Uncover Omnichannel Growth on Walmart and Amazon

Learn unique attributes between the Walmart and Amazon marketplaces, best practices for growth & creating a holistic eCommerce strategy, and more.

Summary

The two retail giants Walmart and Amazon may have a lot in common, but their eCommerce marketplaces offer some distinct opportunities for sellers looking to reach new customers, grow market share, and increase sales. Watch this video to learn unique attributes between the Walmart and Amazon marketplaces, best practices for growth & creating a holistic strategy, how to use new Walmart advertising capabilities such as Search Brand Amplifier.

Key Takeaways

• Bid adjustments on Amazon can be made on Top of Search, Product Pages, and Rest of Search
• Bid Amplifiers on Walmart can be applied to Search In-Grid, Item Buy Box, Stock Up and Homepage placements
• Search Brand Amplifiers vs Sponsored Brands
• Amazon can raise bid by 100% more than bid adjustment
• There is no maximum bid multiplier amount on Walmart
• Amazon shows 16% improvement in Sponsored Product conversion rates when used with Sponsored Brand Headline Search Ads
• In 2022, Walmart is switching to 2nd Price Auction, will offer SBA access to third-party sellers, and is launching Self-Serve Display
• Aim for 95% content scores on Walmart using the Walmart Style Guide for product detail pages

Transcript

Matt
‍Alright, starting to see more people get logged in and I’m sure we’ll have more people join as we get started here, but I’m gonna go ahead and kick things off today, I am Matt McGrory with Pacvue here with the Vendo team. We have some great content for you today in this webinar discussing how to uncover omnichannel growth on Walmart and Amazon e-commerce. And a quick reminder, this is being recorded, the recording of this webinar along with a transcript and the presentation will be sent out later today with an email. And then from others who are joining us for the first time for a Pacvue webinar, Pacvue is a leading e-commerce platform for brands, sellers and agencies to programmatically manage their e-commerce advertising across 30 plus retailers. Alright, we’re gonna kick it off with a quick agenda here, we’re gonna jump into introductions, we’ll then move on to how to uncover e-commerce growth on both Amazon and Walmart with some really great tips and tricks from the Vendo team, and then we also will reserve time at the end for a Q&A section, you guys may notice that in the bottom of the Zoom screen, there is a Q&A portion, as we’re going through the presentation, please feel free to add your questions as we’re going through…You don’t have to wait until the end. You can add those as we’re going through and we’ll reserve about 10-15 minutes for Q&A to answer both questions that were entered through the presentation as well as the live questions in the Q&A section. Alright, Speakers today you have myself, Matt McGrory, Account Director at Pacvue here with the VENDO team. We have Michelle Long who is Walmart Advertising Manager at VENDO, and then Gefen Laredo, Head Media Buyer and I will pass it off to him to get us started…

‍Gefen
‍Got it. Thank you, Matt. How is everyone? Thanks to Pacvue for hosting us. So as Matt said my name’s Gafen I’m the Head Media Buyer here at VENDO joined by Michelle who’s our head Walmart media buyer and just a quick intro to VENDO we’re 360 degree digital growth agency, and we specialize in both platforms as Amazon and Walmart.com, I really do mean 360 degrees, anything from obviously advertising, to listing and item optimization to inventory to data and reporting, etcetera. So it’s really awesome to be here to share some of the information that we’ve got planned for you guys, and we got a lot of stuff to go through, so… Let’s get started. Alright, so the first thing we’re gonna talk about today is something called bid adjustments, so I’m sure that most people have heard of them at least if you are Amazon sellers, it’s been around for quite some time, but in the landscape of rising cost per clicks, we’ve seen bid adjustments as a really valuable way for us to get more out of our dollars and for us to convert higher on the platform, and recently Walmart has rolled these out as well, and Michelle has been testing and testing and seen a lot of success.So we’ll dive into what they are, what they mean, and how to use them. Okay, so Michelle if you wanna take it off.

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, awesome. So hello everyone, it’s great to be here. We’re gonna cover bid adjustments, and as Walmart calls them bid multipliers, so Walmart essentially has these laid out in two separate ways, so we have placement and platform multipliers, we’ll get into the details of what these mean in the next couple of slides, but essentially, what we’re looking at here is the differences and the placements are affected by our campaign types, so are we running automatic or manual campaigns, and the placements that we have available to us are gonna be different placements across the site based on your advertising spot. So is it a search in grid multiplier, an item buy box, home page and stock up, those are gonna be your four placement options, and then you will also have platform bid multipliers as well, and those will be for desktop app and mobile.

