#546 – Walmart.com PPC Campaign & Listing Strategies

Ever wonder what it takes to turn your Walmart product listings from lackluster to lucrative? Ryan King, the savvy CEO of BlueRyse, joins us on the airwaves to share his expert strategies for maximizing your presence on Walmart’s digital shelves. Together, we navigate the intricacies of PPC, the subtleties of listing optimization, and the crucial metrics that could make or break your profits. Ryan’s advice, drawn from the cutting-edge tools of Helium 10, affords a masterclass in finessing your financials and leveraging Walmart’s ever-growing online platform for unparalleled brand growth and diversification.

In the vast sea of selling at Walmart, standing out is an art form, and we’ve got the brushes and palette to help you paint a masterpiece with your product listings. Our journey reveals how to ensure your offerings are not just indexed, but also scoring high on Walmart’s listing quality score. We cover all bases from the precision of backend attributes to the finesse required in product type optimization. We also dissect the importance of competitive pricing and swift delivery, how to ace the A/B testing game, and even how Walmart’s fulfillment services can provide a much-needed boost in ranking.

As the curtain falls on this episode, we’ve left no stone unturned in the realm of Walmart PPC and the emerging tactics of brand conquesting. Imagine targeting competitor brand terms, a concept newly possible on Walmart, and the advantage it hands you in the grand chessboard of ecommerce. Wrapping up with a flourish, we dabble in the complexities of SEM strategies and the nuances of bidding wars, closing with a heartfelt word of thanks to Ryan for his insights. So, tune in and equip yourself with the secrets to selling success on one of the world’s most formidable marketplaces.

In episode 546 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Ryan discuss:

• 00:00 – Walmart Listing Optimization for Increased Sales
• 01:47 – Expert Insights on Walmart Brand Performance
• 04:54 – Leveraging Social Proof in E-Commerce
• 08:58 – Optimizing Search Terms on E-Commerce Platforms
• 12:48 – Maximizing eCommerce Channel Expansion
• 18:07 – PPC Strategies & Updates for Walmart
• 24:19 – Untapped Brand Defense Opportunities
• 29:42 – Expanding Opportunities in Walmart Marketplace
• 32:36 – Optimizing Walmart PPC Bidding Strategies
• 36:26 – Tips for Completing Applications Successfully
• 40:00 – Secret Strategies Ryan Uses

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Walmart PPC and Listing Optimization Strategies to increase sales on the Walmart marketplace. This and so much more on today’s episode.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. What was your gross sales yesterday, last week, last year? More importantly, what are your profits after all your cost of selling on Amazon? Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool Profits For more information, go to H10.me/profits.

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast brought to you by Helium 10. My name is Carrie and I will be your host, and this is our Winning with Walmart Wednesday, where we go over all things Walmart, we tell you the latest and greatest news about Walmart, we answer your questions and we have an amazing Walmart expert guest. I’m going to just tell you a little bit about some Helium 10 tools, because I haven’t really mentioned these a lot lately. I wanted to make sure that everyone is aware that Helium 10 does have a lot of amazing tools that support Walmart. So we have X-Ray. It’s going to help you with sales estimates and so much more. We have our Cerebro and Magnet tools that help you find amazing keywords for your listings. We also have our Profits tool and our Keyword Tracking tool. In addition to that, we have Adtomic, which is our paper click advertising management software, so that is extremely helpful. We’ve added day parting and a lot of other amazing things to Adtomic, so it’s definitely the best it’s ever been and highly recommend checking that out if you haven’t checked it out. All right. So today I want to bring on our guest, and I’m really, really excited to have him on today and his name is Ryan King, and so thanks so much for being on. Ryan is a CEO and co-founder of BlueRyse, which is a Walmart agency, and I’ve actually known Ryan for a few years now. We met at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and we definitely connected on Walmart stuff, so he’s definitely an expert in the field and I’m really excited for him to share all of his knowledge with everyone today. I know he was on last year, but for anyone, Ryan, that doesn’t know you, can you go ahead and tell a little bit about yourself to the audience?

