The Walmart.com platform boasts a whopping 131 million unique monthly visitors. The channel’s growing presence, as well as the opportunities it poses to brands for new customer exposure and a more syndicated brand image, make selling on Walmart.com a great idea for product brands.
If you’re exploring new channels and platforms for your products, we highly recommend partnering with an ecommerce accelerator. Pattern is a global ecommerce accelerator that layers capabilities and resources on top of what’s already working for your brand to help you optimize product performance wherever you sell online, including on Walmart.com.
For brands selling on Walmart.com, especially those starting out on the platform, it can be hard to know if their efforts are making an impact. Here are 5 ways you can measure whether or not you’re achieving success with Walmart advertising.
What are Walmart Ads?
Similar to Amazon’s Sponsored Product Ads, Walmart Sponsored Product Ad campaigns are pay-per-click ads. When someone types a relevant search term, your Walmart ad can display on the search results page with a “sponsored” banner below the image. (See below.)
How to Measure Success on Walmart Advertising
1. Take Note of Organic Rank
The goal of advertising is to increase your sales overall, not just sales attributed to advertising. So, make sure that you consider organic performance when measuring your success with Walmart Ads.
As you sell more through your listing ads, your organic rank improves—Walmart’s algorithm sees that your products match buyers’ search intent for certain keywords and favors your organic listings to a more discoverable place. We call this the “Flywheel Effect.” As you increase your relevance on keywords, you start to see more sales from the improved rank, leading to better listing placements and more sales.
Products that don’t have high conversions on the detail page are more often very low on the search results page and thus not very discoverable (“Reverse Flywheel”).
How can I see if my Walmart Advertising organic rank has increased?
There’s currently no tool that can currently track your organic rank and how it changes over time. So, we recommend noting your organic rank before you begin advertising, and then check again weekly to see if the rank increases. In our experience, brands are pleasantly surprised by how quickly advertising affects their product listings’ rankings.
2. Measure Walmart.com Ad Sales
Measuring your Walmart.com ad sales is a great way to see the success of your ad strategy on the platform. The two are related because advertising increases the traffic on your detail pages. It’s one of the great reasons advertising your products early on gives you more opportunity to obtain rules faster. If your detail pages are optimized and retail ready and you can increase their traffic, you’ll see increased conversions.
This is often called the Ecommerce Advertising Flywheel:
The best way to view this on Walmart.com is directly on the platform.
3. Track Impressions from Walmart Ads
Another way to determine whether your efforts are successful with Walmart is to look at the number of impressions you’re able to generate.
Using the image above from Walmart.com’s platform, you can see that spending only a few thousands dollars got us a few million impressions for this brand through Walmart Advertising. Since Walmart.com is a CPC model, we only paid for the clicks, which means we got millions of additional views for free.
On other platforms, we aren’t given the opportunity to be served so frequently, making Walmart.com a game changer for brands really wanting to grow online.
4. Keep an Eye on Detail Page Experience Metrics
Walmart detail pages show you how you’re performing for several metrics:
- Sessions
- Reviews
- Content/Imagery
Sessions
If we keep in mind the Ecommerce Advertising Flywheel, you’ll remember that it’s important to watch for detail page sessions to increase as you increase traffic through advertising. That’s how you’ll know if consumers are clicking on the ad of that product.
If you’re only advertising one product, then this would be inevitable. But, if you’re choosing to bucket multiple products into one ad group, looking at the increase in sessions on each product will help you see how advertising has lifted each product’s detail page sessions.
Reviews
Keep track of reviews, too. How many reviews were you getting per week before focusing on/optimizing your advertising? Has that number increased as you’ve brought more people to the detail page and received more product purchases? Keep in mind that getting more reviews takes time—people tend to wait a few weeks before leaving a review.
Content/Imagery
When potential consumers get to the Walmart detail page, are they converting? If your RoAS (Return on Ad Spend) is not where you would like it, look at your detail pages’ conversion rate. As you’ve brought more people to the detail pages, did they convert into purchasers?
If not, it may be possible that you’re not providing them with the right content and imagery to get them to convert. If that’s the case, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tests can help you see if you can enhance the detail page experience, therefore increasing conversions on the page. You can also get in contact with an ecommerce content expert for advice on what works and doesn’t when optimizing visual assets for Walmart.com.
5. Look at Individual Product Sell-Through
When analyzing advertising performance on Walmart.com, it’s best to compare the product you’re advertising to a product you’re not advertising. This comparison works best if the products are similar in rank as well as product type.
As you see the sales of the advertised product increase, you can look at the similar product and see if the trend occurred there as well or not. If not, you have another indication that your advertising has been successful.
Maximize Your Walmart Ad Spend with Pattern
As one of the first platforms to advertise on Walmart.com and now an official Walmart.com partner, our advertising team at Pattern knows how to grow our brands successfully on the platform. By combining our resources, technology, and expert teams, we can help you to expand to Walmart.com or improve your performance there.
If you’re interested in selling on Walmart or learning more about our advertising capabilities, contact us here to get in touch.