‍Gefen
‍Yeah, and you’ll see that on the Amazon side, it’s a little bit different, and that’s what the screenshot on the bottom is here, so essentially there’s three placements and two bid adjustments or bid multipliers that you can put in place, you’ve got top of search, which is literally the top row of sponsored product placements that you can see when you go to search term product pages, these are obviously the pages and product detail pages that Amazon products are listed on, and then rest of search, which is basically a really broad way of saying everything else, so bottom of page one, page two, maybe bottom of product detail pages. And for that, unfortunately, you can’t multiply. What you’ll see in this screenshot on the bottom is Amazon specifically, we’ll start with Amazon and we’ll go into Walmart. Amazon allows you to tell them basically to increase a bid for a placement if they feel that there’s a higher likelihood of conversion. Now, for those of us that sell on Amazon, you might have heard of dynamic bidding, this is a little different, so the dynamic bidding, which has three forms, you can have down only, up and down or fixed.Dynamic bidding tells Amazon, if you have up and down, tells Amazon, in any case of an increase of likelihood of conversion based on their blackbox metrics, if there’s any instance where Amazon feels that you’re gonna have a higher conversion or higher likelihood of conversion, they can raise your bid up to a certain percent, Walmart bid adjustments too… It specifies that where you can actually have a dynamic bidding setting that’s down only, which means that Amazon will not raise the bid if it’s a higher likelihood of conversion, unless you allow them to do it for a certain placement. And in this landscape of rising CPCs, this has become really central to our strategy across the board, where we’ve seen phenomenal success in putting in bid adjustments and bid multipliers specifically for top of search. And so you’ll see in the screenshot here that there’s a couple of major differences in the way that top of search is performing versus product pages, and so we’re kinda gonna walk through what this means. Essentially, if you look at the CPC row, so the bid and obviously I couldn’t have 100 screen shots here, so the bid that we have going on here is a 3 bid, okay? We’ve got a 3 bid in the back end and we’re telling Amazon for a certain keyword, you can bid up to 3, we said that for any type of search placement, you can increase that bid by up to 60%, and obviously they did by 60.So what that tells us is that Amazon feels that there is a much higher, less of coverage on top of search, and obviously the cost per click went up, but you’ll see two major KPIs that are coming into play that obviously justify this change. The first of which is right, that the CTR is 10% now, that’s really high. We obviously chose a really good example, usually we see CTR on top of search between anywhere between two and five percent, noted that usually the rest of the CTRs are around 02 or 04, so it can be between 5, 10 and even 20 times higher of a click through rate on top of search versus say product pages or rest of Search, so from an awareness perspective and from a relevance perspective, right off the bat, top of search has proven really valuable, and then you’ll also notice the number of orders relative to clicks for the conversion rate has also been, is also way higher on top of search versus the others, and so we know that we’re gonna continue leaning into top for this campaign specifically, and then for the rest of our brands as well, because it provides more value across the board. And the last point before moving on, I know it doesn’t show it on the right, but the ROAS is higher, and the next slide, we’ll get to see which KPIS we’re looking at specifically, and how and why we are increasing our bids.Perfect, so we know that the adjustments work, so what we did is we included a screenshot here of a brand that’s ripe, or a campaign… Excuse me, that’s ripe for increased bid adjustments. And so essentially, the example we have here is, you’ll notice if we look first at the CPC, you’ll see that even though we’re technically bidding higher or telling Amazon to have a higher multiplier on top of search, the cost per click is actually lower, but the ROAS is almost… In fact, it’s 3X higher on top of search, then rest of search and the click-through rates are… I don’t know what that is, 10 or 100 times higher. So what that tells me is that we can go more aggressive on top of search, and what we’re doing essentially from a high level, is we’re telling Amazon to allocate funds up that funnel, I guess down that funnel, but up towards top of search. Right, so we’re telling Amazon to put as much money as possible into the highest performing placement… Now, this isn’t always the case. There are cases where rest of search or product pages will perform better. Unfortunately, the downside, and it is a downside at least on Amazon, with bid adjustments sometimes you’ll want to put more emphasis on top of search, and what will happen is you won’t be able to modify a rest of search, and then what ends up happening is you lose out maybe on some real estate, and so that’s really the drawback here is you can see based on the number of impressions that top of search has gotten…Sure, a 9% click-through rate, but 378000 impressions versus 10.5 million and 2.5 million, and specifically on the product pages, we spent 6000 less for essentially 10 million more impressions. So from a real estate perspective, from a brand awareness perspective, I would say that that’s the risk that the strategy poses, so it’s always important to make sure that going into these strategies, 0.1 right here, it all depends on the right KPIS that you’re looking for, if you’re looking for conversions, if you’re looking for ROAS, if you’re looking specifically to acquire customers and the ROAS is demonstrating based on the data that top of search is better, then you can lean in, but if… Say you want more page real estate, if you want to go more in an impression model, if you want more brand awareness or showing up across more product detail pages, then potentially it might be better to use that KPI as your guiding light and say, Hey, we’re getting 10 million impressions here. Why don’t I increase our bid adjustments there and maybe lower them on top of search so I can get 20 million impressions, but as you can see here, we chose this example because obviously we’re gonna increase the topside to maybe 20 or 30%.You’ll see on that last point on the right side, there’s a caveat that Amazon doesn’t… Sometimes they share, sometimes they don’t. I’ve seen it pop up as a notification when you are going into the adjustments, which is that they reserve the right to increase your bid by a further 100% on top of say the 10% that you allowed them to… So what that means is if you’re bid is a dollar and you allow them to go up to 110, sometimes you might go in there and you might see it at 1.90 or 2, and… So it can get a little bit hard to track. Luckily in this case, we see that that’s not the case, Amazon has only increased by that 10%, which is great, but overall, that’s essentially why we’re pushing the strategy so much and we’ve seen it work with most of our brands across the board, obviously, different campaigns, different goals might have different agendas and different strategies that we use, but when we do employ this looking at say, ROAS or specifically CTR and conversion rate, we’ve seen phenomenal success, but Michelle, I know that there’s some slight differences on Walmart, so we can cover that as well.

