Watch the Walmart Business replay
Read the full webinar transcript
Andrew Waber (00:04):
Hello everyone, welcome to today’s webinar, and really thrilled to be joined by Walmart here once again. And this one is specifically going to be focused on getting your Walmart business ready for Q4. And obviously as we’re kind of getting through the bulk of Q3, Q4 on the horizon. And this obviously this upcoming Q4 stands to be different from ones we’ve experienced in the past. And really not just obviously from the societal side and everything going on. But then also Walmart’s debuting a lot of just really great features, and some of them Stephanie is going to be talking about today.
Andrew Waber (00:44):
So my name is Andrew Waber. I’m the Director of Insights here at Teikametrics. And today I’m joined by Jason Magee, who’s a Senior Director over here at Teikametrics as well. And really is close to our Walmart product and getting that in the hands of our customers. And finally, from the Walmart side, super happy we’re getting a repeat performance was with us back in April for the first webinar we did with Walmart. But it’s Stephanie Prasad, who’s the Senior Product Marketing Manager of Walmart Media Group. And is really responsible for a lot of the stuff happening with the sponsored products over at Walmart. So, thanks again, you guys for joining us.
Jason Magee (01:20):
Yeah, thank you. Stephanie I’m glad we didn’t scare you off the first time.
Stephanie Prasad (01:26):
Definitely not. I’m very happy to be here.
Andrew Waber (01:29):
Great. So just a few housekeeping notes before we start getting into it. Within 24 hours after the end of this presentation, we’re going to be sending over a recording of this webinar along with the deck you’re seeing here. And additionally, as we’re going through the presentation, feel free to use that questions box on the right hand side of your screen. If a question comes up, you don’t feel like you have to wait till the end. Feel free to pop those questions in as we’re going and we’ll keep track of them. And then we get to the end of the presentation, we’ll hit Q&A. And we’ll answer as many of those as we possibly can. So with that, I think we can start getting into it. And just a quick note, first on what Teikametrics does for those of you who may not be familiar.
Jason Magee (02:13):
And in the meantime, as you go through this, Andrew, please let us know. We just want to make sure our audio is coming through clear. So please just feel free to type away and let us know if you can hear us correctly. And I guess if you can’t hear us, you won’t be commenting. So anybody who can feel free to chime in there.
Andrew Waber (02:34):
Yeah, definitely, let us know if you have any issues. So a little bit about Teikametrics. Teikametrics is a technology platform. But what we do is we pair that really deep technology background with live analysts that can help you, especially larger brands really scale up across both Amazon and Walmart.com. And we offer two multiple tiers of service, whether you’re a larger brand that needs that extra help from hands on keyboard help. Additionally, though if you’re a let’s say smaller seller, we do offer self service product for Amazon. And again our Walmart product which is a separate offering but can be aligned with that is more of an in service offering. So here’s some of the brands we work with, you can see down below. And again we’re going to have contact information at the end here. So if you want to get in touch with us learn a little bit more about what we do. Happy to have that conversation. So getting towards… Oh go for it, Jason.
Jason Magee (03:30):
No I was just say it looks like we’re coming through great. Thanks Shanti, Jawad and Mallory, looks like at least three people out there can hear us great. So thank you guys so much and back over to you Waber.
Andrew Waber (03:42):
Great so what we’re going to cover today, first Stephanie will be talking about some new Walmart sponsored products reporting and ad inventory functionality. Super, super great stuff there. I’m really excited for her to talk about that. Then really talking about what you should be thinking about in Q4. How those changes along with some of the existing functionality of Walmart really should be playing into Q4 specific thinking. Especially with the first price auction like Walmart has, it’s incredibly important to take some learnings that maybe you got from other marketplaces. But then you take a substantially different approach when it comes to Walmart.
Andrew Waber (04:21):
Just to make sure you’re going to hit all your goals and do so effectively. Then we’re going to be talking to really the best stories that we’ve been able to gather. In terms of what drives success on Walmart, and the lessons you can take from them as you look towards Q4. And really looking at based on probably your holiday seasons, what works in Q4. Really how should you be thinking about you’re gearing your business up for this really important holiday season. How should you be thinking about that? So there’s a lot of great content. And so with that, I want to pass it over to Stephanie who can hit on some of these new functionality updates.
Stephanie Prasad (04:58):
Great. Thank you so much Andrew. So as they mentioned, I am Stephanie Prasad from the Walmart Media Group. And I’m excited to share with you guys some of the great innovations that we have released recently for sponsored products. So the first one that I will talk about today is we now have the search term report that gives you the ability to harvest keywords from automatic campaigns. We’re calling this an Item Keyword Performance report. So basically, we’re giving you keyword performance at the item level, which is granularity that we did not previously have. So for automatic campaigns, it means you can now see the specific keywords that showed your ads in our search in-grid placements.
