Author: Dionne Resnik - Senior Product Marketing Manager, Walmart Connect

Sponsored Search is essential to any omni campaign. Earlier this year, our SVP and General Manager Rich Lehrfeld shared how Walmart Connect is leaning into our core offerings through a combination of innovation and evolution – such as Walmart Sponsored Search.  

Improvements to our search capabilities, such as relevancy enhancements, are already delivering more impact to advertisers and better experiences to our customers. And this week marks a major milestone in that evolution with the launch of our advanced second-price auction and a new campaign optimization tool called Item Recommendations.  

Here’s a recap of these new offerings and other enhancements we’ve introduced this half:

Search-relevancy enhancements: In April, we streamlined our ad-serving criteria to make all qualifying Sponsored Products ads eligible to appear in relevant in-grid results on search and browse pages. Ads can now qualify based on factors such as the advertised item’s contextual relevancy, customer intent, the item’s historical performance and others. Take advantage of these search-relevancy enhancements with our best practices guide. 

Advanced second-price auction: Combined with our recent search-relevancy enhancements, our new advanced second-price auction helps reduce your risk of overpaying for cost-per-click bids. In this model, which launched earlier this week, the most relevant product – combined with the best bid – wins the auction. The winner pays the amount necessary to win based on relevant competing bids, which may be less than the winner’s maximum bid. Learn more about our new auction model in this one-page guide.  

What’s ahead

New Sponsored Products placements: These enhancements open the door for more growth opportunities, like our expansion of in-grid inventory. We’ve expanded our Sponsored Products inventory for ads to serve in in-grid placements 1, 2, 3 and 4. For the rest of the search grid, two ads will continue to appear for every 10 results. This means items now have more opportunities to surface at the top of searches, which can help boost product sales and lead to higher ROAS. 

New campaign-optimization tools: Item Recommendations, also rolling out soon, will identify unadvertised items with the potential to perform well in a Search campaign.

About Walmart Sponsored Search

When a Walmart customer enters a search term on our website or app, relevant products appear as search results. That includes two types of Sponsored Search: Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads boost relevant products to higher positions within or above search results. Sponsored Products ads also appear in prominent positions on other high-traffic pages.  

Contact our team to learn more about Walmart Sponsored Search and our latest improvements!