Ryan:

Certainly. Yeah, thanks for having me on here, Carrie. Glad to be on this episode here of the Serious Sellers Podcast, specifically talking about Walmart. So yeah, BlueRyse is a full managed service agency focused specifically on Walmart. We’ve been operating with third party and first party brands since early 2020. And our focus is on everything from content optimization, ad management, catalog management, interfacing with Walmart personnel, all these other elements with regard to, ultimately, the focus of maximizing Walmart brand’s performance on Walmart.com.

Carrie Miller:

I want to first start out and just ask you, because you’ve been in this Walmart game for quite some time, what do you think the main advantages are for third party sellers to start selling on Walmart and do you think it’s a really good opportunity?

Ryan:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great opportunity. I think the advantages have continued to grow over the years. They haven’t diminished. One of the reasons we saw the opportunity on Walmart was as brand owners ourselves. We began and launched and grew brands on Amazon back in the day, starting in early 2013. And we were looking for ways to, as brand owners, de-risk a bit, diversify revenues back during the aggregator boom. Part of the factor was how do we increase multiples, all those kind of elements? I think all the principles remain the same as to why those would be advantages. If you’re truly building a brand, then you’re looking to identify what are the channels that make sense to increase sales, increase profits overall and to de-risk. So that’s one advantage of finding other marketplaces, other channels to sell through. Beyond that, there’s just the fact that Walmart is pushing heavy and has been pushing heavy into the online marketplace space. They understand that for them as a business, as a retailer, while they’re the number one retailer in the world, e-commerce certainly has been a major growth factor for others competitors like Amazon and everybody else, and so Walmart understands that they need to compete in the digital shelf. That means they want more sellers, they want a broader assortment, they want great products so that more shoppers come and have a great experience. So that has led to Walmart heavily focusing on building out their third-party marketplace over the last several years. I would say a couple other that come to mind social proof and reviews and ratings have been always on the forefront of e-commerce sellers’ minds, especially in the Amazon space, such large motes. I haven’t looked at this example in a while, but earbuds, Bluetooth earbuds. When I looked at it, probably two years ago, the average review count for Bluetooth earbuds on page one for Amazon was somewhere around 40,000. At the time, the average review count for that keyword, which was a high volume keyword, on Walmart was around 800. And so just the opportunity to enter the market. You know, if you had wished you had. You know the buzz for a long time was Walmart is Amazon of 2012 or whatever it may be. Walmart is in its own right of maturing marketplace these days, but the opportunity still exists. In that way, I think, the other ones. There is a bit of a different shopper base, and so if you have a broader assortment, your heroes on Amazon or other marketplaces may also translate to be your heroes on Walmart and you can just get a continued growth of that assortment. However, we also do see because it is a different shopper, a different marketplace, sometimes some other products that may not be performing as well in your catalog on Amazon might be your top performers on Walmart for various reasons, and so it breeds new life into your catalog, potentially. And then, finally, if you really want to identify ways of growing the brand, and maybe brick and mortar retail is a desire of yours at some point, then there is a credible pathway to getting products into brick and mortar. We work with brands all the time. Who that is part of their play, whether they’ve begun with conversations with merchants first, and it’s a let’s test and see and let’s get it in, or if they’re native e-commerce or D to C first, and they’re, they’re engaging with us in order to optimize and maximize performance planning on that conversation in the future. We see those dots connect quite consistently to at least get a conversation. So all the above and then, for those who have FOMO you know, to kind of trigger the FOMO, that it’s, it’s a bit of this is the opportunity to get in now, even if it’s maybe a mid to longer term play for some brands. Get in now while you, while the opportunity is there, while there’s more access to account managers and others who are aligned incentives with you, to get your assortment online on their marketplace.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, amazing, yeah, those are all really amazing reasons. The next question I have for you is you know, people are always wanting to know how can I, you know, increase my sales on Walmart. So what are some strategies you have for listing, optimization and just increasing sales on Walmart?

