Are you one of the 100,000+ sellers on the Walmart marketplace? According to Walmart, “every year, 90% of American households rely on Walmart for a range of products from must-buy brands, both large and small. And every week, more than 150 million customers shop with us in-store or online.”
For brands advertising their products through Walmart Connect, Walmart’s advertising platform, this massive opportunity to sell on one of America’s largest retailers (both online and in-store) keeps growing and growing. Walmart revealed that it generated $2.1 billion in advertising revenue just last year. Another strong sign that its retail media ad strategy was starting to click was in January 2022 when Walmart invested $3.9 billion in advertising. This investment proved to be a whopping increase of $700 million compared to what the company spent in the previous year.
So, what’s the best placement for Walmart advertisers on the platform to spotlight their entire line of products with the goals of increasing conversions and gaining brand awareness? The clear answer is Sponsored Brands. Like Sponsored Brands ads on Amazon, Walmart Connect’s premium keyword-targeted search ads placement helps showcase your brand logos and curated product portfolios to customers actively searching Walmart online for similar products. This article is all about the ad type, the requirements to begin leveraging it, who can use it, and the best practices advertisers should follow to get the most out of it.
Sponsored Brands works on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, which means advertisers will pay only when online shoppers click on their ad.
One of the best parts of Sponsored Brands is that it shows up right at the top before the organic search results are displayed. Sponsored Brands is a very useful ad placement to encourage engagement with high-intent customers with the goal of increasing conversions and awareness. Regarding awareness, Sponsored Brands ads help reinforce your brand’s image while increasing the effectiveness of the product discovery phase with prospective customers. In terms of conversions, Sponsored Brands helps brand and account managers to drive more sales, especially when launching new or seasonal products. Sponsored Brands also helps brands gain Share of Voice for their line of products, which can help boost organic rankings.
Bidding requirements for Sponsored Brands ads differ from Sponsored Products ads in that minimum bids on the placement are $1.00, as opposed to $0.30. Although it may be more expensive to bid on Sponsored Brands ads, it’s still a cost-effective way to advertise as it showcases an array of products instead of just one.
Advertisers can choose and bid on the keyword-match options that best fit their campaign goals.
There are a few aspects that advertisers should be mindful of when setting up Sponsored Brands campaigns.
Brand Logos - The required dimensions are 300x180 px. We recommend that you use PNG file types since we’ve experienced resolution issues with JPEGs.
Custom Taglines - This is your opportunity to speak to the shopper. Ultimately, you will want to think about the specific shopper that you are targeting and create your tagline around what would drive engagement and serve your brand strategically based on the shopper’s behaviors (e.g., what keywords are they searching for?).
The following are best practices from account managers with experience managing Walmart Sponsored Brands campaigns.
Sponsored Brands ads on Walmart can help your brand’s marketing strategy by targeting shoppers at most points in the marketing funnel. It helps with driving awareness and conversions, so brands should be taking a close look at which SKUs to feature and why, which taglines are most effective, and which images to feature that convert the best after running several variations during the testing phase. What’s great about this ad type on Walmart is that they’re easy to set up and optimize once running.
Boost your reach and increase sales on Walmart with Pacvue, the leading platform to manage Walmart Connect Advertising campaigns. Contact us today for a demo, and you’ll walk through Pacvue's customizable dashboards, five levels of automation, competitive intelligence, Share of Voice reporting, and more.
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