The most successful eCommerce advertising strategies require more than a competitive edge on price. To achieve long-term profitability on Walmart, Amazon, and other major marketplaces, your ad strategy needs vision.
Success with Walmart Connect is about reaching new customers across the purchasing journey, from the moment of brand awareness to the final conversion. In this guide, you’ll learn how to build and refine your Walmart advertising strategy to drive sustained growth—not just bottom-of-funnel sales.
Looking for new ways to drive sales from Walmart Marketplace? Try the powerful Walmart advertising platform built for high-growth brands.
Amazon Ads vs. Walmart Connect: Key Differences and Similarities
If you’ve been operating mainly on Amazon, there are a few key differences between Amazon Ads and the advertising options on Walmart Connect to be aware of.
| Feature | Amazon Ads | Walmart Connect |
| Sponsored Products | In-grid ads for search results. Guides shoppers to product pages. | Positioned in high-traffic areas like homepage, search, and item pages. Winning bids need relevance and CPC. |
| Sponsored Brands | Display and video ads appear in search and detail pages. | Exclusive to marketplace brand owners with logo and product display at top of search results. |
| Sponsored Display | Shows ads across Amazon and partner sites. | Onsite and offsite via Walmart DSP, Partner Network, or Managed Serve. |
| CTV/Streaming Ads | Ads across Amazon's streaming services. | Streaming ads on platforms like Roku and Paramount+. |
6 Walmart Advertising Strategies for Success Across the Funnel
Whether you’re just venturing into the world of Walmart ads or looking to refine your approach, these six tried-and-true strategies will set you up for success.
1. Create Rules Based on Target Outcomes
Automating your Walmart advertising campaigns with rule-based bidding is critical to stay nimble without devoting heavy resources to manual optimization. The ability to automate decisions like ad spend, budget adjustments, and campaign settings based on specific triggers helps you maximize Return on Ad Spend (RoAS) and overall profitability.
Think of your advertising strategy as a finely-tuned orchestra. You’re not playing every instrument; you’re the conductor. Rules-based automation makes sure everything stays in harmony. With Walmart Connect, you can set rules to respond to performance data in real time.
For example, you can automatically increase budgets on high-performing campaigns to make sure they capture as much demand as possible. On the flip side, lower-performing campaigns can be automatically paused or restructured to prevent wasted spend.
You can also set up notifications to be alerted if a campaign runs out of budget or performance unexpectedly changes.
By setting rules to modify your Walmart keyword bids based on target RoAS or sales numbers, you can ensure you’re bidding competitively for the right shoppers. Consider using a tiered keyword strategy to adjust ad types and bids based on each stage of the customer journey.
| Goal | Ad Type |
| Awareness | Sponsored BrandsSponsored VideosCTVWalmart Display - onsite/offsite |
| Consideration | Sponsored ProductsSponsored BrandsSponsored VideosWalmart Display - onsite/offsiteBrand Shop and ShelfIn-store experiences |
| Conversion | Sponsored ProductsBrand Shop and ShelfWalmart Display - onsiteRetargeting and social mediaIn-store demos |
2. Build Custom Audiences
Many of the most competitive eCommerce brands are actively integrating shopper data to manage the experience holistically across platforms. Walmart Demand Side Platform (DSP) gives advertisers a powerful framework to do this by building custom audiences.
You can use your own first-party data from Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and other platforms to build detailed segments or target shoppers who have previously interacted with your brand outside the Walmart ecosystem.
“You're able to see how a shopper interacted through different advertisements, different organic listings, before they made their shopping decision,” Trellis Chief Product Officer Krishna Vemulapali explains. “It can be really powerful to understand which of those parts are most profitable, which ones you should turn off, and which ones you should double down on.”
Walmart custom audiences let you target shoppers based on behavioral data. Tap into specific target audience insights, including:
- New buyers
- Lapsed buyers
- Top spenders within the product category
- Lookalike audiences
- Brand affinity
- Category predictive
- Customer attributes (personal, interests, lifestyle, life stage)
For example, you can refine your ad campaigns by using variant bidding to automatically tailor ad creative to specific segments, highlighting product variations like different flavors, colors, and sizes.
These advanced targeting techniques make it easier to execute data-driven display campaigns that make every advertising dollar work harder for your brand.
3. Set Frequency Caps
In advertising, repetition is key—but there is such a thing as hammering the nail too many times. Frequency caps help you avoid over-exposing the same audience segments to your ads.
Setting caps at the campaign level can help you:
- Prevent wasting ad spend on users who are already sufficiently exposed to your brand
- Help maintain healthy click-through rates
- Maximize engagement and conversion rates
With Walmart DSP, you can manage frequency caps (per day or per week) across all campaign touchpoints regardless of which apps or websites they see your ad on. You can also set these caps using a third-party platform like The Trade Desk or Trellis’ advertising software.