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, absolutely. So I’m glad you brought up the differences here because that was what my brain was turning to as you talked on Amazon, so one thing I wanna mention here is Walmart’s not going to go in and affect that bid that you’re applying, right, so Gefen was speaking to that, Amazon has the right to raise it up to 100%, but there is one caveat, at Walmart, there is no maximum bid multiplier amount. Right, so you really do have a lot more control. If you wanna set that at 5%, 10%, or if you are really leaning into a strategy based on a page one ranking strategy and you wanna lean into search over all, you can have a 200% bid multipliers, so I di wanna mention that as well, ’cause I think that’s one of the key differences. Another main difference here and why we laid it out, looking at automatic versus manual campaigns differently is the adjustments that we’re able to make based on the campaign type are different, and we can see that as well, and this is a screenshot within the Pacvue platform. So when we go in and we’re managing our campaigns, this is what it looks like when we go into a…A bid multiplier. So when we’re looking at the auto campaign on the left side, you can see that there’s four different bid multiplier options that’s gonna be for search in grid, item buy box, so the placement right underneath the Buy Box when we’re within the PDP, homepage bid multiplier and then a stock up bid multiplier. Stock-up is not one that a lot of people are familiar with, so I’ll just give you a brief explanation of that placement, so overall, that placement is going to be like the last spot or the last ad, that could be some shopper when they are adding the cart right before they make their final purchase, so it essentially could say like, Hey, recommended based on your past purchases or taking into account other category knowledge, and then your ad can be served to the customer in that way, stock up for us, has been a really, really successful placement overall, especially for our grocery brands, you’re essentially sending the customer a last minute reminder, right, hey, don’t forget about us, let’s serve them an ad really quick, and the conversion rate has been phenomenal for that placement.Oh, sorry, go ahead, Gefen.

‍Gefen
‍I just wanted to chime in real quick, sorry to interrupt. Quick question – just as a reference for those Amazon sellers that might not know a lot about Walmart, those placement sliders, is that telling… So say for stock up, for instance, is that telling Walmart where you want to show up?

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, that’s a great point. So for auto-campaigns, we actually have no control over the placement, and you can see that here, those spots are kinda grayed out a little bit, a little dull green, so when we have the auto campaign on, you can adjust that now for the manual side, and we can see over here in right-hand screen shot, we have three placements that we can turn on and off, and that’s gonna be the two carousel placements, and then the item buy box placement. What we’ve also found that’s been super helpful for manual campaigns is when we are testing page one ranking strategies, we can turn off those additional placements and lean more heavily into search and grid, so that was a great point Gefen… One of the really good features that I like about manual campaigns and why we like to lean into that strategy overall, just ’cause it gives us that little bit of extra control, so we could do a little bit more testing and to have a little more control over our parameters.

‍Gefen
‍Yeah, I’m jealous. We can’t do that on Amazon ’cause we… So just for reference, we can’t tell Amazon where we want to and don’t want to show up, we can’t turn off rest of search or turn off product page, we can just try and push as much of the spend up towards top of search as possible, and by the way, one of the ways that you can effectively do that is Amazon allows you to get up to 900% to adjust the bid up to 900%, and so let’s say you don’t wanna show up on rest of search and product pages, and you only wanna show up on top of search, you can put a 20 cent bid in there and then do like a 800% market, and then the 95% of your placement is gonna go towards top of search.

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, yeah, that’s a really good point. And I think what we found too, because right now we are still very much in the early stages of Walmart advertising, and our team continues to capitalize on low CPCs right now in unsaturated categories. So this is allowing us to take a little bit more control over that, where we are looking at a campaign by campaign basis, so we need to lean more into buy box placements? Where is the CPC the lowest? and then how do we capitalize on that across the board? That was a really good point.

‍Gefen
‍Yeah, and do you find that certain percentages have you tested like going over 100 or 200% or most of yours in the double digits?

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, that’s a great question. So for stock up, I would say, especially for, like I mentioned earlier, our grocery clients, the grocery category right now from an advertising perspective, it’s not overly saturated, so we’re really taking advantage of that at this point and leaning into stock placements in that one, I would say most of the time is over 100% just because we know that placement is so valuable and the results that we’ve seen from it are worth it in the end, and when we have a CPC that’s 50 cents in the long run, it’s not as expensive when we add that 200% multiplier for the stock out placement.

‍Gefen
‍Yeah, it’s definitely not the same on Amazon, if you go ahead and put in 200 or 300% on a domain, top of search, you’ll be spending quite a bit, but again, there are reasons why, and if you wanna show up on top of search, if you’re competing against big players, and you have the funding and you have the pockets to do it, then if the conversion rates are there, and I think that this is a crucial point that we have, then we always go off of which is… Let the data do the talking. I put in these campaigns and see where you’re converting highest, or where you’re showing up the most, or where you’re performing the best, and then lean into those, so if you do have a goal to go against top players in the space, then you do have the pockets to do it, and you’re seeing the conversion rates, then push on that, so a good example would be a product targeting campaign, if you wanna go and target a top competitor, then you put in your keywords or put in their accents and then you specifically focus on product pages, if you’re converting well, and in that way, you can see…You know, even Amazon isn’t telling you, you know, based on the performance and what you’re targeting, that you’re taking sales from their product detail pages at their point of sale, and that secondary data that is implied, but at least Amazon doesn’t necessarily give you…

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, and I would say since we don’t have the luxury of product targeting, this is a way around it, right. If we know that we want to really show up on our competitors item detail pages, then we can really hone in on this item buy box placement and increase the bid multiplier and make sure we’re showing up across the board there, but… I completely hear you on… It’s totally different on the category, right, what’s our competitor landscape overall, what’s our average CPC, and then I think taking that information at the base level and then testing and learning on these bit multipliers. And I think that’s really what we’re doing across the board for Walmart ads right now, is just testing and learning constantly, because so much is being updated week over week, especially Walmart internally has an update coming along, so… It’s really exciting. That’s for sure.

‍Gefen
‍Yeah, so for all those Amazon sellers that are on here, to go to Walmart, I would say that is, in my opinion, as a predominantly Amazon media buyer, that is a massive advantage, so test out of those placements, see where you’re showing up, see where you’re converting and performing the best and then see if, as best you can, see if you can isolate that data and Michele, I would assume that in the reporting, you can see which placement performs at which level…

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, and I will speak on this, our relationship with Pacvue allows us to manage our campaigns within the platform, we do have access to that data so we could see at the placement level, at the platform level, and then go in and make those adjustments live while we’re in the campaign, looking at the data, and then we’re able to more monitor like our data over time, and then if we’re running a two to four week test and just having that live data and using Pacvues platform has been really helpful overall for that testing.

