Win at Walmart.com by optimizing your strategy for Walmart’s unique features. Learn a 4-step roadmap to Walmart advertising success and the differences between Amazon and Walmart advertising.
Summary
Your brand can succeed on Walmart.com—but you’ll need to refine your strategy to navigate the unique features of Walmart advertising. This webinar provides a simple, 4-step roadmap to winning on Walmart.com and covers the fundamental differences between Amazon and Walmart advertising.
Key Takeaways
- Don’t clone your Amazon strategy: Walmart and Amazon have different product requirements, attribution windows, and bid options. Walmart uses first-price auctions (the winner pays what they bid), so start low and increase slowly until you hit your KPIs.
- Step 1—Be discoverable: Products must be in the top 128 organic placements on a given keyword in order to bid with paid search.
- Step 2—Optimize keywords: Use keywords with high volume and low competition—and capture more share by targeting keywords your competitors are organically ranking on.
- Step 3—Analyze the market: Build your targeting strategy based on Share of Search. And since competition for Walmart advertising is lower than on Amazon, your ad spend goes further.
- Step 4—Scale spend efficiently: Use bid modifiers to prioritize high-conversion placements (like search), and use dayparting to target high-traffic shopping times.
Transcript
Matt
Alright, looks like our attendees joining is starting to slow down a little bit, so I will go ahead and kick things off today. Thank you everyone for making time and joining us today, Pacvue and SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder. Our webinar today is gonna be discussing the four-step roadmap to Walmart advertising success. We have an hour blocked off today. We’ll spend the first probably 20 to 30 minutes or so, maybe a little longer, going through some slides that Pacvue, SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder have prepared for all the attendees today. We do have a big chunk of time reserved towards the end of this today for a Q&A section. One quick note to anyone on the line that does have questions and would like to raise their hand, ask questions during this webinar, this recording, within the Zoom platform, there is a Q&A feature. If you do have any questions that you would like answered at the end of this during the Q&A section, please feel free to enter those questions as we go slide by slide through the stack into this presentation. Feel free to ask your questions in real time, but just please know that we will be answering all of your questions at the very end in our Q&A section.
So kicking things off with presenters today, this is Matt McGrory speaking, Account Director at Pacvue. Some of you may or may not be familiar with Pacvue, but it’s an enterprise platform for brands, sellers, and agencies to programmatically manage and optimize e-commerce advertising across multiple retailer platforms.
Atal
Hi, this is Atal Patel, VP Agency Solutions, at SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder. We’re really focused on search with Walmart.com across the board, and [0:01:30.4] ____ content and excited about partnership with Pacvue.
Matt
Awesome, thank you.
Atal
Yeah, so a little bit about us just overall, SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder has been in business for over a decade, so we’ve been in the content syndication game. We really haven’t taken any outside investment, privately owned, we’re happy to code it right here Northwest Arkansas in Springdale, and we’re really focused on search and conversion. So how do you win search across walmart.com and OGP, and how do you get there at the right place with right content and ensuring your PDPs are on-point enhanced, getting a report card back, which I’ll share later as well.
Matt
Perfect.
Atal
And then just going into, about five years ago, we became connected content partner with Walmart, real excited about that. We have dynamic connections to Walmart API, and we have people on site at Walmart, so if there’s any issues, we can work back with the category specials at Walmart, and really focusing in on rich media, hitting the right insights, including with advertising through Pacvue and integrating the ad management tool. So that’s really exciting for us, and as I mentioned, working alongside content specialists and folks onsite, whether it be buyers or marketers as well.
Matt
Perfect, thank you Atal. So a quick agenda here for everyone on the line today, four main sections here, first and foremost, where to start with Walmart advertising. I’m sure that many of you are either brand new or fairly new to Walmart advertising, especially as their self-service platform launched fairly recently, and it’s a very quickly evolving and ever-changing platform, so I’m gonna begin with a quick introduction of where to start. The main section here is number two there, the four-step roadmap, that is the theme of today’s webinar, your four-step roadmap for success in Walmart advertising, so I will be sharing that section with Atal. Three and four, just some key takeaways, some big high level takeaways for you to make sure that you’re being successful and have a really quick action plan coming out of this webinar today, and then again, reserving at least 20-30 minutes, a big chunk of time at the end to answer any and all questions that you have. So one more quick reminder, please feel free to be adding those Q&A questions in your Q&A feature as we go and we’ll answer those at the end of this presentation.
So quickly, where to start when it comes to Walmart advertising. We know that it can be a little daunting, a little scary since it is brand new and some people on the line may be a little bit more comfortable with other retailers, other technology platforms, but really I wanted to start off grounding us in the big two in terms of retailer integrated paid search platform, so the kind of big 300-pound gorilla in the room is Amazon, of course, with Walmart launching their comparable product in January of this year and scaling very quickly, the reason that we wanted to start with the slide is there are some extremely critical differences in the two platforms in the way that their algorithms and their bidding and auction models work. And the reason that we show this as slide one essentially is because that has a huge impact on how you both craft and then manage and optimize your strategy for the two different retailer platforms. So a lot of takeaways here, I’m not gonna go line by line, but a few really important ones is top one there, ad products, this is ad products for their self-service platform. Amazon has sponsored products, which is the most common or high volume sponsored brands, campaigns, and then sponsored display, for the self-service platform, Walmart currently only has sponsored products, so that’s a big difference between the two right away.