Stephanie Prasad (05:49):
And use that to help you identify and convert those keywords over to manual campaigns. It also means that for manual campaigns, we’re now giving you that lower level of keyword performance granularity. To give you more information to pull insights from to help you better optimize either your bid prices, your match types. Or allow you to remove or add underperforming or overperforming items as you promote them against specific keywords. So this is a highly requested report. And I hope that you all find it useful as you go into holiday.
Jason Magee (06:30):
Yeah, this has just been an incredible move. And we’ve already seen a lot of benefits from it. So I’ll touch more on this later. But thanks for that, Stephanie.
Stephanie Prasad (06:41):
The next update I have for you all is around the slots or the placements that we have available in our search in-grid. So previously, we had fixed sponsored slots in slots 3, 5, 6 or 12. We now have the ability to promote sponsored items in any position one through 12, still with a maximum of two ads per page. But it means that you now have the ability to get increased visibility at the top of the search results page. And even in slots one and two, which were previously not available. So there’s nothing you need to do to take advantage of this. All of your existing automatic and manual campaigns that you’re running, are now eligible to get the higher level placements on the search in-grid page.
Stephanie Prasad (07:34):
The next thing that we’ve given some additional reporting visibility into is your buy box win-rate. So as a reminder, in order to be eligible to win the sponsored products option across any of our placements. Your product has to be in stock and you have to be winning the buy box. And so previously, we did not give any easy visibility into whether or not you’re winning the buy box and what that buy box win-rate looks like. We are now making that available to you. So you’ll be able to see the buy box win-rate today specifically and also over the last seven days. And we’re making this directly available to Teikametrics as well so that they can surface it for you within their platform.
Stephanie Prasad (08:27):
And the final new release or innovation is one that hasn’t come out quite yet. This will be coming soon. And hopefully in time for holiday. But we will be adding an additional placement specifically the sponsor products carousel to our keyword bidding campaigns. And so currently, our manual keyword bidding campaigns only are eligible for the search in-grid placement. We’re now adding the sponsored products carousel placement. Which again, just gives you the ability to target those specific keywords that you’re interested in. But get visibility now across both the in-grid as well as the carousel. So this hasn’t been released quite yet. So stay tuned for additional updates on this from the Teikametrics team. But this should be available to you in time for holiday.
Jason Magee (09:25):
Great. Well, thank you so much Stephanie really appreciate that. And they’re some awesome updates and we’re really going to dive into them. So let’s talk about incorporating Walmart product ads and tools in Q4. And particularly how you can use them to drive growth. Again, my name is Jason Magee, I’m the Senior Director of Sales and Business Development here at Teikametrics. And just a reminder, we will be sending this out the recording and the slides you all can have them as well. But let’s jump in here. So you really need to be able to understand trends and adjust quickly during Q4. I mean this is so apparent especially with COVID, because it’s really shifted how buyers purchase products.
Jason Magee (10:10):
In a good campaign structure, if you take good campaign structure and leverage all the tools that are unique to WPA. It’ll allow you to identify and act upon changes in performance. Now further going into this, to optimize your efforts, you need to hone in on your strategy. The reason being wasted ad spend is particularly easy in Q4, with the substantial increase in traffic. Especially Walmart as a first price auction so you really need to understand how that impacts the money you’re spending, and how you actually set your bids. So let’s go into the best practices of Walmart that are related back to the tools that Walmart has released, and will be releasing.
Jason Magee (10:51):
Now the first one, the fact that you have the item keyword performance report allows you to run the auto to manual structure. You can replicate that now on Walmart, I mean you see this a lot with Amazon and other places, too. This is incredibly impactful, because previously, before Walmart had the search term reports here. Instead of doing the auto to manual migration, you took a different approach. You use automatic campaigns to increase organic ranking to increase discoverability, searchability, impressions. Now, with all those benefits there, you can now go one step further. And really take those keywords you’ve been exploring through automatic campaigns and move them into manual campaigns to really exploit the success that you can see from them.
Jason Magee (11:39):
Because you can control every keyword at that point. Now, when Stephanie shared that Walmart product ads in search in-grid are not only limited to 3, 5, 6 and 12 slots now. You can get placed between one to 12, you need to now take into account where your products ranking organically on top terms. Now, what I will say is, this is going to be relevant if you are on page one. Predominately if you’re not very deep in the search result pages. If you’re on page one of the first few pages, this is incredibly impactful for you. Because with these new ad slots, the incremental value for advertising may have changed.