‍Gefen
‍Yeah, that’s really awesome. That’s great. Alright, so on to the next topic, search brand amplifiers versus sponsor brand headline outside should put headlines in there, so all that Michelle, speak to search brand amplifiers, which I know have really taken up a lot of the strategy on the Walmart side as they’ve been really a big update for sponsored brand headlines. They’ve been around forever, there’s constantly new data coming out and Amazon is kind of releasing piecemeal updates around, say lifestyle images around say, New features with sponsor brand headlines. But for this section, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna compare what the differences are between Amazon sponsor brand headlines, and then search brand amplifiers and see where the similarities are, there’s advantages, disadvantages for each platform, and then end with roughly how much… At least on Amazon to spend towards that advertising type.

‍Michelle
‍Awesome. Yeah, so just to go in really quick, like Gefen mentioned, we have what Walmart calls an SBA, so search brand amplifiers, we’ll go into details on the following slide, and then as I mentioned, we’ll be hitting on sponsored brands for Amazon and then just an overall, look at how this appears for mobile versus desktop and how that is presented to the customer in their shopping journey.

‍Gefen
‍Perfect, and then from an Amazon side, we know that the Amazon sponsored brand headlines, lead towards brand stores. We know that they offer product assortments, but one of the things we’re gonna talk about is their supplemental efficacy, so what that means basically is how specifically on Amazon, and Amazon has actually really stayed on this, how sponsored brands work, maybe not as these strategy, but as a means to an end and part of the strategy helping the other ads, say sponsored product ads perform a bit better.

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, absolutely, and I’ll kinda go in to… Sorry, man, can you go back for us really quick, just to kind of cover high level here what we’re talking about for SBA, so this is a placement that Walmart released on last fall, and we have access to this placement once again through a partnership with Pacvue, and what this does is it’s going to own the top of search for the relevant keywords that we’re targeting, essentially what we’re able to do here is we can select the logo, a brand headline text, and stay on that top of search for the keywords that are really important to us overall, and I know, I think we’re gonna walk through some screen shots here, so I’ll let you… Take it off there.

‍Gefen
‍Thank you. Okay, so just a quick reminder, I’m sure most of you’ve already seen, this is the difference between desktop and mobile, now, a couple of holdouts here, first and foremost, you’ll see the lifestyle image, our recommendation is to make sure all of your headline search ads have a lifestyle image, we find that an image in general, by the way, same concept of the video that either an image or a video and sponsor brands video gets you most of the way there. Obviously, the image is good. That’s even better. And you’ll see here, there’s a quick quick tip from the vendor side here, what we like to do is we like to feature another product in the lifestyle image, so you’ll see that we have three products listed, that middle stick of deodorant there, it has an orange, has an orange wrap around, that’s one of the sense, the clear one you see on the left is another one, so in effect, we get two for one, we get to… What’s the word? Show another product, and then we also get to have the effect of a lifestyle image and just make it look more authoritative, and so that’s…What that looks like on desktop mobile is very similar. There’s a couple of fundamental differences. Number one, depends on how your screen looks, but at least on my screen, when I took the screen shot, I did not see any of the actual titles of the product, it just showed the five star or four and a half stars and the number of reviews that’s one difference, obviously, the caption on top is in two lines ’cause it can’t fit over the… I can’t fit the one line across the screen and you can’t see all three products at once, so those are… Difference is on what we find too, is that we’ve gone more aggressive on headline search ads when we have wanted to show up on mobile more, even though we don’t get that granular data from an advertising perspective, just some anecdotal searches will tell you how you’re showing up because it takes up… You’ll see here on this search on the right, I didn’t… I just took a screenshot of my screen, the one on the left, I cropped out on my desktop, the one on the right is just a screenshot, if you wanna dominate a search term, whether it’s branded or non-branded, if you have the headline search ad and the first sponsored product, you’re showing up on full screen there, and that’s really valuable because most people make their decision at least click on the first three products that they see, in fact, Amazon’s release data shows that about 64% of clicks happen on the first three to five products on a page.So it’s really important that if your goal is to show up top of page and it’s not too expensive, you’re not operating at a really negative ROAS and you’re seeing good performance there, that dominating both headline search ad as well as top sponsored slot is really valuable.

‍Michelle
‍Gefen question for you, are you all able to target competitors search terms within your sponsored brand ads?

‍Gefen
‍Yeah, you can actually do two things, You can… Number one, you can target competitor search terms, and it depends, so you actually have to get approved, sometimes it just… Sometimes we’ve been not approved for those terms, sometimes we have, but what you can do is you can product target, which is pretty cool, so you can actually do product ASIN targeting on headline search ads, and that functions very similarly to the way regular product targeting works and that it shows up on product detail pages, it can also… And I even will admit that I don’t fully understand this. You can also show up on search terms as well if you’re product targeting, so I’ve seen that happen before, but remember, sponsored placement isn’t just the top, but this is specifically sponsored brand headline, but you can do sponsored brand product targeting, which can show up on product detail pages on the side of the page. Or on the bottom of the page as well. And by the way, when you do similar to the bid adjustments that we were talking about earlier, you can’t specify placement, so you can’t even do bid adjustments on this, so you target sponsored brands and Amazon will literally sponsor your brand, either at the headline they’ll do it at the bottom of the page, you’ll see sponsored brand at the bottom of search terms and then also on product pages as well.