The next two most important that I will cover on this is the attribution model default there, the second row down, and then the fourth row down auction model. So first, for attribution model, these are pretty different. Amazon’s is a 14-day attribution window as a default, and it is a click-only attribution, meaning that for sales to count towards that impression, it has to be coming from a click where a customer clicked on your branded ad and then purchased within your brand in 14 days. Walmart does offer different attribution models via their API, so there is a three-day window versus just a 30-day, which is their default, you can also get a clicks-only attribution on Walmart via their API. So if you wanna see apples to apples, the Amazon model versus the Walmart model, but the Walmart default attribution model is a 30-day versus Amazon’s 14 days.
So it’s double the timeline for attributable sales. It’s also views and/or clicks, so technically, a customer could view your ad on Walmart, not click on your ad, but then purchase within your same brand within 29 days of viewing your paid search ad, and it would still count as part of their attribution model, which is their default. So first and foremost, just right off the bat, super, super important to make sure that if you are comparing your performance on Walmart to other retailers or other platforms, especially Amazon, just knowing that there is a difference there in the attribution model, that can skew your comparison, so just wanna make sure you’re comparing it as much as possible in an apples to apples fashion.
And then the last one we’ll cover on this slide is auction model, the fourth row down. This is, in my opinion, the most important differentiator between these two retailer paid search platforms. So Amazon’s is what we refer to as a second price auction model, and then Walmart’s is what’s referred to as a first price auction model. So really, really big difference here is Amazon, the second price model, you generally only pay one cent more than the next highest bid for that same exact keyword, so if you were bidding $5, the next most competitive bid is $4, you do not pay $5, you pay generally $4.01. Walmart, on the other hand, as part as their first price auction model, if you bid $5 and the next most competitive bid is 25 cents, you’re not paying 26 cents, you do pay that full $5 for that cost-per click bid. So we have seen, it’s a very common mistake and it’s a very understandable mistake… We’ve seen a lot of advertisers assume that Walmart is the same exact second price model as Amazon, and it’s unfortunately seen lots of advertisers bid $10, $15 for across the click bid, and they end up paying that amount, so just a really, really important differentiator there to make sure that you’re taking that into account when deciding what cost-per-click bid to bid for high volume keywords.
Alright, and then next up here is the competitive landscape here. So the charts that you’re looking at here are share-of-voice. This is not market share, this is impression-based paid share-of-voice, so a really great proxy for how much of the available ad real estate you’re taking up on a retailer platform. This is tracked at a keyword bucket level, so the charts you’re seeing here are based on 10 very high volume keywords combined in the consumer electronic segment. So the top chart is Walmart’s, bottom chart is Amazon’s. We’ll go to Amazon first on the bottom for the top 10 keywords in the category, there were 84 brands that owned at least some amount of paid share-of-voice, so 84 brands actively hitting on those 10 keywords in the category, and no brand owned more than 10% paid share-of-voice, so very, very equal share, spread out, super competitive category for those 10 keywords on Amazon.
Those same exact 10 keywords on Walmart, flipping up to the top chart, it was only two active brands in Q2 of this year, so fairly recently, with one brand accounting for over 90% paid share-of-voice. So the takeaway on this slide here is that top section, bolded there. There is currently much less competition right now for paid placements on Walmart versus Amazon. That will definitely change. It will almost certainly become more competitive over time, but the key takeaway here is, strike while the iron is hot. Competition’s relatively low, so we think it’s the best time possible to begin testing on Walmart while competition is still relatively low.
Alright, so a couple of key unique considerations for Walmart. First and foremost, they do use their first price auction model, meaning you do pay your full price bid. I really can’t stress that enough. It is critically important in making sure that you’re not spending too much per click, and then also making sure that you’re driving efficient results from your marketing spend. A second one here, this is also a really, really hugely important one that is different from Amazon. So for an item to be eligible to appear in results for a certain search term, that item that you’re promoting has to also appear in the top 128 organic search results… I believe it’s the first five pages on Walmart for that same exact search term. There is currently no great scalable way, but hopefully that will change soon via their API availability, to be able to audit to show exactly which of your SKUs is or is not ranking in the top 128 for those keywords.
So the recommendation at this time… This is definitely going to change, so this recommendation will change over time… Is just load whatever keywords you would like for the SKUs that you want to promote. If your SKU does not rank in the top 128 for that keyword, it won’t give you a notification per se, but you just won’t serve for that keyword and you won’t be charged for any clicks. So really, really critically important there, where if you’re seeing your session volume a little bit low, if you are seeing things not take off the way you would expect it, one good audit is to make sure that the SKUs you’re promoting are ranking in the top 128. A quick fix there, or a quick way to get around that and mitigate that is, if you don’t rank in the top 128 for that search term, you can promote that same SKU via an auto campaign, use auto-targeting instead of manual keyword-based targeting. That’s a really great step to use if you’re not ranking in the top 128 and trying to build your item’s relevance. And the last one there again, the competition, relatively low. Early adopters have a ton of advantage right now. I can’t stress that enough really. I think it’s a great time to jump in and start testing. Alright, I’m gonna kick it over to Atal.