Jason Magee (12:20):
Now one of the things that Walmart has done very well is they’re never going to show the exact same product one organic one paid on a search engine result page. But now since let’s say you had slot number two, where slot 3, 5, 6 and 12 didn’t really matter to you. Now you can actually decide whether it’s worth it for you to try and go for the number one slot. So the incrementality in your strategy should change and adjust because of this. This is also a very good time to re-evaluate where and when you are going to be deploying bid multipliers. So top of search now maybe even more particularly valuable considering this new inventory.
Jason Magee (13:00):
But one thing I wanted to jump back to is something that Walmart has released, that’s put them in a league of their own. Is the ability to look at placement by platform and device type, because that’s an absolute goldmine. And I’ll actually show you an example of that next. Lastly, now since you can see your buy box win-rate, you need to be especially focused on winning the buy box. And if you’re not being able to address it. Because here’s the thing, if you don’t have the buy box, not only is it hard to get a sale in general. You can’t even advertise your product. And during high traffic periods like Q4, it can be incredibly painful if you do not have that buy box placement.
Jason Magee (13:36):
Now that you can see buy box win-rates, you can also start to see okay, if my ads aren’t performing well. Or I’m not even getting impressions, you then can go see hey maybe the issue is I’m not even winning the buy box. So now you have more data to dissect what actually, you’re facing within your business. I did want to give you an example of performance by platform. So Walmart has a very unique ability that’s incredible. Where you can see whether an advertisement was served up on the desktop or the mobile app or the mobile browser. And you can leverage bid multipliers to adjust how aggressively you attack a platform and advertise on a platform and device type.
Jason Magee (14:20):
So prime example we work with a cosmetic company that has done incredibly well on mobile. One of the things we started to see though, is because folks weren’t just hopping on Walmart to make a one off purchase. They actually were changing and I believe Stephanie, I think I got an email about a new survey Walmart did. Where the average person is spending 20 minutes adding things to their cart instead of a one off item. We’ve actually seen that products that did well on mobile, they’re actually picking up the pace a lot on desktop. So you need to be able to recognize how buyer behavior has shifted and how you specifically want to advertise based on device type.
Jason Magee (15:00):
Walmart gives you the ability to do so when other platforms do not. So, know before you place your bets. So what you need to do is you need to understand where are you’re currently under spending or overspending. You need to audit your account to identify problem areas in terms that you should be doubling down on. A great way for you to do this, is to break down your spend by shopper segmentation. What are my own brand terms that I’m bidding on? How does that break out compared to competitor terms that I’m bidding on. And then also generic terms that do not represent a brand. There’s no brand term it’s something generic specific to a category term or a spec of the product.
Jason Magee (15:45):
You should start to break that down to understand what is truly incremental? And incrementality is, what was the likelihood that I was going to get this sale without this advertisement. To put this into perspective, if I’m Jason Magee T-shirts. If somebody is going on Walmart looking up Jason Magee T-shirts, that’s not necessarily incremental to my business. Because they were already looking to buy my brand. But it’s also important to do that to defend your brand at the exact same time. Now on the other end, if you’re going after my wife Joanna, Joanna’s T-shirts. And I’m trying to tell them, hey I better shirts than my wife. By competing on those branded terms.
Jason Magee (16:24):
That’s a very, very incremental sale because they were actually looking to buy another company’s products. So regularly download your search term reports. Because consumer behavior is a moving target performance changes. Now that you have the item keyword performance reports from the automatic campaigns. This is how you explore keywords that are driving people to your product. That you may not know that was a search term that people even used. You constantly need to be exploring new keywords. Another best practice is whether it’s coming from autos and especially manual campaigns. If you’re downloading the search term reports, you should be matching your top performing keywords with your listing.
Jason Magee (17:07):
To know hey actually I’m getting a lot of traffic from advertising on this key term. It barely shows up in my listing at all I should probably highlight this more in my listing. Next bullet, can you support value based bidding with uncapped budgets? Now, the thing about Q4 is the demand of consumers outweighs how many people are advertising. You see this on Amazon, Walmart, etc. Meaning that the right structure, if you have the capital is to uncap your budgets and tie them to KPIs such as ROAS, conversion rate etc. The best way for you to do this is to break out your manual campaigns into single item skews. So you can quickly track performance at the item level and know exactly which keywords are so incredibly important to your business.
Jason Magee (18:01):
Now, how are you supporting exploratory bidding? Again, since Walmart is a first price auction, just to give everybody an example. What that means is if I want to bid on the keyword T-shirts, outside of shipping, buy box win rate, etc. If I were to bid $5 and the second highest bid is $2. Most places like Facebook or Amazon, there’s a second price option. So I win the bid at five I pay $2.01, one penny over the second highest bid. On Walmart whatever you bid, you pay 100% of your bid you would pay $5. So what you need to be doing is constantly adjusting your bid. Adjusting it up to where you’re winning the advertising auction. But also making sure that you’re not just complacent at that price point.
