(Note: Our guest author of this article is Michael Lebhar, CEO of SellCord. To learn more about how SellCord can help your brand excel on Walmart.com, check out their complete package of services.)
Walmart Connect (previously known as Walmart Media Group) is Walmart’s own advertising platform that allows brands to promote their products and services directly to Walmart customers. With access to Walmart’s immense first-party data and audience insights, Walmart Connect makes it easy to drive product discovery, brand awareness, and sales on Walmart.com.
In this beginner’s guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about getting started with Walmart Connect advertising, including how it works, the different ad formats and options, tips for success, and why it should be a key part of your ecommerce advertising strategy.
What Is Walmart Connect and How Does It Work?
Walmart Connect is the media division of Walmart, which provides Walmart suppliers with a platform to reach new customers through online, in-store, and sponsored media channels across the internet.
In 2021 the Walmart Media Group was renamed to Walmart Connect, marking the start of its aggressive growth into becoming a leading advertising platform. Walmart Connect is inclusive of Walmart’s advertising solutions that serve advertisers of all sizes to help them make meaningful connections with their shoppers.
Some key facts about Walmart Connect:
- Saw 41% growth in Q4 of 2022, reaching $2.7 billion in global ad revenues.
- Offers display, search, and shopping ads on Walmart sites and apps.
- Leverages Walmart’s data to target ads to high-intent customers.
- Auction-based pricing based on each ad’s expected performance.
Walmart Connect allows advertisers to promote products and brand awareness to Walmart’s huge customer base during the shopping journey. You can target audiences by interests, behaviors, demographics, and more.
A big draw of Walmart Connect is the many innovative ways in which it lets sellers reach out to buyers. You can run ads to promote your product at every stage of the customer journey, targeting them when you believe it would be most effective. Not only that, Walmart Connect even lets you reach customers as they shop in-store!
Walmart boasts over 4,600 locations in the United States alone and around 170,000 screens (in the form of TV wall and self-checkout screens), all of which sellers can gain access to through Walmart Connect. This obviously has immense potential for growing brands.
Why Should Sellers Use Walmart Connect?
Being the digital advertising arm of the world’s most famous retail giant, Walmart Connect gives sellers the ability to reach Walmart’s expansive audience and turn them into buyers through sponsored ads. This is a fantastic way to accelerate your business’ growth. But it’s not just about generating extra sales.
One of the best ways to take advantage of Walmart Connect is by using it to launch new products. Most sellers know that launching a new item, especially in a highly competitive category, is often a huge challenge. It’s possible for your listing to get buried in the results and never get any traction. That’s where Walmart Connect comes in.
Sponsored ads allow you to drive qualified traffic to your new listings, and those initial sales can help establish it through review generation and by improving the listing’s metrics. This is one of the strongest strategies for launching new products on the marketplace, and it is one utilized by many of the website’s top sellers.
Benefits of the Program
Walmart Connect might be relatively new in the ecommerce space, but it already has a lot of things going for it. Here are a few advantages it has that sellers can look forward to:
1. Unmatched Audience Reach
With over 100 million monthly visitors, Walmart’s audience reach is massive. This doesn’t even take into account the foot traffic that Walmart gets, which as mentioned earlier you can gain access to through their omnichannel implementation. Walmart Connect provides an easy way to benefit from the company’s impressive reach.
2. Powerful Audience Targeting
Leverage Walmart’s first-party data on purchase history, interests, demographics, and more to target your ideal customers. If you have a clear idea of your ideal customer, Walmart Connect’s targeting capabilities will allow you to maximize returns while maintaining great efficiency.
3. Improved Search Visibility
Walmart Connect Search Ads can help you rank higher in Walmart’s product search results pages. Considering how competitive some product categories can be, Walmart Connect is vital for ranking at the top of the search results now.
4. Measurable ROI
See exactly how your ads are performing through Walmart Connect’s robust analytics and reporting. Measure conversions, ROI, and more. With these reports, there are no surprises, and you’ll know just how well sponsored ads are working for your business.
Walmart Connect Advertising Options
With a wide range of advertising options available, Walmart Connect enables brands to connect with customers at every stage of their purchasing journey. From sponsored products and sponsored brands to display ads and video advertising, Walmart Connect offers a comprehensive suite of solutions to help brands reach their target audience and drive sales.
Whether a brand is looking to increase awareness, drive traffic, or boost conversions, Walmart Connect has the tools and expertise to help them succeed. Here’s an overview of what sellers can expect:
Sponsored Products
Sponsored Products ads on Walmart’s site and app are displayed to customers actively searching for items. By appearing on search results, product pages, and other relevant sections, these ads can significantly increase visibility for your products. These ads are designed to help you reach potential customers who are already motivated and looking for products similar to yours, guiding them to your item page and potentially driving sales.
Here are some Sponsored Product Placement options you can consider:
1. Personalized Carousels
Personalized Carousels on Walmart Connect offer premium ad placement on the homepage and relevant item pages based on customer search and browse behavior. Each carousel can feature up to eight Sponsored Products ads, which may appear in any position. With multiple carousels per page, this feature provides increased visibility and engagement opportunities for your brand.
2. Search In-Grid Placement
One of the most popular Walmart ad placements is Sponsored Products that appear in search results. These cost-per-click (CPC) ads show up throughout Walmart’s search result pages and direct users to relevant product detail pages on Walmart.com.