Ryan:

Yeah, you know, I know a lot of these have probably been covered repeated ways, but it bears repeating again would be step number 1 is making sure you’re not just If you’re gonna, if it is a secondary or tertiary marketplace in your mindset and strategy and you’re not paying attention to the unique ways you need to optimize for Walmart, then unless you’re kind of the you hit the trend at the right time in the in the search volume at the right time, Walmart with an optimized listing, you’re not gonna see great sales lift. And so Step one would be, know the Walmart marketplace. Understand how the algorithm works, understand what product listing optimization means, understand that it needs to be original for Walmart’s marketplace and how that impacts sales. And so if I was looking and we can talk about I know we’ve talked about this several times in the past to some key things to look at, let’s just jump forward and assume you’re on the marketplace, you’re trying to grow sales in your troubleshooting, first step I go to is on the listing itself. Or actually the first step would be double check search term volumes, and this is easy. Segue into talking more about Helium 10 tools, because that’s what we use is look at your category. One simple way to do it you can either start with your own listing or you start with competitive listings. But one way we like to do it is as well as you go to Walmart.com, go to the category and sort by bestseller, you’ll probably get a lot of 1P brands, meaning in store brands, those they’re popping up at the top list. But go ahead and pull up Xray if you have Helium 10 Xray and scrape the Top 10 out of there and then plug those in, analyze them through Cerebro and get that, that search term volume list, and identify where are the search volumes? Are you optimized for those? One thing to call out if you’re in a consumable space or anything that might be more related to grocery, for example, Amazon search volumes, you might have found success with different types of search terms. But there might be high volume search terms on Walmart you haven’t even optimized for Because Amazon wasn’t a grocery first type marketplace or that type of place. So there’s, there can be high volume keywords that would not even exist really On the Amazon marketplace that are going to be high drivers on Walmart. So identify, get, make sure you’re looking at the right search terms. Secondly is just make sure you’re indexing and ranking before you even think about ranking. Are you indexing? And one of the fundamental areas that you’ve got to look at to make sure you’re indexing properly is your category. Are you on the right shelf path? But if you go into growth opportunities and you click on your listing in your kind of table of products that show up there product type widget will show up and look at that product type and I didn’t try and identify. Is this the right? Does this fit? Product type determines what the back end attributes are on your listing that you need to fill out and, just as a quick aside, you need to fill those out as exhaustively as possible. It’s only getting more and more important to do so. While your listing quality score is not as heavily Impacted by attributes as it used to be, your visibility and relevance are, and they only increase increasingly. Be so. So fill those all out. If, even if it’s a not applicable, you know, even if it’s saying sports team and you’re a toothpaste brand, you know, make sure you just say none are not applicable, whatever is there, and then test the product type. We’ve talked about this in the past and we can talk about it again if you like. But testing that makes sure your listings are optimized. So the algorithm on Walmart’s giving you quantitative feedback Between your content, which is your back end attributes, your title, images of long and short descriptions, and are you at? You get mostly ranking benefits around 80%. But if your long term play is really to be best in class and to open up other doors with potential features and other things, 95% or higher is your goal offer. So price parity with other marketplaces is key, and speed of delivery. So, whether it’s using something like a deliver, we heavily recommend just using Walmart fulfillment services. They continue to get broader distribution. You’re instantly credited in the score with utilizing theirs and getting 2 day delivery. So use the levers that Walmart’s given you on the marketplace, and we can talk further about other ways. If someone’s listening saying I’ve done all that, I’m at 95%. I don’t know what else to optimize. We’re using WFS. There are other things to continue to do. We could talk about whether that’s how do you look at imagery in a way to convert? How do you utilize advertising? How do you drive external traffic to listings? What’s its impact? We go a variety of ways. Maybe the last thing I’ll say, though, is the first question. The last thing I’ll say is maybe the first question you should ask yourself is what’s your overall business case? So sometimes we have sellers come to us and they’re saying I don’t want to do anything, Amazon’s my main channel. I would like to sell in Walmart. What can I do? And there’s going to be certain limitations. If you’re saying I don’t, price is going to be determined by my other marketplace, not by Walmart, or something like that, you’ve got to be aware of those and what you’re long, how the impacts, the levers you can pull on Wal-Mart. Now there’s some interesting features coming out, like couponing and different things that can maybe allow for greater flexibility there.