Jason Magee (18:47):
You could possibly be lowering your bid and still winning the ad placement because of conversion rates, how you deliver etc. So this is self-fulfilling, but this is very, very tough to do manually. This is something that we do very well at Teikametrics. So let’s talk about products, keywords and bids. So obviously your entire catalog you have products. We’ve seen the data that shows that 99 keywords can generate revenue for any particular product. So how do you identify those keywords? And then what is the bid you’re willing to express to generate an impression and win the advertising auction.
Jason Magee (19:33):
So if you look at products, you need to understand that every product is going to have a very different retail price. Their margin is going to be different where your product is in its lifecycle is going to be different. And then on the keyword and bid side. Every keyword has a different audience. Whether it’s a brand, non brand, competitors. What did you want to express and then what your desired ACOS or ROAS is. Now one thing I will say is that Q4 is an incredible time to launch a product. Or really step on the gas regardless because again, the amount of buyers coming to the site outweighs the advertising side. So it’s in advertiser’s favor, it’s your Superbowl.
Jason Magee (20:14):
So the way you address this, whether it’s Q4, anytime in the year. Is you need to establish goal-based campaigns that incorporate these factors mentioned above. So what does that look like? So if you think about what your goal is, you should really understand where your product is in its lifecycle. Is this a brand new product that I need to launch? Is this is a product that’s been around for a while, but I just need to scale up revenue. Or it’s just been such a good seller, you want to maximize it and work out any profitability you can. Or the very opposite end as you know what I’m clearing this out, I’m bringing in a new version, I’m just going to liquidate this product.
Jason Magee (20:53):
So depending on where your product is in its lifecycle, everything becomes contextual. Such as what are your goals? And what are the outcomes that you’re hoping for? What is the budget you’re willing to set aside to achieve those goals? What is the desired ACOS or ROAS? And then what are your overall expectations now as well as the product grows through its evolution. We look to the very far right, this vertical graph here gives a representation of what you should expect within a certain lifecycle of a product. So if you’re in a launch phase, you don’t have many sales. You’re investing heavily in advertising to spin that Flywheel and to establish product market fit. Once you start to hit the growth stage, you can back off your ROAS and ACOS targets.
Jason Magee (21:42):
Next to being profitable, where you’re maximizing and striking that balance between sales and advertising generated. So let’s look at how you should be thinking about structuring campaigns. Again, I guess amplified in Q4. From an automatic perspective, the fact that you now have reports from keyword level reports on automatic campaigns. Allows you to get away with having multiple products grouped together by product theme. Similar products that have different colors, different sizes, etc. You may want to have them in one overarching campaign. And then within each ad group, you can have all those items there together. The beauty with Walmart is you can bid at the individual item level. So what do you do with this?
Jason Magee (22:37):
Excuse me, there’s my son running in here. Sorry guys I was talking to Waber and Stephanie about my son probably wanting to do that. So glad to know it actually happened. So where was I? So now we have your search terms that are performing well and automatic campaigns. You should do two things with this. You should move those search terms from your automatic campaigns into your manual campaigns. At the same time, you should think what are my best performing products in these automatic campaigns? And you should segment out your best performing products. And your products that aren’t going nearly as well, because when you leverage bid multipliers, you want to make sure you’re doing it to drive the right outcomes for the right products.
Jason Magee (23:27):
So as it relates to manual campaigns, this is what I mentioned. You should have single item campaigns. And once you have single ad campaigns, you should break those ad groups up by shopper segmentation. What are generic category terms? 78% of search terms on marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart are generic in nature. You need to cast a very wide net there. You need to have a separate ROAS goal etc. On branded terms, you should approach competitors separately as well. You can take learnings from other marketplaces like, Amazon even Google Analytics. And take those keywords and you can even break them out into separate ad groups to drive growth to those keywords as well.
Jason Magee (24:10):
So maximizing your efforts. Number one branded keywords should demand some of your lowest bids and your highest ROAS. Again, because these aren’t necessarily incremental. So you should expect to convert at a very high rate. But also you don’t want to over invest in branded advertising. Because again, it’s not really moving the needle in terms of driving the top of the funnel. Understanding bidding to value and having the budget to support it, as I mentioned, uncapped budgets but tie them to KPIs. Because if profitable sales are likely the last thing you want to do is close up shop early and have your campaigns run out of budget. With hours in the day left actually that could actually be turned on to maximize sales.