Atal
Yeah, perfect. I think the biggest thing we hear on WMG is how do we optimize overall, and how can I prove my spend is working, and there’s real simple ways to doing that. So the number one thing is discoverability of your items overall. So, Matt, if you can flip over to my next slide. Perfect. So the Walmart content quality score, Walmart is recently mandating a 95% or higher on quality score. So what that means is the type of content you have on your page, images, videos, peripheral content, that really picks up on the algorithm in searchability and it being picked up. So whether it’s chocolate cake or whether it’s diapers, ensuring that you’re showing up, to Matt’s point earlier, in the top five pages, or even the top five ranks overall, both organically and paid.
So there’s a lot of easy things you can do with us at Pacvue to fix your items on walmart.com, whether it be rich media, whether it be uploading images overall, whether you’re one peer or three days. And this is an example of our quality score dashboard. So we upload all of your SKUs, whether it’s five items or 500 items or 1000 overall, and you’re able to get a quality score back based on your title or your descriptions, images, video, time batching, you can see it and it’s live URLs. You click this down here in the plus sign, and you can see where you were at previously, and what you fix organically overall to improve that quality score. So it’s a really nice, again, report card for your items. The really important on retailer websites is keywords, so we know the importance of Google keywords, but shoppers search very differently on retail sites, which are much more specific, right? So we have a prioritized keyword list that shows you volume based on relevance and product types, and what are competitors paying for organically overall. So whether that be a top 50 or a top 10, you’re getting insight if you’re a supplier in baby or a supplier in beauty or consumer electronics, you’re getting all that data back as well.
And here’s an example of this top 15 for chocolate cake. Obviously, there’s a lot of weight in cake here, but there’s maybe some lower ranking terms, and the big thing here is looking at what should you be bidding on overall, whether it’s exact match or broad match, and that’s really, really critical in working with both our teams. And the really nice thing is competitive analysis. So we take a look at share-of-search, so are you showing up as number 30 or are you showing up as number two, or are you paying for position number three overall? So this is almost again, a report card that you can build a strategy on really winnable keywords that make the most sense. So we had a supplier, an OTC that was a number 30 that we elevated to number one, overall in share-of-search. And if you switch on to the next slide Matt, you can easily see top keywords, competitors, all those color codings, so that’s maybe a little bit harder to see. But you can click on any of those boxes and you can go direct to the PDP page, or product detail page, and see where your competitors are buying versus where you rank, and how we can… Both our teams can elevate you in those positions.
Matt
Awesome, thank you Atal. So next couple of slides, I’m gonna flip back one real quick, the next four slides are talking about how to scale spend efficiently, so we have compiled a couple of different data points and metrics for you, this is across multiple advertisers, multiple product categories over Q1 and Q2 of this year, some pretty large data sets with some key takeaways for you and just some guidance on where is the most important, where are people putting their spend and where most importantly are advertisers driving the most efficiencies. So first up is page type placement data, so a really quick overview here, these three rows, we have browse page, item page, and then search page, those are kind of the big three on Walmart. There are some secondary page type you can appear on like category pages, things like that. They’re not quite as common here, but for the purpose of this presentation, we’re focusing on these big three that really make up the vast majority of available impressions and especially ad sales on Walmart.
So first and foremost, we’re seeing bottom row, their search placements, first column is a cost, so a super, super low a cost of about 46%. Some of you may realize this is much lower than you may be seeing on another retailer platforms. Kind of a great example of how non-competitive it is versus other retailers at the moment here, but search placements tend to work best mainly due to the fact that they are those premium very visible placements for customers. We also see bottom right there, about 43% of advertisers spend is currently going towards those search in-grid, you’ll sometimes hear it called in-grid placements, but also item page performing very well too. So as you see the cost-per-click on item page placement is a little bit higher. It’s up almost double, so it’s not quite as efficient, but you still see a really, really strong conversion at about 7% versus the 7.3% for search, so pretty equal roughly equal spend allocation with better efficiencies coming from search placements.One really, really big, important caveat that I wanna include here is this can vary widely based on e-brands, your product, and especially the product category itself, so a lot of times we’ll see lower ASP, lower priced items may tend to perform a little better in search placements. We’ve also seen on the flip side, some higher ASP or maybe more competitive categories, things like TVs, mattresses, consumer electronics, those sometimes tend to perform better in item page placements, and then one really important note on that is, if you are a brand within your product category that maybe tends to have a higher price point, is maybe not necessarily an entry level brand per se, we do tend to see better performance or maybe a higher ASP item on item page placements, and then if your item is maybe a little bit lower in ASP in terms of the entire product category, tends to see stronger performance from those more expensive but more visible search ad placements, and the main, main takeaway here is, like I said, it can vary widely, this is across hundreds of advertisers and dozens of product categories. So the biggest recommendation here is take this with a grain of salt, this is kind of a starting point. I highly, highly encourage you to test this for your specific product category and your brand because this can very widely.