Carrie Miller:

Can you talk a little bit about how to product AB test your product type, because I know you mentioned that In there. Just how to optimize, because I know you know certain product types reach more keywords. So how do you just keep track of the keywords that you? Maybe you Get impressions for an ad or like how do you really determine which one has better keyword reach?

Ryan:

You can do. There’s various methods. It’s whether you’re doing advertising. You’re just saying we’re not. We’re not getting on to your goal when you’re running advertising for any keyword. Really, if you’re using search and grid, which is a sponsored product, that’s what most people are thinking about when they’re leveraging advertising on Walmart, you’re competing for Page 1. It makes sense that from a conversion standpoint, most people aren’t going to Page 2, Page 3, but literally you’re competing for Page 1 because the Top 4 positions are awarded potentially for the keywords in the categories for sponsored product and the next 2 out of every 10. But you’ve got, on average, around 40 products on Page 1 of the listing of the search results. Those same positions are being repeated across every page. There is no, I didn’t get position 1 Page 1. Maybe I’ll get position 1, Page 2. Position 1, Page 1 is repeated across every page. You’ve got to compete for those top positions. In order to do that, keyword relevancy matters. You’ll get the signals If I’m showing up and position 200 from my ad reports or whatever. Or if you’re using Helium 10 again and Keyword Ranking Tracking and maybe turn on boost for those keywords where it may be and track on a real-time basis best you can, how you’re performing on those keywords. Obviously, make sure it’s in your title. Title has the highest ranking, has historically had the highest ranking influence on keywords. You can only get about 1 or 2 in there because you don’t want keyword stuff. Then in your description both points, all those things as well. Make sure it’s in your listing. If it’s in description and key features, repeated just a couple of times, make sure it’s readable and flows naturally. Once you’ve made sure it’s in there, then track, get your baseline. It’s not truly an experiment if you didn’t really record ahead of time. Am I running an experiment? Otherwise, we use the word experiment like when we just tried something and failed but we don’t know what we learned. Get your baseline, see what your rankings were. Before you try something, use Helium 10’s Keyword Tracker. Then go into growth opportunities, go into pick that listing, get to that middle widget that says product type. Make sure you record which one you are right now. I’ve used this example in the past with you, Carrie, I believe. But one case study we did was involving a client who was in herbal supplements. Their product type it was an herbal supplement and their product type was actually an herbal supplement. The product type was a one-to-one exact match. You would assume this is the best product type to be in, but we weren’t indexing for them, no matter what we did for probably 10 to 15 major keywords that we knew they should get. We went to that widget. You pick. I think it’s a reporting issue. It doesn’t say switch product type or anything. You have to click the link that says reporting issue. It’ll give you usually 4 to 5 choices of other product type. You think it is. Basically what it’s doing is creating a support ticket for you and you can submit that request of change. It’s not a guarantee that it’ll happen, but persistence pays off. We recommend making requests of that change once you’ve been informed that changes happen. Then watch for us. What we saw was in that product, all the keywords we needed were instantly indexing for and began ranking within the first couple of pages of results. That was the beginning of the journey. That’s a general standard practice for us in making sure we’re in the right product type as well.

Carrie Miller:

All right, that’s really good. Yeah, that’s a really good strategy. I’ve used your example many times because people ask me about that a lot. Usually, when they get in the right product type, they start to see a lot more traction. Thanks for sharing that. I want to get into advertising because we haven’t talked a lot about PPC on Walmart, on our podcast here for Walmart. I think a lot of people have questions about it. I wanted to just get your. I know you have some basic strategies or just thoughts about PPC and then also some new things that are coming that you think people should take advantage of. Then, once we’re done with that, we’ll get into some questions from the audience.