Jason Magee (24:52):
Another very interesting point is when you’re looking at the metrics of products, you want to look at conversion rates. Even more closely than ACOS and ROAS because of the window and how you look at the attribution. Conversion rates, you can see that a lot quicker. So if you see conversion rates spiking and going up, you can confidently increase your bids. Knowing that it’s going to handle the ROAS and ACOS and take care of itself because your conversion rates are up. Lastly, get your fulfillment plan set up and competitive. Walmart has done a lot in the realm of this. I mean, Walmart’s released Walmart Fulfillment Service of third party sellers.
Jason Magee (25:35):
They have partnerships with deliver to have a two day shipping tag. We even did a webinar and covered this in great detail. If you have at least three days shipping, and you have those tags associated with your listing, it’s going to dramatically improve conversion rates. So as an example, this is what Alicia DeFinis from the Walmart Marketplace team had shared during our last webinar. If you have at least four days shipping, you’re going to start to see a material improvement in your conversion rates. And once you get into that sweet spot of at least three day or two day rates. You can see your conversion rate can increase as high as 42% if you have the two day shipping tag. So that’s incredibly important to your business.
Jason Magee (26:22):
And Stephanie, I’ll turn it back over to you to talk about… Actually a few more success stories Stephanie, before I get over to you. So I want to talk… One of our clients GoPlus. This is incredibly just telling in terms of why you do not want to cap budgets. So them like most of our clients started with a fixed budget. But in a very short amount of time within the first two weeks, we’ve exceeded their ROAS goals. So instead of saying okay, let’s keep it going because we’re hitting our metrics. They double down and begin to invest heavily. And we’ve been able to achieve and exceed their ROAS targets with 4X the budget. And if you want to see that in a graphical view here, you can see exactly where we achieved their targets.
Jason Magee (27:08):
And how even though we’ve been ramping up spend 4X, we’re still exceeding their targets because they’re not even close to the law of diminishing returns. Another example, I wanted to highlight how you need to be able to adjust based on the data and trends that you’re seeing. So this is a client of ours, we had a very good plan for them. When COVID struck there were supply chain and inventory issues. We quickly audited what we were doing and changed our strategy. So much so that we were able to switch our strategy, methodology and achieve a conversion rate increase and our ROAS increased at 2.4%. You can see the graphical representations about what happened. How we saw it and identified it and what we did do change that and drive top line growth. So Stephanie, as promised back over to you for lessons as it relates to holiday.
Stephanie Prasad (28:04):
Perfect, thanks, Jason. Okay, so I want to just cover some quick do’s and don’ts. So I already mentioned that in order to win in the sponsored products auction, your products have to be in stock. So that is the first thing to keep in mind. Make sure that during the holidays, you have the appropriate stock. To make sure that your products are not going to be going in and out of stock at any time during the day. Which is going to cause you to lose that visibility. The second thing to do is to make sure you have optimized your product detail page. Make sure you have appropriate and descriptive titles and descriptions, you have really high quality images. When you get a shopper to your product detail page, you want to make sure you convert.
Stephanie Prasad (28:59):
So make sure that you’ve really optimized every one of your product detail pages. Third, make sure that you’re pricing your products competitively. That goes hand in hand with what Jason mentioned around shipping. To get shoppers to click on your products, you want to make sure you have a competitive price. And you’re offering competitive shipping times both of those are going to be really important for you especially during the holiday season. And then lastly, don’t just stick with business as usual right? The holiday is going to be a time of a lot of increased shoppers, which means the potential for increased conversions and sales. So just make sure that you are changing your strategy accordingly.
Jason Magee (29:47):
And one thing to note about this on your third do. Price-test, price or products competitively run promotions. Also when you’re running promotions, see what that’s doing to your conversion rate. So if you think about running at 20% off. You should assume that you’re going to convert at a higher rate, so I would monitor your conversion rates. And if your conversion rates are skyrocketing and increasing. That’s an awesome opportunity to make sure you’re also advertising that product more aggressively as well. Increasing your bids because you know with the conversion rate and your higher probability of sale, if you win that click. It’s going to take care of your ROAS and ACOS in the long run. And I’ll go to the next slide here.
Stephanie Prasad (30:31):
Perfect. Some additional strategy tips that I will give you all to keep in mind for the holidays. Make sure that you are first planning ahead. You want to make sure you’re launching all of your holiday campaigns at least two weeks in advance. So you have the opportunity to kind of get your strategy in place. And then give you some opportunity to be ready to optimize once holiday hits. Go bigger with your budgets, right. So as Jason mentioned, setting a budget cap isn’t necessarily the best strategy. If you’re getting good ROAS and results, be ready to set those budget higher. And double down when you need to. Third, make your keywords work harder for you. So Jason talked about some strategies on grouping your keywords and putting them into appropriate ad groups.