‍Michelle
‍Awesome, I’m ready to dive into the Walmart side now, ’cause it’s so different. So just as a reference point here, so on the left side, once again, we have that desktop screen shot and then on the right side, we have the mobile screen shot, so just to kind of back up and give everyone a little background here, like I mentioned, before this was released outside of the Walmart connect atmosphere in August of last year, I believe, and we launched our first campaign in September. So essentially, what you’re able to do here is, like I mentioned before, you can have a logo, unlike on Amazon, it cannot be like a picture of a product, whether it’s a lifestyle or hero image, it has to be your branded logo. And then, like I mentioned before, you’re able to adjust your headline tech, so as we can see here, for however, one there says America’s Most sold hoverboard since 2018. What this left side does here is when we click within the SBA, it’s actually going to drive us to a URL that we’ve selected within the site, so Walmart, you have to partner with Walmart connect to have a brand page, but we’re actually not able to drive to the brand page within the SBAs, so you have to either drive to a browse, a shelf page or an overall search query, so essentially what we’re able to do there is apply some filters to make sure that only our actual branded items are going to show up within that URL, but essentially, we like to call it a mini collection page, right? It’s giving us the ability to drive the customer to show our full array of products, to be one more add on piece of the shopping journey overall.I will say this placement as a whole has been very profitable for us, we’ve actually had some brand ship fully to an SBA strategy and leaning away responsive products, now we’ll say That’s not gonna work across the board, right, we have to take into account what are our retails of our items. What are our CPCs in the category? Typically, we’ve seen that FDA strategy work for higher retail items like for example, here we’re looking at a hover board brand, the sponsored products within this category are highly competitive, the CPC are very high, but from our testing… And what we’ve learned is that the CPC is actually lower from an SBA perspective, so that’s one thing I have been encouraging people to look out for and to check into is because SBAs are so new, they’re not across every category, right, there are some search firms on Walmart dot com, where you’re not going to be served in SBAs. Those are opportunities to write their opportunities for us to take advantage of the… Then we’re rapidly scaling this out across all of our suppliers, and then one other thing to mention that I know Gefen asked, are you able to do competitor contesting on Amazon and you are…For Walmart, you’re not… So this is still a very manual process from the creation to approval, etcetera, you actually have to submit all of this information to Walmart, we’re able to do that with a Pacvue portal, and then Walmart basically comes in and says, Okay, you’re approved for your SBA and you could be rejected based on what your logo looks like, they have requirements for that, it’s really just to ensure that the shopping experience is seamless and overall pleasant for the customer, right. So making sure that it’s in a full white background and it can back parameters, and then also there are some specifics around headline text too, right? You’re not allowed to call out your competitors or mention anything like that, so essentially just making sure that you’re staying within your lane and within what your products are relevant for. Right, so if trying to launch a hover board SBA, I’m probably not gonna be able to show up on a remote control car search term, so just ensuring that when this is being served to the customer, it’s what the customer wants to see on site and that it’s relevant overall for your experience.And then one other thing I wanted to call out here, and I know we’re gonna hit on this kind of at the end, is content, we found that it is not going to work from an SBA perspective, if your content scores are less than 85%, you have to make sure your content is fully intact and your reviews look great, right, because as we could see here, the customer’s looking directly at our listing, they can see the retail, the title and the reviews, so just making sure that your PDPs are fully optimized before you launch your SBA campaigns.

‍Gefen
‍So what we have here is basically a breakdown of… We actually got category wide data, this is for the men’s, deodorant space, and what we found is that the majority of advertisers have this relative breakdown for Amazon PPC, so you’ve got about 80% going to sponsored products, you’ve got about 20, 19… 20% go in to sponsor brands, and you’ve got just a little bit going to sponsor display wallets, postulate on a whole different day, t’s a whole another topic. Amazon is really aggressively pushing sponsor display and we’ve got a ton of data around that, just not enough time, but what I do wanna cover is that 20% going to sponsored brand. So as Michelle mentioned on Walmart, it’s incredibly valuable. And she mentioned that you are… That she has certain brands that are switching entirely to… SBA is a little bit different on Amazon. Number one, the cost per clicks are very expensive, anywhere between 20 to 40%, more expensive, at least in certain categories, but mainly why they’re used as a supplement and why the majority spend more on sponsored products is because they actually help sponsored products perform better.So Amazon really is showing that when you have a headline search ad running, your top of search, sponsored product ads convert up to 16% better, and so what that basically means from a qualitative standpoint, is you’re conveying authority and you’re basically ushering the customer to click on that product, sponsored product ad, and this is why we also like to look at ads holistically, because you might get clicks on a sponsored brand headlines search ad and not get a conversion, which they do usually, especially a non-brand, it has significantly lower conversion rates than sponsored product ads, but they are contributing to the effort as long as you’re not over-investing in that, because remember, for years, even decades now, the Amazon customer is trained to assess and buy from a PLA, a product listing ad or just a product listing. And that’s what the sponsor products look like, so they’re much more likely to convert from that, then a headlines search ad, but the headline search ad can convey a brand story, it can have multiple products, and also if you are interested in putting a little bit more money behind it, they’re great for launch as events, say like a Valentine’s Day special, or if you have a new product launch, you can drive traffic to a specific page on your brand store, you can even have a specific page around certain goals, the subscribe and save, say discounts.There’s a lot that you can do with driving traffic to individual pages on your brand store that can be small individual efforts that that can move the needle as a whole, but as a rule of thumb, we usually don’t like to go over 20% of total spend going to sponsor brand headline, and obviously video would be a separate category there, but usually that’s what we see, so…

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, I did have one point there you mentioning seasonality… That sparked an idea in my head. We’ve done some testing with that for SBAs as well, so like around new year, new you, and then some of our supplement brands or Valentine Days you brought up Easter practice for any of those relevant times of here that you are very specific within your category or to your brand overall, you’re able to adjust that for Walmart SBAs, so we’ve seen going in and adjusting our copy, maybe calling out something related to new year new you or calling out something specifically to Valentine’s Day. Now, we didn’t see a crazy lift in conversions, but there was a Lift overall, right, I believe it was about 10 to 15% depending on the brand, so just going in and adjusting and making those call-outs where we’re looking at specifically holiday timelines, we have seen that play out well.