Next up is the actual platforms or devices themselves, excuse me, Walmart, compared to other retailers, give some really, really great data points into actual platforms and devices themselves, so the big three here are the Walmart app, the desktop experience, and then the mobile web browsing experience. Main takeaway here is at that first row, you can see it has both the lowest a cost at 5.2% or so. The lowest cost-per-clicks are the most inefficient cost-per-click, and it’s also that very top right percent of spend is accounting for basically 50% of all advertisers spend is going to in-app placements here. So we’re seeing a lot of great adoption on the Walmart app, especially during covid craziness over the past few months, we’ve had some really interesting data points from Walmart, Walmart was the number one shopping app in the iOS app store for Apple devices for multiple weeks during the peak covid spike and the shift towards e-commerce purchasing. The Walmart app downloads actually surpassed Amazon app downloads for a few specific weeks, so huge, astronomical growth for the Walmart app, so super important to be making sure that you’re looking at not only the page type placements, but your device type placement.
And then last callout here is Walmart’s OGP or OG online grocery pickup, one of the biggest growth drivers for Walmart as a company, especially from a digital perspective. I know that that is a massive corporate priority for Walmart is their online grocery pickup that is currently a separate experience. There are plans to combine it with their general dot com core business. But as of today, there’s currently no sponsored ads opportunities within online grocery pickup. This is not based on any information from Walmart, but we do expect that to change some time in the future since that’s such a big opportunity. So the reason I bring this up is, that mobile app experience is the core of the OGP business, they are very app-heavy. And so when OGP does launch sponsored ads opportunities at some point down the road, we believe that this app placement will be even more critical to your success, if you are an OGP participating brand. Alright. And the last one here is your page type based on consumable products or durable products. So we included this here because we do see some pretty interesting disparities here with the difference in cost-per-click for consumable goods versus durable.
So you can see cost-per-click there for consumables in the middle column, more than double at least, sometimes getting close to triple for the comparable cost-per-click for a durable product or a durable product category. So it probably comes as no surprise, but Walmart has seen a lot of early adoption from consumables brand, some of your big CPG brands that just have the ability to launch quickly on Walmart. So we’re seeing higher competition for consumable goods versus durable goods, but the next… The biggest callout here is that these placements do depend, and the cost-per-clicks and efficiencies do vary based on what type of product you’re selling. And so again, kind of consistent theme here. I highly encourage you to test specifically for your brand, your product category, but it does look like there is a pretty widely varying level of competition and then especially efficiency and performance based on what type of product you’re selling on Walmart.
Alright. And then some quick hit Walmart advertising tips. Walmart has done a really great job of giving advertisers the ability to use bid modifiers. So you do have the ability to say, I wanna bid an extra 30% or boost my bid by 30% for item page placements versus search page placements, for example. You can also do that from a device perspective, so you can say, I want to bid more aggressively on in-app placement versus desktop because that’s really, really important for my product category. So I definitely encourage you to use bid modifiers whenever applicable or available and again test to make sure that it is driving those efficiencies for your brand. Next up, two of the four is dayparting. So for those unfamiliar with dayparting, it essentially just allows you to flex your bid up or down using technology per hour of the day or day of the week.
So if you know that your customers are not necessarily converting, they may be searching for your products, but not really converting and adding to cart and checking out from, let’s say, midnight to 4:00 AM East Coast time, you can actually lower your bids, which is a really common strategy we see to just drive efficiencies, make sure that you’re not wasting your ad spend during low conversion periods of the day. And then more importantly, in my opinion, allowing your competitors to waste their budget during those hours, so their budgets are exhausted by the time that your bid starts back up, starting 5:00 to 6:00 AM to allow you to both conserve your budget, but then win at a lower cost-per-click and drive higher sales during peak conversion hours. Number three here is, if your products do not rank within the top 128, which is very common on Walmart since it’s a massive platform, we highly recommend Walmart’s automatic or auto campaigns.
Based on my experience, auto impressions and auto campaigns have accounted for some brands for upwards of 90% of total available impressions in sales. We also see in general, and we actually… I just got off the phone with Walmart a little bit ago, they’re also seeing actually better ROAS and better efficiency from auto campaigns. Biggest driver there is that it tends to have on average a lower cost-per-click than a keyword manual-based campaign, which makes sense since you’re finding cheaper impressions, cheaper clicks, and not only focusing on those super high volume competitive keywords. So we definitely recommend, at least, starting and testing out initially, but leaning fairly heavily on auto campaigns. And the last one here, because Walmart is the first price auction model, so you do truly pay what you bid, which can get very tricky, very quickly. We do recommend the approach of bid scaling. So start low. Bids can start as low as 25 cents on Walmart. Start low, see what impression looks like, see what your page placement and device placement data looks like.