Stephanie Prasad (31:36):
Make sure you’re doing that. So you group your products together by categories. So you’re getting keywords that are going to align to multiple items and products across your product portfolios. The fourth bullet here is to bid your maximum. So as a reminder, Walmart is a first price auction. Which means you should always be bidding the maximum price you are willing to pay. And during the holiday we do expect that CPC bid prices will increase just based on the increased competition that will happen. So make sure that you are bidding high enough to ensure that you’re going to win the auction. When you’re doing your keyword bidding, also make sure that you choose a mix of the match types.
Stephanie Prasad (32:26):
We always recommend that you start with broad. Which is going to give you the largest exposure. And then over time, optimize towards phrase or exact match for the keywords that are converting and performing really well for you. The next point here is to make sure that you are showcasing your winners. So choose your products within your product portfolio, that are highly rated. That you have priced competitively, etc to make sure that you are promoting the products that are going to continue to drive additional sales and conversions for you. Next, make sure that you’re boosting your daily spend.
Stephanie Prasad (33:12):
So our recommendation is that you set your daily budget at least 35% higher than you do during the remainder of the year. That again is to make sure that you’re not running out of budget in the middle of the day. So that you ensure that you’re always have the ability to win the auction and make sure that you’re not going to run out of budget. Your products won’t be going out of stock. All of those are going to you know impact your ability to win the auction. Think mobile, Jason talked a little bit about this. We do give you insight into the specific device types that are performing well for you. So if you’re converting really well on mobile or on desktop. Make sure you use the bid multipliers to take advantage of that, and really boost your bids across the device types that are converting well for you.
Stephanie Prasad (34:06):
And then lastly, make sure you’re checking in frequently. So check in on all of your campaigns, make sure that you’re you’re not running out of budget. Your items aren’t going out of stock that you’re winning the buy box. All of those are going to be factors that influence whether or not you are able to win in the auction and get those top of search placements. So just make sure that you’re checking in frequently, so you don’t miss out on any potential sales. And then lastly, I will just leave you with a reminder of what the key holiday dates are this year.
Stephanie Prasad (34:46):
So Thanksgiving will be coming up on November 26. Now Walmart made an announcement recently that we are closing all of our stores on Thanksgiving. We will not be opening for Thanksgiving which is the first time ever. Which means the only way that Walmart shoppers will be shopping on Thanksgiving Day this year will be on Walmart.com. So keep that in mind even more important right with all of the strategy that we just mentioned. To make sure that you’re set for for Thanksgiving Day. And then of course, Black Friday will follow on the 27th. With Cyber Monday on the 30th of November this year.
Jason Magee (35:25):
Yeah and that’s just to kick us off, because there’s a lot more holiday season after that as well. So thank you for sharing that, Stephanie. And that said Andrew, I know we have a bunch of questions in here. So we’re happy to address any of them as you deem fit.
Andrew Waber (35:41):
Sure, so yeah got a bunch that we’ll we’ll go through. Just a minute, yeah again. Thanks for that great presentation. Again, anyone online if you want to learn more about what Teikametrics do for Walmart Jason’s email’s right here you can shoot him a note directly. So getting into the questions. The first one is from from Shantae here. And I think this is a good one for Stephanie. She asks, “I work with a brand that is moving from the Walmart marketplace program to the Walmart supplier program. What does this mean for our advertising options?”
Stephanie Prasad (36:17):
Yeah, thank you for asking that question. So we do have some additional advertising options that are available specifically to suppliers only. Specifically, those are going to be our display advertising options, as well as our search brand amplifier. Which is the placement that shows up at the very top of the search results page is very similar to the sponsored brands concept on Amazon. So if you’re interested in any of those placements, those are available through Walmart directly. So if you reach out to Jason and he can connect you or just reach out to your Walmart contact directly and we can explain all of those additional options too.
Andrew Waber (37:06):
Great, this next one, I think is a good one for Jason. This is from Jennifer. She asks, you mentioned all these buckets for keywords and separating them into ad groups. Again based you talked about competitor and generic and brand. What’s the best practice for bucketing these keywords into different categories?
Jason Magee (37:30):
So great question, Jennifer. I believe you’re mentioning on the manual side. The beauty about Walmart is you can set your bids either at the ad group level or the individual item level. The thing about it is if you have one product per ad group, what you should do is you should make a list of any… And you can download your search term reports from Walmart. You can even use them on other marketplaces, if you’ve just launched on Walmart. What you need to do is you need to make sure that anytime your brand name is referenced to a search criteria. Like it could be as I mentioned, Jason Magee T-shirts, Jason Magee clothing as a brand. You need to you need to separate that out from any list of competitors that you want to go after. Those should go in separate ad groups.