Ryan:

By way of really brief recap for those that have been around the Walmart space, I’ve heard of it over the past couple of years. A lot of people were shy about getting into Walmart PPC in the earlier days because it used to be a first bid auction, which meant fundamentally different than how you would be used to utilizing Amazon. Whatever you bid is what you paid. People were just blowing through their entire budget because they were trying to figure out if they could get a keyword to rank and they thought if I just spend more, I’ll get placement. In those cases they were bidding $4 a click and they were winning position 40. They were getting the click and they were spending $4 for a click on position 40. The good news is shift to second bid auction. That’s been around for quite a bit now. Really, what you’re talking about when we’re talking about PPC is fundamentally you’ve got a sponsored product, which is broken down into two types of campaigns: auto and manual. You’ve got search and grid placement. You’ve got item carousels that you can get in search results. You can get item carousels on product detail pages as well as next to the buy box placement. You’ve got on the manual campaigns, you’ve got exact match, phrase match and broad match, then auto campaign is what it sounds like. You’re letting the algorithm do its thing. You’ve got some placement modifiers. You can do modifiers for app, desktop and mobile. In some other ways you can tweak things. The big thing to know still with Walmart PPC is it’s heavily influenced by algorithms. Determination of are you relevant for those keywords, and so that has a. I mean that’s common practice and most ad retail media platforms. But it’s a heavy influencer on Walmart. So you do need to approach it from an organic signal, cell signals as well as PPC. When you’re trying to rank through PPC you just can’t spend your way to the top. You need to be in striking distance. The top 256 organic ranking results qualify for placement and searching grid, but you’re ultimately trying to outperform whoever’s in position at least 40, or at least position 30. And so it’s usually a hand and glove kind of operation of how you’re going to drive signals to the platform for purchase intent, showing that relevancy, and then continue increase your PPC so that you’re stair stepping your way up to, ideally, somewhere in those first four positions or somewhere on that page 1.

Carrie Miller:

How do you get to those 200 and it’s 256?, like if you’re at spot 300, how do you get down to that spot?

Ryan:

Yeah, it depends. It’s really specific on the categories. You know, the one other element when we’re talking about keywords and search volumes on Walmart is there’s not as many long tail keywords. The keywords just don’t go as long. So you’re probably going to see a significant drop off on volumes after some of the major keywords in a lot of categories. Maybe long tails, around two to three keywords long, are going to start dropping off significantly. As kind of a frame of reference, we would say, if you can find keywords up over, if you’re finding 10 keywords in your category that are relevant to you, up over 7000 in search volume, that’s pretty good. There’s. There are ones way bigger, but identifying those to go for to get in the top 256, you may pretty quickly already appear there. I would say pick your, maybe not the biggest keyword to put in your title right away, but maybe that second tier keyword to put it in your title and some other places, and then plan on changing it over time as you grow. But some ways to drive traffic you know whether a lot of sellers already have, whether it’s influencer traffic, whether it’s Google ads traffic, whatever else, if you already have a traffic funnel that’s leaning to DTC or anywhere else. Consider splitting a little bit of that traffic over for a period of time to Walmart at least, and you’ll be rewarded. A lot of the signals of external traffic are rewarded heavily on Walmart behaviors like certainly purchase, but even behaviors like we’ve, you know, add to cart purchase. Any of those elements are signals that register with the algorithm and help sending signals of relevancy to get you in that top 256. The biggest one being someone searches, finds your products and purchases. So anything you can do to do that is a big help to get that going.

Carrie Miller:

All right, that’s very interesting. And then also, you’ve mentioned conquesting as something everyone should be doing. Could you just explain what that is on Walmart and you know how people can start utilizing this?

