Case Study: Advertising on Walmart Increased Sales by 67%

If you want to win on Walmart, looking at advertising is a great first step to see how you can capture some extra sales that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten organically. In this case study with our brand partner Thorne, we helped our partner increase their sales by 67%. Let’s dive into the Walmart advertising strategies we employed to get the results we had.

Walmart advertising case study summary

As we looked at the rate of growth Thorne saw on Walmart.com over the past 6 months, we then compared that growth to the growth of the products we began advertising on specifically to see if we saw a significant increase in the ones being advertised on. What we found was that the products that had advertising on them saw a 67% increase in sales ABOVE the average.

The control group actually saw a decrease of 12%

We recognize that we were advertising on products that we predicted would sell more due to Amazon performance. So another analysis we pulled was looking at the overall sales delta between the products in the advertised group as well as the control group. The date range started prior to advertising and COVID, as well as during COVID and after. You can see in the graph that at the beginning of the year the advertised group was between 2 and 3 times larger than the control group.

Methods

We began advertising in March right as we saw a COVID wave, and now through our advertising efforts helping us reach a higher organic rank on Walmart we have doubled the delta between both the advertised products and the control group products. Now, we of course had to dig into the possibility of COVID pushing those products, so we looked at the top supplement/immune related keywords searched on Walmart during this period of time, and what we found was that we had a very even overlap over each group.

For example, you can see both groups of products. You can see a Vitamin D in both, Magnesium was searched frequently and we didn’t have that product in our advertised group, but we did in the control group. Vitamin B is found in both groups, etc.

Results

By employing the Walmart advertising strategies above, we were able to achieve these results for our partner Thorne:

• Advertising Products saw a 67% in sales.
• Control Group saw a decrease of 12% over the same time period.
• More than 2X our new weekly average sell-through on advertising products.
• COVID did not play a significant factor in our success—this was tested.

If you want to learn more about how to measure success on Walmart advertising, read our blog here. Reach out to a Pattern representative today if you’re interested in growing your Walmart advertising business and increasing your sales on ecommerce.