Jason Magee (38:24):
Then you should have a third one, which is just for generic searches. Like men’s shirt, blue, size medium that will be a generic search term. Once you bucket them out in different ad groups, you should think what is my desired return on ad spend or my desired ACOS. So you should expect the highest conversion in your highest ROAS on your own branded terms. Because they already know about your brand. And they’re looking to make a purchase decision around your brand and your products. The opposite end is for competitors. This is very competitive because you’re deep in a competitor’s funnel. You should be willing to have a lot lower of a ROAS or a lot higher an ACOS.
Jason Magee (39:05):
Because you’re trying to grab that sale from a competitors basket. Somewhere between those two should be where you place your bids on into keywords for generic search terms at the same time. If you want to talk to me specifically about it Jennifer, reach out to me. And I can show you about how you should set your ROAS targets so your ACOS targets. Based on where your product is in its lifecycle and what the goals of that product are. Hopefully that answers your question.
Andrew Waber (39:33):
Great. And I think another good one that follows on here is, in other marketplaces, this is really from Chris. Right now with Walmart we recommend segmenting targeting at the ad group level rather than at the campaign level that you might see on some other marketplaces. And Jason I have some stuff that I can talk about there, but I don’t know if you have some initial feedback on that?
Jason Magee (40:00):
No, I think they’ve heard a lot of me Andrew, feel free to answer this one.
Andrew Waber (40:04):
Sure, so what you see is what we always recommend from a philosophical point of view here Teikametrics is having single item campaigns, and then subsequent ad groups. Which breakdown again, based on those keyword buckets, like Jason was just talking about right? Brand, competitor and generic. And the reason why you want to do that is because by having a single item campaign with these more granular ad groups. It allows you to essentially track and then optimize performance at again, a much more granular level. The issue with doing something that’s more let’s say, top of funnel. And all these keywords are let’s say bucketed or you have multiple items.
Andrew Waber (40:44):
Is it’s going to be really hard to then subsequently judge okay, what do you need to tweak for performance, based on performance. Because if you have multiple products in there with potentially multiple margins or multiple price ranges, that becomes a much more difficult task. And then you’re essentially spending a lot more time looking at the performance and trying to make changes. Versus trusting the data, which is a lot easier when you’ve got these things broken out more granularly. So that’s why we always recommend this kind of more single item campaign to this keyword type structure. That tend to just drag the best results just from again, a monitoring and adjustment point of view.
Jason Magee (41:22):
And that’s exactly right, Andrew. And going one step further the beauty about having single item campaigns is control. And I guess the alternative would have been deeper. Would be I have an entire campaign for branded keywords and entire campaign for competitor and so on. Walmart does have daily minimums in place for how you’re going to create campaigns and the budget requirements. That leaves $100 a day or 1000, open ended budget. That if you don’t have a huge budget or you have a very large catalog.
Jason Magee (41:54):
That can be a very costly way to do it. And you’re just going a step further than you really need to from a management perspective. Again self-fulfilling, trying to do this manually and dissect the data is tough. But we take a metrics in our technology. We’re able to strike the right balance between being as granular as you need to be out of respect to your budget. And being able to take action based on what the performance delivers for each individual ad group.
Andrew Waber (42:25):
All right, just so we can get through since there’s there’s a lot of questions coming in and I want to get to as many of them as we can here. Let’s see. So I think this is a good one from Chris. And probably a good one for Stephanie here. What determines where ads are placed in the grid one through 12 now with this expanded inventory?
Stephanie Prasad (42:50):
Yeah, so the way that we select the winners for the auction is the same as it was previously. So it’s always going to be based on relevancy and bid price. So just because you’re the highest bidder doesn’t mean that you’re always going to win that that top slot. Walmart also looks at how relevant your product is to that specific search query for what the shopper is looking for. And so it’s a combination of both relevancy as well as bid price.
Andrew Waber (43:29):
Great. And another one here. This was something I think we saw this from a few folks here, and it’s something that’s been long on folk’s mind. Which was when or if there’ll be anything around negative keywords for automatic campaigns. I don’t know if Stephanie you have anything to add here.
Stephanie Prasad (43:55):
Yeah that is on our plan roadmap. You should expect to see it likely like first half of next year. So unfortunately, we will not have negative keywords available for the holiday season this year.
Andrew Waber (44:14):
Got it, good to know. This is one that just came in I thought it was a good follow up for some stuff we were talking about Jason. It’s from Elizabeth, she asks by single item does that mean all variations of a product are considered the same item? We sell clothing in many colors and sizes could we advertise them together? And I believe with Walmart in particular you do have some restrictions on this in terms of what items you can advertise.