‍Gefen
‍And that’s to make sure that you’re always making sure that when you are doing that, that you’re at the very least adjusting your headlines, so the actual captions are relevant, and I think there’s a 50 character limit, and that if you can… Your custom imagery is also relevant, all of those things help move the needle and improve conversions either on that individual sponsor brand headline or search brand amplifier or on the sponsored product ads below.

‍Michelle
‍Awesome, so I know we get asked pretty regularly what’s coming, what’s happening for Walmart, so we’re gonna go into what’s coming, the three biggest changes that are happening within the Walmart advertising space or the three biggest changes from our perspective overall for Walmart advertising this year. So the first thing to note is the auction style is switching Walmarts aligning to Amazon and other retailers in the industry, as of right now we’re first price auction, we’re going to be switching to the second price auction. Yes. How do you feel about that? What do you expect? How is that gonna change our overall landscape on Walmart ads.

‍Gefen
‍It’s about time. It’s about time, let me tell you, it was mind-blowing to me that you guys did not have the second price auction going on, it’ll change so much because it will allow you to actually see… It’ll just make bidding a lot easier right now, one thing we always say about Amazon is that… And I don’t know if Walmart’s gonna go in this direction, even though it’s not confirmed, Amazon has made it very clear that it’s not a perfectly fair and clean option, right. So just because you’re bidding 2 and someone else is bidding 1, it doesn’t mean that you’re gonna get that bid for 1.01 cents, Amazon takes other factors into consideration, that’s how they’re able to tell you going back to the bid adjustments, that your product has a higher likelihood of conversion, because they know based on a whole wealth of factors and AI and everything that certain products, certain ads for certain customers at certain times will have a higher likelihood of conversion, so you might see yourself bidding or outbidding or even aggressively outbidding and not getting placement. And so I’m very curious to see if Walmart is going to take that direction, if they’re gonna have a really developed AI that’s gonna say, Hey, you are the brand, so you’re gonna get a lower cost per click relative even though other people are bidding, or if it really is gonna be a fair action and a clean action and not gonna take that into account.I think that’s a big question. When is that gonna come into effect?

‍Michelle
‍We have not got a firm date yet, and Walmart is a little bit tight on when they release firm dates, but for the auction switching and the SBA access to third party sellers, we don’t have an actual day yet, so we’ll keep everyone posted on that, and I know Pacvue will release some information that is available, I’m sure they will, but as of right now, we don’t have the finalized date, just expecting it to be this here. And then that brings me to my next point, SBA, access to third-party sellers. This is gonna be huge, this is gonna be our overall game changer for our third-party sellers on Walmart, so right now you actually only have access through an API partner, we don’t have access to this within the self-serve Walmart native UI. So right now, our partnership with Pacvue is even more valuable, right, because you have access to these SBAs, the other option for us access at this point is if you are leveraging Walmart connect and they are managing your search campaigns, they also can manage for SBA campaigns so it’s really limited, right? That’s why we don’t see a ton of them all over the site just yet, because it is truly limited to suppliers that have an API partner or manage service Walmart connect.So this will be a big one. I know a lot of our marketplace brands are really excited about this. The last piece here is gonna be self-serve display, so this is not necessarily released across the board yet, VENDO has actually gained access with some categories within Walmart, and it’s granted based on the supplier level, right. So we just… Our relationship with Walmart Connect has been strong and continues to be, so just leveraging that partnership with them, and one main call out I wanted to make about self-serve display accesses, you’re gonna have full control for your campaign, so you’re gonna be able to manage those in-house or with your agency partner, whoever that might be, and there’s gonna be no budget minimums, which I know the display piece has been a little tough on our smaller suppliers, a lot of the times it’s a 100K minimum, and so that no budget minimum is really gonna open up the door for some of these smaller players to come in and launch the display campaigns. Awesome, and you… And I know you… Test test test is one of your favorite things… I’ll let you take that one.

‍Gefen
‍You got it. So yeah, it’s so important when we’re talking about these strategies, they’ve come from a lot of trial and error, and you know the key with these is that when you don’t test, you’re still testing and usually the impact is greater in either direction, so it’s really important when we raise bids, or when we raise a bid adjustments, we’re testing multiple types of bid adjustments at once through different campaigns, and we’re making sure that we’re not doing anything too drastic… Right to where we’re saying, Hey, bid adjustments work. We’re gonna throw on a 250% bid multiplier and see where it goes, right? What happens at 20? What happens at 30? What happens at 40%? That’s crucial. And you’ll find also, because anyone who sells on these platforms knows that you can wake up one day and everything can be different, that they’re also constantly testing on us, so what I find a lot of the time is that Amazon specifically… They’ll just run a ton of user interface or user experience tests on the sellers and they won’t tell us, so it’s always important to stay as up front or as ahead of the curve as possible when it pertains to new features because you’ll find that they might change a bid adjustments.And you’re not gonna get a notification. And so treating it all like a constant test is also really important because things can change and having the data that you know that you’ve been testing for the last three, four and five months will allow you to make an informed decision, quite rare. And Michelle can talk about the last two.

