Since Pacvue launched its Walmart platform in early 2020, we’ve seen brands have strong results with their Walmart advertising campaigns. We consistently hear that brands love being able to manage their own campaigns, especially with the assistance of a powerful software solution. Many advertisers are still learning the platform and wondering how to best manage their advertising on Walmart.com. Here are some early trends and insights from the first three months of Pacvue’s partnership with Walmart.

Page Type Placement Trends

• Spend on Walmart is primarily driven by three Page Type ad placements. Ad placements on the search page accounted for 43% of total brand ad spend. Coming in second, ad placements on Item Detail Pages accounted for 39% of spend. Browse Page ad placement accounted for 17% of ad spend.
• In terms of ACoS, Search and Browse ad placements had similar ACoS performance of around 4-5%. Item Page ad placements have shown to be less efficient, with an ACoS that was nearly twice as high at 10%.
• Item Page ad placements had the highest CPC at $0.56, which was 36% greater than CPCs for the search page. Item Page and search page had roughly similar conversion rates of around 7%. However, the higher CPCs for Item Page placements drove ACoS up and efficiency down.

Device Type Placement Trends

• Nearly half (49%) of Walmart ad spend was driven by App ad placements. Mobile Web ad placements accounted for 29% of spend and Desktop ad placements accounted for 22% of ad spend. This shows how important mobile device ads are to the success of a Walmart.com paid search strategy.
• Desktop ad placements had the highest conversion rate at 13%, which was more than double the conversion rate of App and Mobile Web ad placements.
• Desktop ad placements had the highest CPC at $0.56, which was 16% higher than Mobile Web ad placements.
• There wasn’t a huge variance in ACoS performance between the three platform ad placements, but App placement did perform slightly better than the other two placements with a 5% ACoS.

Durable Goods vs Consumable Good Trends

Since Pacvue works with brands that span virtually every product category, we took a look at Walmart paid search data by the type of products that Pacvue clients were selling. Since there are vastly differing levels of competition on Walmart.com between product categories, analyzing the data at this level should help give a better sense of where current KPI benchmarks sit and what trends we’re seeing between different segments of the market. For the purposes of this recap, we analyzed durable vs. consumable goods.

Consumable vs. Durable Goods Page Type Placement Trends

• For both durable and consumable products, search page ad placements had the most efficient ACoS.
• For consumable goods, there’s a large variance between ACoS for Search, Item and Browse placements.

• Search page ad placements had the lowest CPC for consumable products, while Browse pages had the lowest CPC for durable goods.
• Item Page ad placements had the highest CPC for both durable and consumer goods.

• Durable and consumable goods had consistently different levels of Conversion Rate, but each followed the same trends, with Browse placements driving the lowest Conversion Rate, and  search page ad placements driving the highest Conversion Rate.

• Advertisers in the consumable space spent the majority of their budget on Item Page placements, while brands advertising in the durables space spent the majority of their budget on search page ad placements.

Consumable vs. Durable Goods Device Placement Trends

‍

• For both consumable and durable goods, Desktop ad placements had the lowest ACoS.
• For durable goods, there wasn’t a large variance in ACoS between the different devices.
• For consumable goods, Desktop had significantly lower ACoS than App and Mobile web placements.

• CPCs are relatively consistent across device types for both consumable and durable goods.
• Desktop ad placements had the highest CPCs for consumable goods.
• Mobile web ad placements had the highest CPCs for durable goods.

• For both durable goods and consumable goods, Desktop ad placement had the highest Conversion Rate.
• For consumable goods, the conversion rate on desktop was roughly 3x greater than the other device placements.

• For consumable goods, spend was fairly evenly distributed across all three device placements.
• For durable goods, spend was heavily weighted towards App placements. Desktop placements saw very little spend for durable goods.

While this data is based on a relatively small set of advertisers and spend, and only reflects the first few months in partnering with Walmart, it begins to paint a clear picture of how and where advertisers are competing on the platform. Compared to other large paid search platforms, competition is still low on Walmart. Average CPCs are relatively cheap and ROAS has been high for many of our clients. We expect this to change as more advertisers enter the platform. Based on this, we recommend testing out campaigns for your brand as soon as possible, with the goals of benefiting from this brief period of low competition and gaining learnings that will help inform your future strategies. As we continue to gather more data and insights, we’ll keep you up to date on all of the important trends and developments in Walmart’s paid search platform to help enable you to stay ahead of your competition and maximize your marketing performance.

‍