And then if you’re not happy with the results, if you’re not able to spend as much money as you expected, or you’re not driving as many sales as you would want to, we recommend slowly increasing your bid by 15% to 20% every few days, even slower than that, if you’re comfortable with it just to see exactly how much you do need to spend and bid to get to your target share-of-voice number. Alright. Last slide here that I will do before I kick it over to Atal, it’s just bid scaling for this first price auction model. That graphic on the right, it does illustrate that if advertiser B is at $3 and you are advertiser C at $4, again, you’re not bidding, you’re not paying $3 and one cent, you are paying that $4. So really, really highly recommend starting off with not necessarily bidding, really, really aggressively quickly, starting off slow, making sure that you’re not driving your ROAS into the ground and paying more than you actually need to and testing over time to figure out exactly what level of cost-per-click bid is required to be winning whatever share-of-voice target you want for that specific keyword. Alright.
Atal
Awesome. Thanks, Matt. So I think the really exciting thing in our partnership with Pacvue is using the ad management tool to automate and optimize overall, and really being efficient with what you’re buying across walmart.com and the mixture of insights and driving sales. So with the SKU Ninja software plus Pacvue, and the integration within the ad management tool is really, really exciting. So we’re really excited about the partnership with them. And just overall discoverability and how to find items and how do we convert. So the dollars you’re spending across walmart.com, how do you be most efficient in that and using the insights outside of SKU Ninja, and whether it be elite or other items that subscribers choose or it’s enhancing content to average media or to update your [0:26:14.6] ____ content, that is really, really important how you show up. And both on what you’re bidding on paid and then how you show up organically as well. So I think it’s the best of both worlds, in my opinion. It’s fantastic.
Matt
Awesome. Couldn’t have put it better myself, so thank you, Atal. That is the last slide that we have for you today. We are gonna move over to the Q&A section. Looks like we have received about 10 or 11 questions so far via the Q&A feature within Zoom. If you do still have any questions you’d like to ask, please feel free to keep asking those and we will stay on the line for the next 30 minutes until we have answered all your questions, so please feel free to keep asking those. But we will start with the… I know that Atal had actually received a few questions ahead of time from some of our attendees.
Atal
Sorry about that. Yeah, I think a couple of the ones that I wanted to answer overall is, should I do auto versus manual? Overall, what’s the best tactics if I have limited ad dollars? And I think it should be broad versus precise and the nice thing about Pacvue is that the dynamic budgeting allows you to allocate spend in your highest performing campaigns per item overall, and it’s X amount of dollars per day, per month, and you can reduce or pause campaigns with a lower ROAS. So there might be an item for OTC, for example, that may be under-performing, but there’s another item that is a popular item that’s performing really well or it’s a new item. That’s an important key feature. I think the other thing too is… One of the questions we had was, what are the main reasons for low conversion? The biggest thing here is weak page content, so utilizing the SKU Ninja Content Management System, search boost, rich media, keywords, maybe too broad, cooler toys versus swimming goggles for kids, maybe the item’s already winning organically a high ranking.
So those are really important things to really dive into and the insights you get from our team and in partnering with Pacvue on both sides of the fence and I think the other thing is keyword relevance. So we talked about the prioritized keyword list. You could find keywords have low volume, but they convert more because they’re specific to your item. So keep that in mind as you’re looking at strategies across the board for both of our teams.
Matt
Perfect. Atal, I did just open up the Q&A feature. One quick question we have from an attendee is, is content quality score a feature through Walmart or through WhyteSpyder SKU Ninja platform or Pacvue platform?
Atal
The content quality score is being mandated from Walmart. So during the supplier summit late last year, Diana Marshall mandated, in Hardlines specifically, that they need to have a 95% or higher quality score. So the quality score is a mixture of above the full content, below the full content if you have rich media. So we have an number of suppliers that utilize our team for rich media to help the quality score overall. That’s really, really critical on Walmart.com in ensuring the algorithm picks up your item, whether organic or even paid. So 95% is the benchmark that Walmart has set across the board. So we have an algorithm that pulls all that out and provides that data back to you to say, you’re at 75% today because the title is too short, the descriptions are not enhanced enough, you’re missing images, you’re missing videos. We see a lot of items that maybe have one or two images. You should really have more than that, you should have six plus overall, and you should try to have a video ’cause a lot of suppliers across the board have great content and/or they’re developing content as well. So we wanna make sure we’re making it really easy to upload those items through our tool and provide you back with a quality score that changes every 24 hours.
Matt
Perfect, cool. Alright, so Atal, I’m gonna take a few questions here and then I’ll kick a few back to you, I’m just reading from our Q&A section. Attendees, please feel free to keep adding these as we go, we’ll answer all these before the end of the webinar. I have a few questions from Sarah. First is, is product rank in the Top 128 the only criteria for eligibility? At this point in time, I don’t believe that is the only criteria for eligibility. I believe that you do have to be in stock on the item and it does have to have above a certain amount of a star rating, I believe it is at least a three star rating or just a review score. But Sarah, yes, to answer your question, the Top 128 really is the main criteria at this point. I will also say that the Walmart platform is still relatively new and so it’s changing super, super quickly. They’re making a ton of improvements, but that Top 128 is at this point in time subject to change the main criteria for eligibility. And then next question from Sarah is, does dayparting account for all time zones? So if I wanted to start at 9:00 AM, would that be 9:00 AM EST or 9:00 AM PST? Eastern time versus Pacific time, that’s a fantastic question. So luckily, within the Pacvue platform and within Pacvue’s technology, you do have the ability via a drop-down to decide what time zone you want to set your daypart settings for.
