Starting March 1, 2021, all Walmart Sponsored Products campaigns will automatically start serving ads on both Walmart.com and Pickup & delivery placements (also known as “Online Pickup & Delivery” or “OPD”). As more and more consumers turn to online shopping for their daily essentials, groceries, and other household items, Pickup & delivery offers an important channel for brands to reach their audience.
Walmart Connect is leaning into this shift in consumer behavior by expanding the advertising opportunities available to brands. Starting March 1, Sponsored Product ads will display in the most relevant positions across .com and Pickup & delivery, simplifying campaign management, expanding ad inventory available, and enabling every brand to reach high-intent grocery shoppers. As a Walmart Advertising Partner, Pacvue will now have access to Pickup & delivery ad placements.
Jacob Snelson, Vice President of Marketing at OneStone, a full-service eCommerce agency and Pacvue partner, is looking forward to these new developments from Walmart Connect. “We are incredibly excited about the moves Walmart and Walmart Connect are making by giving more advertisers and vendors access to OPD ads on Walmart.com,” said Jacob. “Advertising on Walmart OPD has been on the rise, and now that Walmart is opening access to all brands it will be more critical than ever to find the right partner to make calculated ad buying decisions. Pacvue is that partner to dig deeper into .com advertising insights and optimizing sponsored product campaigns that lead to lower costs to advertising and increasing sales.”
How It Works
Sponsored Product campaigns will automatically start serving ads on both Walmart.com and Pickup & delivery placements starting March 1. No action is required on your end as an advertiser, but there are a few things that you should be aware of with this transition:
- Pickup & delivery inventory will now be available through the Walmart Advertising Partners program, including campaigns managed through Pacvue
- Default attribution will be standardized to 14-day click attribution
- Only base SKUs (not variant SKUs) will be accepted for all search campaigns.
- Reporting will now be combined to include Walmart.com and Pickup & delivery
With more ad placements available and consumer behavior continuing to grow Pickup & delivery’s relevance, we recommend increasing your budget for Sponsored Products campaigns. In general, advertisers are seeing higher conversion rates and higher ROAS with Pickup & delivery placements, so now that ads will serve in the most relevant placements across the board, we expect overall campaign performance to improve.
Ad Placements
Similar to Walmart.com, Sponsored Products will appear in the grid of search and browse results. To be eligible for these placements, products must organically appear in the top 128 search results. These placements are a good way to maintain digital Share of Voice when consumers are searching for your category, or you can promote relevant, related products to edge out the competition.
Sponsored Products will also appear on the homepage of the Pickup & delivery site in a Featured Items carousel near the top of the page. Walmart Connect automatically populates these placements based on a product’s regional search frequency, store availability, and bid price.
Sponsored Products may also appear in personalized placements, such as “Recommended for you” and “You may also like” placements. Being an early adopter of Pickup & delivery advertising will enable you to gain market share before your placements and drive high-conversion, repeat purchases as customers return to Walmart Pickup & delivery to stock up, replenish their groceries, and repurchase their go-to items.
Managing Ads with Pacvue
If you’re already managing Walmart Sponsored Products campaigns through Pacvue, your Sponsored Products will start appearing on both .com and Pickup & delivery placements starting March 1, depending on the most relevant placements for your products.
You can run both manual and automatic campaigns through Pacvue, and both will serve ads across .com and Pickup & delivery. Currently, only automatic campaigns will serve ads on Pickup & delivery homepage, checkout, and other personalized ad placements, while manual campaigns enable you to manage precise targeting on search in-grid placements.
Regardless of campaign type, you can use bid modifiers to increase bids for the placements you care about most. For example, if you’re launching a new product, you may want to use a bid multiplier to bid more aggressively for the homepage carousel, where your product will reach a wide variety of shoppers and drive a high number of impressions. Keep in mind that Walmart Sponsored Products campaigns are a first-price auction, meaning the winning bid pays the full amount, so use bid scaling to increase your bids incrementally over time until you reach the maximum CPC you want to bid or are meeting your goals. You can use Pacvue rule-based optimization to set up automatic bid scaling.
Reporting will be combined across .com and Pickup & delivery, and will not be broken out. We expect overall performance to improve, since ads will be serving on the most relevant placements across a wider variety of ad inventory.
Most importantly, managing all of your Sponsored Products campaigns through a Walmart Advertising Partner, such as Pacvue, enables you to simplify your SKU management and avoids the potential conflict of “competing against yourself” when bidding for the same placement from different sources. Pacvue was one of the first partners in the Walmart Advertising Partner program, and advertisers have seen success using our campaign management, rule-based optimization, dayparting, and other solutions to increase sales efficiently with Walmart. In fact, the TV manufacturer Hisense saw a 72% increase in Return on Ad Spend and 46% increase in conversion rate after using Pacvue.
To learn more, or for help making the most of Walmart Pickup & delivery advertising, request a demo today.