Marketers can set custom budgets and bids to control spend, only paying when someone clicks on your ad. The minimum spend is $100 for the full campaign duration or $50 per day. This ad placement is great for driving targeted traffic to your Walmart product pages.
3. Sponsored Products Carousels
Carousels are a prominent feature on Walmart Connect, appearing on search pages, browse pages, and the item pages of similar or relevant items. When a customer clicks on an ad within a carousel, they are taken directly to the item page to make a purchase, making it a highly effective advertising tool.
On search pages, only one carousel is displayed per page, while on item pages, two carousels are featured. Each carousel contains up to 20 ads, providing ample opportunities for brands to showcase their products.
4. Buy Box
The Buy Box banner exclusive appears on Walmart product detail pages, showcasing an alternate or complementary item to what the shopper is viewing. For example, if a shopper is viewing a particular hair dye brand, your competing hair dye brand could be displayed in the Buy Box spot.
As you might expect, this premium placement is extremely visible and competitive. Think of the Buy Box banner as a high-value placement that is only awarded to ads with the highest bid and relevancy scores.
5. My Items In-Grid
Enhance the shopping experience for Walmart customers by strategically placing ads within the “reorder” section of their My Items page. This high-visibility placement influences existing customers at a crucial stage of their shopping journey, as they review past purchases and complete their cart. The ad, showcasing an in-stock item previously bought by the customer, appears within a relevant category grid. Positioned before organic results, these ads maintain a balance, with a maximum of 50% of the grid dedicated to advertisements. This targeted approach ensures that customers are presented with relevant products, maximizing engagement and driving conversions effectively on Walmart’s platform.
Sponsored Brands
If you’re looking to increase your brand’s visibility on Walmart, Sponsored Brands is a premium placement option that you might want to consider. This keyword-targeted or category-targeted placement appears at the top of search results when Walmart customers search for items similar to yours.
Sponsored Brands include your brand logo and up to four items with shoppable links, making it an excellent option for smaller brands, new brands, and brands with new items that may not have high organic search rankings yet.
Sponsored Videos
Sponsored Videos are a premium ad solution offered by Walmart Connect that can significantly improve the visibility of your advertised items within search results. These short video ads are designed to complement Walmart Onsite Display, helping to boost awareness and discovery of new brands and products.
Incorporating Sponsored Videos into your search campaigns, alongside Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products, can enhance your product discoverability strategy in search. By using Sponsored Videos, you can showcase your unique brand positioning and help build awareness and product consideration in a descriptive, easy-to-understand narrative.
Display Advertising
Beyond its owned-and-operated sites, Walmart leverages a partnership with The Trade Desk demand-side platform (DSP) for offsite display ads. It uses shopper data for efficient targeting and lets you advertise to Walmart shoppers as they browse the wider web.
Walmart also offers onsite display advertising through its self-serve platform. This grants access to Walmart.com display inventory for greater onsite visibility.
Getting Started With Walmart Connect
If you’re sold on the idea of advertising with Walmart, it’s time to decide how you want to go about doing so.
Option 1: Sign Up on Walmart Connect
Just fill out the form on their Contact page and a representative from Walmart Connect will get in touch with you. Be aware, however, that the platform is fairly selective, so newer sellers without a proven track record may find it difficult to qualify.
Option 2: Work With a Walmart Connect Partner
The second and easier choice is to just let the experts handle it. Walmart Connect has several partners that can help you advertise your products. Agencies such as SellCord provide a fully managed service, letting you focus on running your business.
Tips for Walmart Connect Advertising Success
So your Walmart Connect account has been set up, now what? Here are some proven tips to help maximize your Walmart Connect advertising:
- Start with search and shopping ads to promote specific products rather than broad branding campaigns.
- Test different audience segments and product targeting options to find what works.
- Use negative keywords to avoid irrelevant traffic and reduce costs.
- Design multiple ad variations and AB test creatives.
- Monitor click-through rates to find your best-performing assets.
- Enable auto-bidding and let Walmart Connect optimize bids for conversions.
- Analyze performance trends and metrics to identify optimization opportunities.
- Be patient — it takes time to collect data and fine-tune campaigns.
- Combine with off-site marketing like email and social ads for greater impact.
By continually refining your targeting, offers, and creatives based on data, your Walmart Connect campaigns will become more efficient and effective over time.
How SellCord Can Help
SellCord is a Walmart-approved partner agency that exclusively focuses on helping brands scale on Walmart.com. We offer services and tools to help brands grow on the platform. Reach out to [email protected] to learn more about how we can help your brand grow!
How 8th & Walton Can Help
If you want to be successful with Walmart, you need to know how to use the Walmart resources that are available to you.
Few Walmart resources are as potentially game-changing as Walmart Luminate and Retail Link®. If you want to know how you can use the data from them to grow your Walmart business — not just in advertising, but in other aspects as well — we can help.
8th & Walton offers over one dozen classes that will teach you how to make full use of Walmart’s incredible resources.
If you are a new supplier to Walmart, our team can get you off to a strong start. Talk with 8th & Walton experts as you begin this exciting journey with the world’s largest retailer.
Complete the form below to schedule your free consultation.
Conclusion
Walmart Connect is fast becoming an essential advertising channel, and sellers cannot afford to ignore it if they want to remain competitive.
With its unmatched shopper reach, integrated data, and variety of ad placements, Walmart Connect makes it easier than ever to drive awareness, traffic, and sales on Walmart.com.
Get started today!
