As of September 2020, Walmart.com has had 116 million unique monthly visitors. This growing presence, along with the recent launch of Walmart+, makes it an obvious choice when trying to grow your brand on ecommerce.
With Walmart putting a lot of focus on growing the platform, it is inevitable that advertising is going to get very competitive sooner than expected.
Walmart Advertising is new, which means metrics are green
Walmart is a newer platform, which of course means that the algorithms for advertising, SEO, and the overall organic listing performance is changing constantly to try and serve the best quality products to the consumers. It also means that advertising is going to be very hard to measure. New customer acquisition is practically impossible right now because you can’t add negative keywords to rule out the brand name.
Although the more common metrics like branded versus non-branded sales, new customers, and click-share data are not currently provided in the ad platform, there are still 5 great ways to measure success with Walmart advertising.
What are Walmart Performance ads?
First, let’s briefly cover what Walmart Performance ads are.
Similar to Amazon’s Sponsored Product Ads, Walmart Performance 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 an example of a Walmart Performance ad below.
Now that you know what we are talking about, let’s go through the 5 great ways to measure success:
1. Measuring organic rank on Walmart Advertising
In summary, we advertise to increase our sales. We don’t just want to increase our sales attributed to advertising; we want to increase our organic sales as a whole.
Increasing your sales will increase your organic rank because Walmart will see that you are relevant to those searching for the product. Therefore, you should be moved up to a place that is more discoverable. Products that do not have high conversions on the detail page are more often very low on the search results page, thus not very discoverable.
Advertising is a great way to increase your organic rank faster because it allows your products to be more discoverable when consumers are searching for products like yours on the platform. As people see your products more, your opportunity for detail page views increases, thus increasing your opportunity for more sales.
How can I see if my organic rank has increased?
There is currently no tool that is tracking this, so we recommend tracking this before you begin advertising, and then weekly after that to see if it begins increasing. You will be pleasantly surprised how quickly you can increase rank through advertising.
2. Measuring Walmart.com ad sales
This is simple. Advertising increases the traffic on your detail pages. It is one of the great reasons why advertising early on your products gives you more opportunity to obtain rules faster. If your detail pages are retail ready and you increase traffic, you will then 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. In your advertising.walmart.com dashboard, you will see the section called “Total Attr. Sales Revenue.” Here are your advertising attributed sales.
One thing to note is that above this section has an area where you can choose the attribution window. The options, as of now, are 3, 14, and 30 days. You may see your Total Attr. Sales Revenue change based on the window you select.
3. Tracking impressions from Walmart ads
116 million unique visitors were tracked to Walmart.com as of September 2020. These visitor counts to Walmart.com are only increasing as Walmart puts more and more brands on the platform.
Using that same image as before, you can see that impressions are shown on the top left.
As you can see, spending only a few thousands dollars got us a few million impressions. Since Walmart.com is a CPC model, we only paid for the clicks, which means we got millions of additional exposure for a very insignificant cost.
On other platforms, we are not given the opportunity to be served so frequently, making Walmart.com truly a game changer for brands really wanting to grow.
4. Detail page experience for Walmart ads
This point embodies several metrics:
- Sessions
- Reviews
- Content/Imagery
I’ll discuss each one briefly to show you how we can measure our advertising success with the detail page experience.
Sessions Bringing the concept of the flywheel back, it is important to remember that as we bring more traffic through advertising, we do expect sessions on the detail pages to increase. If sessions are increasing, then you know that they are clicking on the ad of that product.
If you are only advertising 1 product, then this would be inevitable. But, if you are choosing to bucket multiple products into 1 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 How many reviews were you getting per week? Has that increased as you have brought more people to the detail page and received more product purchases? This one takes time, as people tend to wait a few weeks before leaving a review.
Pro tip—the ability to increase detail page reviews is a great way to pitch advertising to brands that are hesitant to advertise on the platform.
Content/imagery As people are getting 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 have brought more people to the detail pages, you could expect to see increased sales come.
If this isn’t the case, it may be possible that you are not providing them with the right content and imagery to get them to convert. If that is the case, you should do some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tests to see if you can enhance the detail page experience, therefore increasing conversion on the page.
5. Individual product sell-through via Walmart Advertising
When analyzing advertising performance on Walmart.com, it is best to compare the product you are advertising to a product you are not advertising. Preferably have them be 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.
As one of the first platforms to advertise on Walmart.com, our advertising team here at Pattern is learning every day how to grow our brands successfully on the platform. These 5 great ways to measure success on Walmart advertising is exactly what we look at when optimizing campaigns for our partners.
If you’re interested more in selling on Walmart with Pattern, or learning more about our advertising capabilities, reach out to schedule a demo of Pattern services today.