Ryan:

Historically you could not do brand cron questing on Walmart. You can’t. You obviously can’t put trademark terms in your listings. That’s just a copyright issue but an advertising. Until just very recently you haven’t even been able to brand conquest. Really, there’s kind of some ways around that. But now you can kind of the headline. So what we’d recommend is for those brands that are starting to show some relevancy or do things and you know there are heavily branded search terms on Walmart. We’ve noticed Walmart is leans typically more in a lot of categories towards branded search terms with high volume. So this has been untapped opportunity for a lot of brands. Unless you’re running an auto campaign to get you, you get buy box placement, you know, just under their buy box on their PDP. So now you can actually set up a manual search, a manual campaign, and you have to have, you have to use exact match keywords and you can use. Just put in every variation of that brand name in there and you can win. You can’t win position 1 or 2 with that brand, but you can get beyond position 2. In most cases you’re eligible to actually show up in grid for their terms and so that’s one that most brands that have not been playing defense as much may still be asleep on right now. So it’s a good opportunity, at least for now, until some of those brands start allocating defensive budget in that way, those brands will be again because of relevancy and how it impacts how much you have to pay to win versus someone else that’s more relevant. Brands are going to effectively get a discount for defending themselves because they’re the most relevant one, so they’re going to have to pay less than you to defend. But if they’re not really bidding on it at all, this is a great opportunity.

Carrie Miller:

I think that’s really exciting because I haven’t actually done that strategy at all yet. So I’m going to definitely get on that today and see what I can find, because I have found so many branded search terms that I think would be really great to target in the past, but I wasn’t able to. So that’s really good, okay, so let’s go ahead and get into questions from the audience. So I’m going to start with this question here. It says I have two questions. So what type of keywords are better for sponsored and manual campaigns? And I guess that’s one.

Ryan:

I would kind of say what I said earlier probably is it depends on what stage of the lifecycle you’re in at Walmart. So if you’re trying to build relevancy and it’s a new product without much sales history yet, I would probably recommend starting with exact and maybe phrase in a manual campaign of those kind of second tier keywords. Go after the long, the longer tail, build the relevancy there. Every conversion is going to help with relevancy of other keywords in your listings. So begin and stair step up. Another great strategy is at the same time you might want to often will will wait a little bit to do auto campaigns or maybe do it also at the at the same time that we’re starting some manuals, but with a low spin threshold, so it doesn’t go crazy and pick unirrelevant keywords, irrelevant keywords, but using ultimately gold. Also be using automatic keyword campaigns or automatic campaigns to harvest the performing keywords into your manual and put those into exact match. And then the last tip I would give is using the bid modifiers in manual campaigns to really kind of take over. If you have auto campaigns as well, manual campaigns are going to perform really well in search grid and so you want your manual campaigns really doing the work for those high, high volume keywords in your grid versus maybe your auto. So that’d be a few of the tips I’d give you.

Carrie Miller:

Let’s go to the next one. It says I heard you say that more 1P sellers for more might be moving to 3P. Is that good or bad for other sellers?

Ryan:

I certainly thought I didn’t. I don’t recall saying it, but I made up. Yeah, so the Walmart basically is leveraging the third party marketplace for a lot of reasons. One of those is historically with 1P Brands, meaning brands that Walmart has entered into a contract relationship with, where they’re owning inventory and setting the retail price, those things. One of the ways that Walmart wanted to test out more of the assortment with a brand, develop a meaningful relationship, would be they would select a small subset of the products, get them in-store and distribute or online and Walmart would manage everything. Then they used to tell brands that they would do. Another program called DSV. I won’t go into all of it, but it was still in an owned relationship. What we’ve seen is a shift more towards merchants, buyers, telling brands to put the remainder of their catalog on the third party marketplace now that it’s become more mature. Is it good or bad for sellers? On one hand, good in that as you have more recognizable established brands continue to increase their assortment on the marketplace. That’s bringing more shoppers, more eyeballs to the marketplace. That’s good for everybody. Bad, meaning more competitive. Advertising on keywords, certainly retail media ad spend we’ve seen increase year over year as Walmart grows the program. That’s the natural life cycle of any platform. It will certainly get more competitive. Margin’s may decrease over time. If you maybe have had your business model has been dropshipping and just trying to find those places where 1P brands are there’s gaps, where 1P brands aren’t really owning the marketplace. I still think there’s a lot of opportunity there on the third party marketplace, but they’re starting to catch wind of it on Walmart as well. There’s challenges there bit of both. I think there’s plenty of opportunity as Walmart’s marketplace continues to grow. I don’t think we need to be worried right now about, are you getting squeezed out of any opportunity? This is still early stages on Walmart’s marketplace.

