Search strategies are a powerful way for advertisers of all sizes to grow their business and improve the shopper experience. Investing in Sponsored Search advertising can help increase product awareness and discoverability with customers and elevate your brand above competition. But to capture the most value from ad spend, advertisers need to be able to activate the right campaign optimization and performance tactics.

With access to the right tools and resources, advertisers can build, execute and measure their campaigns efficiently. Here are some tips for getting your products higher in the search results and making your campaigns more cost-effective:

Tip #1: Optimize your item page

Your item page is equivalent to your product packaging and is the most important part of the conversion funnel on Walmart.com. This page contributes to a customer’s purchase decision which indirectly influences the historical performance, a critical component for determining relevancy.

To optimize discoverability of your item page, consider these three recommendations:

    1. Provide a clean and concise product title

    2. Include relevant keywords in the description

    3. Highlight the item’s key benefits and use high-quality images

See more best practices here, to learn how you can improve efficiency, gain more product visibility, drive more traffic to your listings and maximize returns.

Tip #2: Build a bid strategy

There are a few important tactics to consider when setting your bid strategy. The first is our suggested bid feature, which provides strategic pricing guidance for setting up both manual and automatic campaigns. By providing a starting point for your bids based on competitive bids, it has the potential to help increase your probability of winning auctions.

Another important tactic is the use of bid multipliers, which allows you to adjust your bid based on the placement. It can increase your chances of showing in premium-high visibility placements, such as In-grid.

Tip #3: Use available tools and reports

There are a variety of tools and reports that advertisers can access throughout a campaign to gain important insights to optimize performance:

    1. Check the Item Health report to understand the quality of your items with your Listing Quality Score (OLQ) and get recommended actions to improve the health of these items. The report allows you to see the health of your sponsored items and take corrective actions to improve item performance and help reach your desired campaign goals. Make sure to add in the items that are higher quality.

    2. The Item-Keyword report can be used to harvest keywords from your automatic campaign. In other words, keywords that customers are searching for that are triggering your items to serve from an automatic campaign. This report indicates which keywords your advertised items are being served against, and how well the advertised items are performing for those keywords. This can help you improve current and future campaigns.

    3. Keyword recommendations automatically identify keywords with the potential to enhance item visibility and boost sales for live Sponsored Products manual campaigns, based on the advertiser’s in-flight campaign performance and organic search data.

Tip #4: Learn how to enhance relevancy 

Walmart’s platform determines relevancy by considering multiple factors:

    1. How closely the advertised product matches the customer’s intent

    2. The ad’s contextual relevancy

    3. The quality of item page content

    4. The product’s historical performance

Relevancy is key to what you end up paying and where your ads are positioned in the search results. The cost-per-click (CPC) you pay depends on how relevant your items are. The higher the relevancy the lower your cost but with a higher max bid you compete for higher ad placements.

You can also use the Item recommendations feature to identify unadvertised items with the potential to perform well in a Walmart Sponsored Products campaign. See our best practice guide to improve the relevancy of your ads.

Contact us to learn more about Walmart Sponsored Search Advertising and you can get started today!