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, and one thing on testing, I know on Walmart, like what we’re doing now is not… Not what we were doing a year ago. The platform is changing constantly, so staying on top of your game and testing every week, right. We have tests running constantly across the board across different categories, we’re all learning on Walmart actively every single day, so make sure you test… And as Gefen always says, Test, test, test. ’cause that’s how we learn, right? And then the next point here is don’t copy and paste your Amazon strategy. So I actually got to go to Prosper with our team a few weeks back, and this was something that was actually brought up several times, so I wanted to bring it up here because I think it is extremely valuable, and we’ve learned this across the board, right. We have our Walmart team or Amazon team that work hand-in-hand together, but we also know that it’s a different shopping experience, it’s a different customer, and the algorithms are different too, right, so make sure you’re not copying and pasting your Amazon strategy because it’s not gonna work. And hone in on what Walmart is doing and leveraging your Walmart knowledge overall.

‍Gefen
‍They are different algorithms, they do work differently, the customer interacts differently, and just if you take the example of SBAs versus sponsored brand headlines, it actually is drastically different, the actual functionality is different, the strategy is different, and you’ll find that we don’t have a single brand that says, Hey, put all of our money into sponsor brand headlights, but Michelle does have brands that are putting most or all of their money into SBAs. So it’s just different. There are, of course overlaps, you can use similar keywords, you can test similar keywords, and that makes life easier, but… They are different platforms.

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, absolutely, and I agree. I know we share data, we share a brain power, it… We’re always talking together about strategy across the two retailers, and you made a great point, even the SBHs and the SBAs are just so vastly different. Awesome, so the last piece here is optimize your PDPs time and time again, especially on Walmart or new brands that are partners with us or new launches, there’s a lack of understanding and the importance of optimizing your PDP for Walmart, even for our grocery brands too, right? Even if we know that they might not have a strong Walmart dot com presence, but Walmart is leaning into that overall new strategy, so understanding your style guides that Walmart has and Walmart uses and how that affects your ad performance too… I mentioned earlier that your content scores below 85%, your SBAs are not gonna convert as well, so just understanding what you’re doing in the back-end and optimizing your PDP and how that’s gonna impact your business in the long run, and a little piece there is it helps your Walmart relationship too, they wanna see you putting in the effort, they wanna see those clean item pages, and we know that shoppers are using their phones when they walk through the store, so understanding that your PDP could be the first thing that a customer sees before they get to your item on the shelf in the brick and mortar store…

‍Matt
‍Perfect. Alright, well, thank you, Michelle, and Gefen from VENDO for that wonderful webinar and all that great content, we’re now gonna move into Q&A with about 10 or 11 minutes left in webinar today, we do have nine questions so far, majority are will be for you Michelle for Walmart, we have a few for Gefen as well, so I will jump in and start asking the questions that have already been added to the Q&A section. Please feel free to keep adding questions if you have any at this point. So first, I’m gonna go to Michelle, this is the first question. We got it all about an hour ago, which is any tips on in-stock management at Walmart for Walmart dot com, we’ve had a hard time understanding how Walmart is allocating inventory and what levers we have to ensure we’re staying in stock online.

‍Michelle
‍I think that one is probably a little too long-winded to handle here, but I would encourage you… Our information is gonna be on the next slide. Pick our team’s brain, reach out to us there, but I think that one might take a little bit too long to hit on here.

‍Matt
‍That’s totally fair. I think that’s something everyone deals with, but like Michelle said on the next slide, we will have contact information for both the Pacvue and VENDO teams so get in touch if you need to. Alright, next up is one for Gefen on Amazon. This is a question from Kelsey, and it is, can you more clearly define placement locations for top of search, product pages, rest of search in terms of the ad type, sponsored brand, sponsor product, etcetera.

‍Gefen
‍Yeah, absolutely, that’s a great question. So top of search is exactly what it sounds like. It is the top row of search, it is the top four placements for sponsored products that you see there, for sponsored brands, they’re not gonna give you that placement data, but top of search is the headline, and then responsive display, you also don’t get that data because the placements are both on and off platform, but if you wanna compare something like a top of search placement responsive products to say something that converts similarly on sponsored display, I would say the one placement of sponsor display that’s valuable, or there’s plenty that are valuable, but the on product detail page placement, that’s really valuable is gonna be right below the Buy Box, that’s a really valuable spot to get, of course, you can’t target, but you can optimize bids and you can kind of test out different types of bid strategies for certain audiences or for certain targets or also for certain targeting types, whether it’s CPM or regular CPM or CPC, and see just on anecdotal evidence where you’re showing up with specifically for Sponsored Products, top of search is gonna be that top row product pages are gonna be the product detail pages, and the rest really is rest of search, that’s why for a couple of those places that you saw, there were literally 10 or even 50 or 10x the amount of impressions on rest of search and product pages as there are in top of search, just because there’s so many more placements that you can actually show up for.

‍Matt
‍Awesome, cool, thank you, Gefen. Michelle, I think the rest of the questions are for you, one is, what is the minimum ad spend for an individual… Sorry, an automatic or manual campaign on Walmart.

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, that’s a great question. And this one actually plays into our strategy overall too, because I know some of our budget overall restrictions don’t necessarily apply to Amazon, so for one piece suppliers to create a campaign or you have to have a total budget of 100 and a minimum daily budget of 50, for third-party sellers, it’s a little bit different, your total budget has to be 50 and your daily budget can be 10.

‍Matt
‍Perfect, and I will say just to kind of talk on that one a little bit more, overall, that impacts your strategy too, it prevents you from doing 100 campaigns across the board, especially if your budget’s limited. So make sure you take that into account when you’re building out your initial strategy. Perfect, cool. Next one is about placement reporting for Walmart and whether it’s available in the UI, so the question is, are we able to see reporting by placement for Walmart in the UI to be able to test and measure impact?