The ability to set frequency caps across all campaigns and placements is key to making a meaningful impact with your message while preserving your budget—and your reputation with your customer base.
4. Use an Intentional Pricing Strategy
If you’ve been selling on Walmart for a while, you know that pricing is a big factor in your success. However, that doesn’t mean you have to race to the bottom to win sales at all costs.
Do you need competitive prices? Absolutely—but you don’t need the lowest price to succeed on Walmart. Instead, consider implementing a more holistic strategy that also includes:
- Keeping consistent inventory levels
- Offering attractive shipping options (or using Walmart Fulfillment Services)
- Optimizing listing content for shopper experience and SEO
- Monitoring your competitors
If you’re competing for the Walmart Buy Box, be aware that raising prices too much too quickly can cause you to lose it. For this reason, you should save price increases of more than 10% every few days for specific circumstances, like if you need to slow sales to balance stock.
Regardless of your Buy Box strategy, be sure to follow Walmart’s Pricing Rule, which automatically unpublishes product listings with prices “egregiously higher” than similar listings on Walmart.com or other marketplaces.
Pricing strategy is an intricate dance. Trellis’ dynamic pricing tools help you pinpoint the optimal prices that serve your business objectives. Explore our Walmart pricing platform.
5. Maximize Holiday Sales
During the 2024 Walmart key events and holiday season, online retail spending hit a record $241.4 billion, up 8.7% from the previous year. It’s crucial to plan for this period and start getting in front of shoppers early.
According to data shared by Zach Hekker, Walmart Connect Senior Partner, 67% of Walmart shoppers started either planning their holiday purchases or actually shopping by October.
“People are starting to shop earlier and earlier,” Zach explained. “Deal days are happening earlier and earlier.”
Here’s a quick Walmart advertising checklist to help you make the most of the holiday season:
| ✅ | Plan your budget strategically: Analyze past performance and allocate your advertising budget across channels, focusing on peak periods. |
| ✅ | Seasonal keyword optimization: Continuously update your keyword strategy to align with holiday trends. Include high-impact seasonal keywords like “Halloween candy” and “Christmas gifts” alongside niche terms like “Hanukkah gift.” |
| ✅ | Ad creative: Design compelling, festive-themed ad visuals and copy that resonate with holiday shoppers, and try different formats. |
| ✅ | Use multi-channel tactics: Combine sponsored search with display ads for omnichannel visibility. Use both on-site and off-site platforms to broaden your reach. |
| ✅ | Prioritize high-growth categories: Focus advertising on categories with high holiday season growth like toys and food. |
| ✅ | Target self-gifters: Showcase products that encourage personal purchases alongside gifts for others. |
| ✅ | Win the Buy Box: Optimize your listings and ad strategies to improve your chances of winning the Buy Box. |
| ✅ | Dynamic bidding: Use bidding strategies that adapt to real-time market conditions to stay competitive. |
Trellis’ seasonal optimization tools help you plan for the holiday season to dynamically increase your ad budget, run cost-effective campaigns, and boost profitability.
6. Measure Advertising Incrementality
Understanding the true impact of your advertising efforts is crucial. “Unless I'm looking for a very specific product from a very specific brand, the odds are I have interacted with multiple organic listings, multiple ad placements, before I have made that shopping decision," Krishna explains.
Measuring incrementality helps you evaluate the effect of specific campaigns or channels on total conversions.
Here’s how to measure advertising incrementality at a high level:
- Model your baseline sales using historical data as benchmark metrics.
- Define control groups to differentiate those exposed to the campaign from those who aren't.
- Run the campaign against the control group to get an unbiased measure of your advertising's impact.
- Track conversions for both groups to gather the necessary data.
- Analyze the results to determine the true incrementality of your campaign and drive future decisions.
With deeper insights into incrementality, you can identify and retarget high-value Walmart customers based on purchase patterns. You can also uncover which ASINs attract repeat and new-to-brand buyers.
These insights let you optimize your advertising campaigns based on customer LTV and brand loyalty, not just RoAS.
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Build and Execute a Profitable Walmart Marketing Strategy
A well-rounded advertising strategy is your ticket to standing out on Walmart. Success isn’t just about competitive pricing. It’s about telling your brand’s story and using all the data you have to create meaningful, personalized experiences for shoppers.Ready to take charge of your Walmart advertising strategy? Give your brand an edge over the competition Trellis, the eCommerce advertising platform designed to help you make better marketplace merchandising decisions. To see how Trellis can take your Walmart advertising performance to the next level, book a demo today.