So if you were on the East Coast, you could use the technology to say, do it from midnight to 4:00 AM East Coast, not Pacific time because obviously that can have a pretty big impact on what times of the day you are or are not showing up for those keywords. And then next question from Sarah is, let’s say there’s two bids for a keyword that are the exact same. Who wins the bid? Again, really good questions. So for both Amazon and Walmart, they have what’s called a relevance or a content score, just like Atal mentioned. So if you do have two bids or two advertisers bidding at the exact same time for the same keyword, the exact same cost-per-click bid, it does take into account a relevance score and a content quality score. So essentially the higher performing that your item has been traditionally from an organic perspective, if you are more relevant and have a higher content quality score than your competitor, you will win the bid for that same exact cost-per-click bid. Alright, Atal, I have a question that I think might be perfect for you in Q&A. Question from an attendee is, we currently use RebateKey to rank on Walmart. Unfortunately, the RebateKey clicks and sales are being translated into CPC ad sales, costing us over $100 in ad spend per day, there’s no real ad sales and getting our ad sales report skewed. Is there any way we can get around this?
Atal
Yeah, I think the really nice feature in SKU Ninja, is our PDP, product detail page reports. They can give you the inside data back on how many folks are coming, where they’re coming from, whether it’s paid traffic or organic search as well. So if you’re using vendors or if you’re using Google, for example, you can see where your traffic is coming from, how many people are coming per day, and how much time they’re spending on our pages, which is really, really critical.
Matt
Awesome, cool. I have a couple of other questions here, around the general idea of page type and device type, and then what the different pages look like on Walmart. So first question is, what is the difference between a browse page and a search page? A really, really great question. So the third one you did not ask about item page, that’s pretty self-explanatory, the item detail page. Search page is, to either a search or as in-grid, you might hear referred to search as in-grid. What that is, is if you go to walmart.com, go up to the search bar at the top and enter “cake mix” those ads that would appear on the search results page would be considered a search page. I think your question’s probably about the first one, you asked about browse page. So browse page is more similar to one of those category landing pages for home and garden, or clicking into different sub-stores that are merchandised, where there are sponsored ad opportunities, that is that browse page.
In my experience, search and item page placements make up the vast majority, but depending on the brand, I’ve seen some really interesting cases where browse pages actually perform very well, depending on your brand. So again, I would prioritize… In my recommendation, prioritize starting with search an item at first, but definitely test out that browse page, ’cause they can drive some really good results. Next question on device type and app type is, does Walmart allow for targeting segmentation by device? So yes and no. The current way that it’s set up is, you can use bid modifiers to say, I want to bid an extra 50%, for example, raise my bid by 50% for in-grid placements, versus search, or for mobile app versus desktop. Atal, correct me if I’m wrong, there’s currently no way to only bid on one of the devices or one of the page placements, but the recommendation would be, you could create separate campaigns to up your bids up or down, to prioritize specific devices or segments.
Atal
Yep.
Matt
Perfect. Alright, let’s see here. A question that I think might be good for you, Atal, do you have a content checklist for Walmart or number of above the fold, rich media packet shots, images, etcetera?
Atal
We do, yeah. So the really nice thing in the SKU Ninja tool is, whether it’s basic content or rich media, there’s guided tours and showing you what should be on the page, what’s potentially missing. It’s a very easy drag and drop scenario for you to upload it, so whether it be basic content and updating a title, key features, below the fold content, with rich media, whether it be 360 views or comparisons or fact sheets, it’s simple and intuitive for anybody on your team or your agency, to go in to the tool and utilize those features. And actually, Matt, just on that note, we also have a really great… If you go to whytespyder.com and you go into our whytespyder.com/faq, there’s a lot of commonly answered questions across the board there, and that we have a knowledge base that I can share out as well, to the team on the call.
Matt
Perfect. Alright, I have a few more that I will take Atal, and then one that I will pass off to you after that, that I think is perfect for you. So first question is, can you target competitor’s pages? So yes, this is pretty new for Walmart, so traditionally in the past, when all page-specific campaigns on Walmart were managed manually, via either Triad or the WMG, Walmart Media Group, you were not allowed to conquest competitor pages or competitive search terms. That has changed in the past two months or so, where Walmart now does allow you, via the self-service platform or any of the four tech solution providers they have chosen to launch with, you now can target your competitor’s terms. In my experience, I have seen more success conquesting competitor terms on Walmart, versus Amazon, I think the reason is, there’s just a general lower level of competition right now, which is gonna change on Walmart. So yes, you can target competitor terms and I’m actually seeing really, really strong results, versus other platforms like Amazon.