‍Michelle
‍That’s a great question that we use Pacvue for, so I know that Pacvue has that reporting available and I pull it regularly, so I’d have to follow up on that one if it’s actually in the native UI…That’s a great question. I was trying not to pat Pacvue on the back too hard there, but you actually, I’m not sure whether or not that reporting is available in the native Walmart-U-I, but it is available in a lot of third party platforms, especially Pacvue’s really robust recording and actual automation settings for Walmart placement level data. Awesome, there are a few more questions here. I think there’s actually three questions that are all about third-party sellers on Walmart and SBAs, I think you already answered that a few slides ago, but the question is, are Walmart SBAs available to third party versus one-party, and I think you answered that, but is it correct to say that it is currently available for one party…

‍Michelle
‍Not quite yet. For third party? Correct, and one party only if you have a partner like that for… So not necessarily if you’re managing it in the self-serve display…

‍Matt
‍Perfect. Alright, there’s a few other questions here that is around the changes you were talking about to Walmart and some of the developments in their API on their platform, one of the questions we got the most in the Q&A section was when will the second price bid auction changes go into place, it sounds like there’s still a little bit ambiguity, I know you mentioned that there’s nothing officially yet.I have personally, I didn’t wanna interrupt on that time, and I have personally heard some chatter in the industry about June at this point, that is completely unofficial, so don’t quote me on that, and that could change, but we’re doing roughly June for some of those really, really big changes.

‍Michelle
‍Well, that’s good to hear, Matt, ’cause that’s exactly what I heard too. So maybe the reverse… True, we’ll have to wait and see.

‍Matt
‍Okay, cool, and another question is, do you know if Walmart is planning on lowering the existing bid mins…

‍Michelle
‍I have not heard that yet, more of what I’ve heard about the updates that are coming this year is a lot of back-end updates, so working to improve the algorithm overall optimizations and giving the suppliers a little more overall control, but I have not heard any updates have you Matt about the minimum… Lowering it all.

‍Matt
‍I have not… We actually got news yesterday that there were some pretty wide spread changes that are taking effect today, so this is kind of late breaking news for Walmart on some of the relevancy factors, I think proof that these platforms change literally every day.But we got some news yesterday that Walmart is changing some of the parameters around their relevancy requirements, I’m sure everyone’s… A lot of people are familiar with the requirement that your product had to rank in the top of 128 placements organically would be eligible for placement via an ad campaign looks like… I would wanna confirm with Walmart, but it looks like that requirement has gone away as of today, so it looks like that’s kind of a long-winded answer to say, I don’t know for sure when those changes will happen, but it looks like Walmart Connect team is really really speeding up their development road map and they can bring some long requested and along the way to changes.

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, absolutely. And they’re excited about it too. I know every time we talk with them, they’re very excited about what’s coming this year because they want the suppliers to have more control and to be able to use those relationships in a better way, so… I’m excited. That’s great to hear.

‍Matt
‍Cool, alright, and then another common question we got from a few for people is, can you go over top strategies for ramping up new brands or new products on Walmart, which we know can be a slower process versus Amazon.

‍Michelle
‍Yeah, absolutely, so that’s a great question. And a lot of the reasons why we have the struggle to ramp up so quickly is because Walmart places a lot of value on historical sales in terms of their relevancy overall and their advertising relevancy. So I would encourage you, especially if this is a completely new item on Walmart, it has not even been visible Walmart dot com before, lean into your auto campaigns really heavily to start… I know this is something that Walmart says as well, because of the parameter around the organic placement, which Matt just alluded to that that it could have gone away yesterday, so you might have a little more control from a manual perspective there, but have those manual and auto campaigns run alongside each other. Typically, what we do is at least 60% of our budget when we initially launch a first product on Walmart goes into our auto-targeting, and that depends on the category too, right? So if we’re talking about grocery, we’re talking about beauty or some of our higher retail categories, that’s gonna come into play as well, but I would say at least 60% of your budget needs to be in that auto campaign, and from there, once you have a couple of weeks of data and make sure you’re pulling that search term report, constantly looking at your ranking over time, and then you can go in and add a few more layers to your manual targeting.

‍Matt
‍Perfect, cool. And then with one minute left, we do have a few more questions, I don’t think we’re gonna get to all of the questions from our attendees, so what we have on the next slide, last question is one of the most important things to consider when trying to drive either organic rank and visibility for product reviews.

‍Michelle
‍Oh yeah, that’s a great call out there, so I would say in terms of reviews and organic rank, it all goes back to the Style Guide, so making sure that you are utilizing Walmart style guide, I’ve been following it to a tee, we cover that with any of our brands when they’re first launching is you have to make sure that your content is in an ideal world over 95%. That’s always our goal. We know that it helps overall organic placement and helps sales, it really helps in terms of ad frequency and ad velocity too, so I would say in terms of reviews and organic placement, lean on those style guides as best as you can and make sure your PDPs are fully optimized.

‍Matt
‍Perfect. Well, I think that is all the time. All the questions we have time for today. I saw a few really great questions from some of our other attendees, we did not get to, but with this last slide here, we do have some contact information for both the Pacvue and the VENDO teams. So I wanted to say thank you again to Michelle and Gefen and the whole VENDO team for participating today to all our attendees for joining us, just a reminder that the recording from this session will be sent out later today to the email address you registered with, and if you would like to get in touch with either the Pacvue or VENDO team, we’re totally happy to speak to anyone and answer any more questions you have. For Pacvue, please reach out to [email protected] and then for VENDO, feel free to reach out to [email protected] So with that, we’ll wrap it up today, thank you, everyone, for attending. Have a great rest of your day and we’ll see you in the next one.