Carrie Miller:

I agree there’s still tons of opportunity. The next thing is is there a way to get your products from WFS or Walmart probably into in-store? Do you have to apply or be invited to have your products in Walmart stores? I think this is a good question because it seems like with open call, it’s just US products, but is there a way for products that are made in other countries? If you can expand on just that whole process, I think a lot of people are curious about this.

Ryan:

Yeah, you mentioned open call, which is for US manufacturers. There’s been different times where I think two years ago, two to three years ago, they gave FirstBot at the Apple to Walmart marketplace sellers. They got to apply first and got an opportunity. Outside of that opportunity there is if you’re growing an account, if you’re seeing sales and showing volume, showing growth. Some of the stepping stones would be identifying if you could get an account manager or a strategic account manager to work with on your account, identifying category manager, somebody else to begin discussions with. That starts with usually getting opportunities turned on and growth opportunities, whether that’s seasonal promotions, whether that’s flash picks, other elements as you continue to invest and show performance there. Walmart’s team they are brick and mortar team and they’re a marketplace team or basically one team. A lot of buyers and merchants will look across their whole category, even on the third party marketplace, as they’re evaluating opportunity. These conversations could happen and you could ask for an introduction. We’ve had clients that have just a category manager. Somebody else has reached out and said would you be interested in talking with a merchant about potential opportunity for in-store? There’s a lot of pathways. I don’t think there’s a defined Walmart’s probably not going to lay out for you. Here’s how every marketplace seller can contact a merchant but continue to invest in sales and growth on Walmart marketplace and those conversations certainly can happen.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, that’s exactly what I always hear from Walmart directly. They say to prove it on the marketplace, basically All right. Next, this is a good question: Any insights on the new SEM feature? Will that feature help ranking or index on keywords used as a GG search, maybe Google search?

Ryan:

We’ve had a few that we’ve worked, we’ve tested out. Sem. Vertic is still out right now in the early stages. Any kind of early testing. As far as depending on the goal, if the goal was measured by, do we see direct conversion at a higher row, as than you would for sponsored products, which is lower in the ads funnel, more towards conversion anyway than earlier consideration steps in the funnel. It’s a lower conversion at this point but there are potential advantages. I’m still waiting to clarify this element. I believe it’s true, but again because we haven’t worked with a lot of resellers or people that are competing with others for their own buy box. I did hear in a recent webinar and I haven’t been able to go back and fact check again by one of the product developers for SEM that one of the impacts of SEM is that you could run SEM even when you’re not presently in the buy box and you could drive traffic to your instance to get the sale. For those who are struggling to win buy box, that may be a pathway to getting more sales and conversions by ads aren’t going to serve on marketplace when you don’t have buy box but if you’re running SEM. It sounded like and again I need to. I try and fact check everything before I say it and I heard it said once and I want to make sure I heard it specifically, but that definitely perked me up and I need to go back and verify. I believe what was communicated was you can run SEM through Walmart when you’re not in the buy box and direct to your instance of you owning the buy box when traffic gets there. That’s one opportunity.

Carrie Miller:

Let’s see. I’ve only been selling on Amazon since October. I have 9 reviews and 1 seller feedback. Is this enough to apply to sell on Walmart?

Ryan:

The exact criteria aren’t shared publicly as to what is in that decision factor. There’s a lot of factors. I’ll see you all next video. What ultimate? I think that the safest thing to say is what Walmart’s looking for is that you have established yourself as a company that shows that you’re making good products, strong history of seller satisfaction, so customer support, and that you’re a legitimate company looking to do business. The other factors they’re looking for are your products, a meaningful addition to the marketplace? So are you adding products to the marketplace that makes sense to them? That’s a really broad filter and subjective maybe. So I can’t tell you what that looks like. If you have 9 reviews, maybe on one product and it hasn’t been as long I’d probably have a lot more questions as to why you want to jump to Walmart at the moment. Maybe you see the opportunity and that might be the primary marketplace that you want to pivot to. Those are my initial thoughts. It’d be hard to answer further without knowing more context. Carrie, I don’t know if you have any things.