And the next question here is, what is an acceptable conversion rate on Walmart? Is it different from Amazon’s? Really, really good question. Answer is yes. I’ve seen much different conversion rates. I don’t wanna speak to whether one retailer has a better search product or platform or customer experience, but I have in general, seen lower conversion rates on Walmart. One of the big reasons for that, I think, is partially due to… Or mainly due to the strategies that I have used with brands that I have visibility into their performance, which is, auto campaigns are currently making up a really big chunk of available impressions within spend and sales, and those auto-impressions can drive 10 to hundreds of millions of impressions in a week, very, very quickly. There’s just so much opportunity out there.
So yes, I am in general, seeing a lower conversion rate on Walmart, versus maybe a similar page search campaign on Amazon. I don’t think that it’s necessarily due to a poor CX, versus somewhere like Amazon. I do think it’s because, on Amazon, advertisers have been advertising for, in general, years longer than they have been on Walmart, and so they know what their budgets are and what they need to spend and what they need to bid to drive what they consider to be a strong conversion rate. Walmart, since it’s pretty new for most advertisers, a lot of people are just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, at least at first, and I think that has, in some cases, driven a lower conversion rate, but not necessarily a negative at this point in time.
Atal
Yeah. And I think, Matt, that’s a really, really great point. I think, dot com, a lot of times, is always an afterthought. So in-store was critically important, until a couple of years ago, we’ve been… And I think the weight of your content and overall simple things like titles and attributes, are really critical in discoverability, and as you’re advertising and as you’re driving organic search rank, finding an item on Amazon versus at walmart.com, for example, is a much different thing, overall. Both are great, but I think, in driving the right content, the right key features, having the right attributes, is critically important, whether it’s an organic placement or a paid placement, overall.
Matt
Great point. Yeah, thank you, that’s perfect. Alright, question for you, Atal, how is content weighted? Are any portions weighted heavier than others? For example, titles versus bullets.
Atal
Overall, simple things like basic content are weighted in your first search algorithm, but as you add videos or 360s or fact sheets, other content enriched media, that will help your content weight across the algorithm. So it’s a mixture of your quality score on walmart.com, which is in SKU Ninja which is mandated by Walmart that we’re gonna track, but then getting all the insights back on, where am I showing? Am I number one versus number 30 or 128? And there’s very simple intuitive things that we can help with, they can fix, whether it’s ounces or… Like Oz dot or ounces… Or do I put the brand name first? Those are things that go to our product knowledge and insights from Walmart that we get back. And whether it be per category and overall as well.
Matt
Perfect. And the next question for you, if you do not rank in the top 128 organic placements for your competitor’s terms, how do you show up for your competitor’s terms?
Atal
So we can track… Within SKU Ninja you can give us a list of terms that you wanna look at and competitors you wanna look at, overall. But if you’re not in the top 128 overall, you really won’t show up. You’re out of the search rank, essentially. You’re not gonna be findable very easily.
Matt
Perfect. And then, yeah, via auto campaigns, we’re pushing pretty hard, hopefully those can help you increase your organic ranking over time by totals, point it can be tough at first.
Atal
Yeah, I think that’s where optimizing search is really, really important in the efficiency you guys drive and the insights we provide. I think there’s a lot of value there in making it efficient and simple and getting the data back in what’s working, what’s not working.
Matt
Perfect. We do have a follow-up question on our conversion rate conversation. Does that apply to organic as well or just advertising metrics? Great question. We were generally speaking… I don’t wanna speak for Atal, I was speaking about advertising metrics. I tend to see a lower conversion rate for advertising metrics versus an Amazon for example, that, Atal, I would love to hear if you see the same thing from an organic perspective.
Atal
Yeah, I think it goes back to items, like what items and campaigns you’re choosing specifically, organically overall. But I think there’s a lot of data and insight that you get back from SKU Ninja overall, organically. They can use, whether it be keyword, share-of-search in helping drive conversion up for those items. So whether they’re elite or certain sensing overall, there’s a lot of value that you guys get back. That exportable, shareable with your buyer, your DMM. I was at rank number 28 and now I’m at number three. I’ve sustained it over 12 weeks. We’ve got great case studies to show that as well, so there’s a lot of value across the board.
Matt
Cool, and then one question we had from Amy, again, I think this is a good one for you, Atal, is how do third party sellers with incorrect content impact your quality score?
Atal
Yeah. So with the 3P… So 1P versus 3P, we’re able to see what type of content 3P has on walmart.com. So our daily dashboard, once you get to that you’ll be able to see if there’s 3P seller selling your item, like Pharma Pax, for example, or other big marketplace resellers. And it really shouldn’t affect the score overall, because if you’re winning the buy box at walmart.com with the right content and getting the right insights from our team and from category leadership as well, you should be able to win the buy box overall. Because what we see a lot of times is the prices for 3P resellers are completely different than our 1P sellers. I’m sure, Matt, you guys see that a lot on Amazon as well, across the board. But I think having the visibility into who are the 3P sellers out there selling it. 1P has [0:45:23.3] ____ credentials to get all the page traffic, all the data back, and all the insights, but on the 3P side of the fence, specifically, we can glean out, Pharma Pax is another reseller that’s selling, and how do we suppress and win the buy box.
