Seller Center Help
• Walmart Connect Learning Hub includes training webinars and videos to learn about using Walmart's advertising tools, optimizing campaigns, and understanding the advertising platform
• Walmart Connect certification courses offer more advanced ad strategies and techniques
• Marketplace seller forums and communities are a great way to learn from other eCommerce sellers

Conclusion

Walmart Marketplace advertising offers a powerful way to boost product visibility, drive sales, and build your brand. By understanding and utilizing Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Videos, Display Ads, and strategic promotions, sellers can create an impactful and scalable marketing strategy.

Remember, the key to success is continuous optimization. Regularly review your campaign performance, adjust your strategies, and experiment with different formats to find what works best for your brand. With the right approach, advertising on Walmart Marketplace can be a game-changer for your eCommerce business.