Carrie Miller:

Well, they said something, too, about that. They have one product with multiple variations, and I actually have seen other sellers that have one product with multiple variations get on there as well because it’s a new, interesting product or really something that would work well on Walmart. So it is really dependent on that, and I’ve seen some people get on very easily, having not sold for very long, and then others have a harder time. So it is kind of interesting how it’s a little bit subjective on there.

Ryan:

And what?

Carrie Miller:

Definitely want to be established. Make sure all of your stuff is matching. That’s the biggest thing. Your address needs to match and everything needs to be tight on your application. But yeah, anything else that you want to add.

Ryan:

Yeah, no, sorry for stepping on you there. Yeah, no, that was basically what I was going to say too. If you get an initial reject, don’t assume that is because a human looked at your application and determined you were not a fit. A lot of the rejections can happen because the bot has looked at, maybe your information, has did not match between what you submitted and what maybe is included in your business documentation. To illustrate the point is we talked about 1P brands coming over to a three P marketplace at the request of merchants. We still get  1P brands that get rejected when they’ve applied on their own to 3P marketplace after they’ve been through even more rigorous vetting because they’re in a 1P relationship already. So the bots may trip on it and it’s worth reaching back out to try and appeal if you need. Even if you get the message of there is no appeal, there are usually ways to find out.

Carrie Miller:

And I’m going to just take one last question. We’ve had a lot of amazing questions. We’re kind of running out of time here, so this one is what bidding strategies have you found most effective for optimizing Walmart PPC campaigns, and why?

Ryan:

Big question yeah.

Carrie Miller:

That’s all I’d like to just answer.

Ryan:

We could do a whole another episode on this one Bidding strategy found most effective optimizing PPC campaigns. So depends again what your goal. What do you mean by optimizing? Do you mean optimizing for growth, which is going to be a lower TACos, ACoS, low RoAS, potentially because you’re looking to increase market share and it’s a longer play? In that case, that sponsored brand, sponsored video. I didn’t talk about sponsored video. If you’re looking for what’s the quick wins with a higher ROAS, things like look in your category, look at the search terms Our other brands are already using sponsored video. There’ll be one placement on mobile or on desktop for that search term on any page, and if you’re not seeing those, that’s low hanging fruit. I would go for a sponsored brand. You’ve got to be brand registered first, but once you’re brand registered, you can create sponsored video ads. So that’s one way out. Optimize I would just make sure that to optimize a PPC campaign, I think that the basics of making sure your listing is relevant and make sure your listing is optimized first, and so that’d be one major factor that we see just a lot of brands miss. They think they’ve got the bid strategy right and that they’ve got the campaign architecture correct. But if you don’t have high relevancy already for those keywords, you’re not going to take a lot of ground. So in general I would say you want to, in any given campaign, not oversaturate your ad groups and not oversaturate with keywords in each ad group. So maybe up to five keywords in an ad group and maybe three to five ad groups in a campaign so that you can be tracking where that spend is really going and tweaking from there. But then I’d also say the biggest level ups we’ve seen is when you combine really the PPC optimization with organic. So blend consider offsite traffic advertising as well in some way to blend and improve the performance of PPC. So PPC will get cheaper for you when your relevancy grows and you’ll be able to maintain it more. So that’s often an efficient way to optimize a bit more. No otherwise to that. But I’ll end there for now.

Carrie Miller:

Thank you again so much for joining us. I think this has been a really fantastic episode full of a lot of information for everyone. I’m sure everyone that’s listening will want to go back and listen to this again. But thanks again for all of your expertise in sharing the secretive strategies and we really appreciate you and we’ll probably hope to have you on again another time soon.

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