Matt
Perfect. I have a new question from an attendee, can you make recommendations or give recommendations on focusing advertising on our more popular items but as part of our line verses our lesser known or lower volume items? Yeah, so really great question. A couple of things you can do, when you’re looking at your top sellers versus the rest, the tail of your catalog, we generally recommend focusing more heavily on keyword-based manual campaigns for the top of your catalog for your best sellers. So if you know for a fact that you’re ranking pretty highly for a given search term organically for that product, we definitely recommend focusing on some of those more premium search in-grid placements higher… Above the fold, higher on the page. And then for some of the lesser known or lower volume products within your ad catalog, definitely recommend leaning pretty heavily on auto campaigns, especially because we almost always see lower cost-per-clicks, and just general better efficiency from auto campaigns. So one strategy we see work really well is to create hierarchies and rankings within your own product catalog and move them into different buckets. It could be as simple as just a top ahead and then the rest of the category, or catalog, excuse me. Or you could create tier one, two, three, four, five, and use the technology to do all the manual bidding for you.
So we would recommend focusing on keyword based campaigns for the top guys, auto campaigns for the rest, at a lower cost-per-click bid, to help find impressions and clicks at a lower cost-per-click. Also, definitely recommend testing out for your specific brand in your catalog, some of those bid modifiers. So your high volume, better known, more popular, SKUs, they may perform better in a search placement or on an item page, based on your category. They could, also, perform better on desktop versus app, for example. We tend to see more expensive items that are a longer consideration cycle, like $1000 TV performed better on desktop, since the customer is probably reading a lot of product content and taking a long time to make that purchase. So definitely recommend testing out some of those bid modifiers to give preference in whichever spots perform the best for you at the head of your catalog. And the next question, what if we’re ranking in the top 10 for big, high volume keywords, but not getting any organic sales in the Tools and Home Improvement category? Does that just mean that there aren’t enough customers on Walmart and when do we give up on our CPC campaigns?
So really, really great question. Ranking highly, for big top 10 keywords in the category but just not driving any sales. So we have heard some pretty consistent feedback, from advertisers, that they’re seeing the inability to spend or they’re seeing low sales. What we recommend is trying… And the same recommendation, I apologize, over and over again, find those niches where you’re working well. Maybe those top 10 keywords are so competitive or one of your competitors is bidding so much higher, a bid you can’t really bid. Start to find some of those lower tail, longer tail, more niche keywords, the keywords where you may have a better time driving a more efficient cost-per-click and higher sales per dollar invested. Also, leaning on those auto campaigns to appear in a lot more places, for any given day. But for those top 10, if you’re not seeing any sales for those top 10 keywords, it’s probably due to the fact that it’s either pretty competitive, or again, Atal can kinda take it from here, maybe your content is not necessarily optimized towards those specific top 10 keywords.
Atal
Yeah, I think there’s simple things you can do, is adding rich media to a lot of those organic PDPs, and then gleaning out the top shopper questions, overall, as well. Again, there’s a lot of simple things that you can do on your PDPs to organically show up and Matt to your point, whether it’s broad match versus exact match, and really digging into the prioritized keyword list and getting the insights. Then working back with your team on what should we bid on, what makes the most sense, auto or manual or managed service, overall? I think there’s a lot of opportunity. I think it’s getting the data back and having the conversation with our teams, collectively, and really being smart about how we build out campaigns.
Matt
Perfect. So we have about 10 minutes, nine minutes left here. If anyone else on the line still has any questions to drop into the Q&A section, please feel free to do so. One question, we have gotten multiple times, is will we be getting copies of these slides? We will not be sending the deck, as is, but we will send a recording of this webinar. So you have both the slides, but then, also, the audio and the commentary and answers to the Q&A long. So we will be sending out the recording of this webinar, after it ends today. Alright. So Atal and I can stay on the line for a few more minutes. We’ll give another minute or two. If anyone has any more questions, please feel free to do so. And if we don’t get any more in the next minute or two, we can give you five or 10 minutes of your day back today. Alright. So I think that is all the questions we’ve received today. Again, thank you everyone on the line for joining us today. Really appreciate the time and a very exciting time to be discussing Walmart page search. It’s a great time to advertise and to be getting first to market and beating your competition, especially with some of the tech solutions, like, Pacvue and then the real experts in the space, like SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder. With the two, combined, the better together story, it really is important to have that help and that assistance to keep consistently beating your competition, especially as things continue to get faster paced and more competitive over time.
So thank you everyone for joining today. Again, we will be sending out a recording of this webinar, so you have both the slides and the commentary. But right here on the screen, some information for you, the websites for both partners here that were on the line today, but then, more importantly, if you wanna get in touch with us, if you have any follow-up questions or would like to learn more about either Pacvue or SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder, please feel free to reach out. We’d love to get in touch with you.
