Walmart Account Audits: What We Find
November 7, 2023
Forming a partnership with a Walmart advertising agency demands considerable trust from sellers and brands. To establish a strong foundation of trust, it’s crucial to offer an honest and unbiased account review or audit that pinpoints potential opportunities.
Having conducted numerous account reviews, we’ve observed recurring patterns where brands are falling short of reaching their maximum potential. Here are the big three (plus a bonus):
1. Misutilization of Auto Campaigns
Consolidation of auto campaigns is KEY because the Walmart Connect algorithm favors campaigns with more products. We often see too many Auto campaigns – leading to competition between campaigns and raising bids on yourself.
2. Underutilization of placement & platform options
Unlike with Amazon Ads, with Walmart Manual campaigns you can select the placements. You can also set bid multipliers for Buy-Box & Search Ingrid as well as device type. These additional controls are often not used, underutilized, or set-and-forget. This leads into our next bullet….
3. Not utilizing reporting available within Ad Center for optimizing campaigns
Reporting is available within the Ad Center via easily-attainable On-Demand reporting, as well as Custom Reporting to further refine the results you’re looking for. On-demand reports will show opportunities to adjust bids by ad and keyword level. Custom Reporting offers a way to read platform performance.
Bids, ads, keywords, placements and bid modifiers should never be set-and-forget. It’s key to be utilizing these reports to measure performance and continuously update.
Bonus #4: While this is a listing element, it goes hand-in-hand with advertising performance…. Not optimizing the elements that impact their Listing Quality Score:
Walmart gives every listing item a score based on multiple factors that affect consumers and their purchase decisions. Sponsored Search items with Listing Quality scores below 60% are less likely to convert and can even begin to impact your ad delivery. Frequent reviewing and optimizing Listing Quality scores is a must for brand-owners.