Unleashing Better Engagement with Sponsored Brands Custom Image
How telling a compelling brand story helped drive performance efficiency.
Opportunity
As a Walmart supplier of refrigerated dog food in the highly competitive pet category, Freshpet wanted to boost brand visibility and increase product trial throughout the first half of 2025, while differentiating its offering from conventional dog food competitors.
Goals
They sought to enhance awareness, boost engagement and increase trial.
Solution
They tested Sponsored Brands custom image and engaged Mile Marker, an Agency Partner in the Walmart Connect Partner Network, to tell their brand story using lifestyle imagery and a keyword strategy to help introduce customers to a fresh new dog food option.
Strategy and tactics
Freshpet’s core strategy focused on increasing engagement, improving CPC and helping boost new-to-brand sales by successfully driving trial and awareness among Walmart pet shoppers.
They ran a Sponsored Brands custom image test campaign, which helped showcase their product in real-life settings, capture customers’ attention, achieve higher engagement and educate customers on fresh pet food, helping drive awareness, trial and sales.
A keyword strategy using top-performing category terms helped reach shoppers and introduce them to a fresh new option of dog food.
As a result, compelling brand visuals with targeted keywords helped achieve strong performance results, surpassing internal benchmarks and historical Sponsored Brands results. Compared to their previous Sponsored Brands campaigns that only included their brand logo, the test campaign using lifestyle creative helped Freshpet stand out in a competitive category and deliver greater campaign performance.
Big wins
Increase in CPC efficiency
Increase in new-to-brand sales
Source: Walmart first-party data, May 26–June 19, 2025 vs. Nov. 1, 2024–Jan. 31, 2025. New-to-brand is defined as a customer who purchases a brand’s product from Walmart site as a result of an ad campaign, after not having purchased the brand on Walmart site for the previous 12 months.
Key takeaways
Strong product visuals can help improve ad performance
Using lifestyle imagery in Sponsored Brands ads helps increase engagement while maintaining performance efficiency.
Visual storytelling helps drive awareness and trial
With Sponsored Brands custom image capability, brands can capture Walmart customers’ attention and drive trial of their products.
Insights from creative testing help inform performance strategy
The creative testing capability available since the launch of the Sponsored Brands custom image feature helps brands understand how appealing visuals can influence performance outcomes.
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