For many sellers, scaling your business on marketplaces can feel overwhelming. Whether you’re launching a new product, entering a new category or trying to stand out from big, household brands, there is a lot to navigate. But the good news is, you’re in the right place. Walmart Marketplace was built to help customers conveniently find what they love and to help sellers of all sizes scale their eCommerce businesses. More and more shoppers are coming to Walmart.com, with over 122 million customers every month¹. 

With a built-in audience of this scale, you can reach shoppers that will likely to be interested in your products, and ultimately help turn them into customers. But it’s still important to drive awareness and demand, especially given our vast assortment of products available for shoppers to choose from. Walmart Connect provides advertising solutions to help sellers connect with our customers more often and more meaningfully than ever before.

Sponsored Search is key to accelerating growth and competitive differentiation on Walmart Marketplace. With the right strategy, it can help your products appear in optimal placements, increase brand awareness and product visibility with our audience and grow your business through cost-effective measures. 

Why invest in Sponsored Search? 

First, let’s take a step back to see how Sponsored Search advertising can more efficiently get your brand and products in front of the right shoppers. When a Walmart customer enters a search term on our website or app, relevant products appear in the results. Products promoted with Sponsored Search advertising are boosted to higher positions within or above search results for relevant, in-market customers. Securing these placements has proven to have a significant impact on Walmart customers’ shopping behaviors. It is also highly cost-effective; you only pay when a customer clicks on your ad.  

According to Walmart proprietary data, Click-through Rate (CTR) is on average 4X higher for products that appear first in search results compared to lower positions and the add-to-cart rate is on average 5X higher, proving a substantial ability to influence purchase behavior².

Recent enhancements made to help boost sellers’ businesses

To give Marketplace sellers more control, we launched several new Sponsored Search capabilities in the last year, such as enhanced relevancy, advanced second-price auction and variant bidding, that helped improve results significantly. For example, Sponsored Search campaigns for sellers during the Holiday season in 2022 outperformed all previous years, with a 20% YoY increase in average conversions³. 

Additionally, we made a series of changes that were focused on improving end-to-end experience, cost-efficiency and performance for Marketplace sellers. These were designed to help level the playing field for advertisers of all sizes, to help make it easier for these sellers to get their products more easily discovered by customers and become competitive with larger brands.

    Sponsored Brands: Send your brand logo and products to the top of relevant search results with Sponsored Brands. This premium placement is now available to Marketplace brand owners registered with the Walmart Brand Portal. In addition to driving conversions, it also helps drive brand awareness by allowing sellers to customize their ad creative with a logo and custom headline. Sponsored Brands can especially benefit smaller brands, newer brands, and brands with new products that may not yet have high organic search rankings in Walmart search results.

    Automated Onboarding: The Walmart Ad Center now offers a seamless onboarding experience that makes launching Sponsored Search campaigns even easier – reducing three-day enrollment process to just seconds. All new Marketplace sellers are now automatically onboarded to our self-serve ad platform, and we’re rolling out automated onboarding to existing Marketplace sellers. 

With these improvements, combined with Walmart’s massive customer audience, sellers have the tools to be successful. In addition to seller value, investing in Sponsored Search brings significant value back to the customer. These campaigns help to create a much more personalized experience for shoppers, better matching their product results with their search intent and needs.

The next step is to dig deeper into the mechanics of strategies and understand how to leverage available resources to activate better optimization and performance tactics. Check out these tips and tricks for making the most out of your campaigns.

Contact us to learn more about Walmart Search Advertising and you can get started today!

Sources: ¹Comscore Top 50 Multi-Platform Properties, January 2023; ²Walmart first-party data, Sept. 1 – Oct. 1, 2022. Seasonal data has not been factored into these results due to the given range of data; results may vary over a different period of time. Past results do not guarantee future performance; ³Walmart Connect first-party data, Oct. 1, 2020–Dec. 31, 2022.