Jason Magee (44:39):
Yeah, Elizabeth this is a really interesting one. And probably requires a separate conversation about it. But obviously to answer your question now. One of the things about how Walmart has created, and at least a current version of Walmart. Is you can only advertise your base item ID. So then becomes a challenge is, do I want to create separate SKUs for small and medium and large? Personally, I think it should be in one. I mean the way buyers purchase things, especially if it’s a clothing item. They know variations are to be expected. What I would recommend is if you do have variations know that you can only advertise the base item ID.
Jason Magee (45:21):
But once they go to your listing and they can obviously select the variation. But what I would recommend is put your best selling item as your base item ID. If you know medium is the best selling size that you have. That would be the base item ID. I would make sure that that’s the base item ID when you’re editing or creating a listing for your product. And again, if you want to talk more in detail about this, please just shoot me a note we can have a chat about it. Actually one thing while we’re at on it too. This becomes more strategic in terms of let’s say you’re selling dog treats. You’re selling a small, medium, large of a T-shirts, the retail price is probably going to be the same or very similar.
Jason Magee (46:10):
And your margins are going to be pretty much the same. But the question really does become what if I have a dog treat and I sell a 10 pack. And then I sell a 30 pack? This may be a reason for you to consider breaking out those as separate item IDs and separate SKUs. Because let’s say that my 10 pack is my best selling or my 20 packs the best selling item. And they can actually go and select the smaller size at 10. You may overpay for that impression and click where it’s not profitable if they select the lower 10 count. But the opposite is if my 20 kind of such a better margin. If you only advertise in mind for a 10 count, you could be leaving money on the table when people could purchase a larger set.
Jason Magee (47:00):
And you actually could have afforded to spend more for that click. So you need to be very strategic about your goals, your budget, and how those variants are breaking out. As a general rule of thumb, you don’t want to advertise products that are not like… If you want to advertise products together, make sure they’re in roughly 10% of the sales price 10% of the same margin. And they have the same goal of product lifecycle. Don’t mix a brand new launched item with an item that’s been around forever, because you’re going to have different goals. And you’re going to battle yourself there as you’re trying to set up your advertising. And how you structure your items on Walmart.com
Andrew Waber (47:42):
It’s a great point, Jason. And dovetailing with that a little bit. We can do probably a couple of questions before we wrap up here. This is from Jawad and I think it’s a nice question. Just what’s the best practices in using keywords when you think of broad, phrase, and exact. How you should think about that. And I know just from our perspective, we typically recommend… When you look at our suggested structure, you may have keywords that within a manual campaign will, let’s say conform to each of those. However, what we typically recommend is you can have obviously a better idea if you get a good idea of performance. Let’s say with a broad or phrase match and you’re getting good performance on that. Look at that within a more exact keyword campaign. Or rather targeting specific because it’s going to give you better performance if you’re able to more manually adjust based on performance surges. I don’t know if you have anything to add on that.
Jason Magee (48:49):
Waber you’re exactly right. So think about it this way. When you’re running automatic campaigns that essentially… Think of automatics most of the time as a broad match. Once you’re proven that you can convert that automatic campaign it’s generating sales. When you move it to a manual campaign, you can actually go right to a phrase match as a good best practice. Because you don’t necessarily need to have it as a broad. The purpose of broad is to prove and discover that key word can work for you so move it as a phrase.
Jason Magee (49:17):
Once it’s in a phrase match and you start converting very well. And you’re getting sales at a good conversion rate, at a good ROAS or a ACOS. You can also add it, not necessarily delete it as a phrase, but you can also add it as an exact match as well. That’s the way you work through the funnel from auto to manual, broad, phrase, exact. The holy grail is having a very finite subset of keywords that you’ve used data and KPIs to move them down the funnel. That’s a good way I would approach it.
Andrew Waber (49:53):
Great and I think we can take one more question here because I saw a couple come through on this front and maybe this is a good one for Stephanie to wrap up here. Which is if certain folks have let’s say used the new Shopify connection to get their products on Walmart.com? Is there anything they need to know in terms of like special about advertising through that? I mean, my gut tells me no. But I don’t know if there’s anything you can add there. For those folks that may have their products out there just via Shopify.
Stephanie Prasad (50:25):
No there should be nothing different or unique with that. You have all of the same advertising or sponsored product advertising options available to you. And Teikametrics will be able to help you out with all of that.
Jason Magee (50:38):
Yeah, and just to round out, Stephanie this is exactly right. Although the back end is being ran on the partnership with Shopify and Walmart, advertising still sits with Walmart if you want to advertise on Walmart in that way. I don’t know if Andrew saw this one too but Steph, can you just touch on how long it may take for you to apply for Walmart advertising? I don’t know if that’s something you have a minute to touch on?
Stephanie Prasad (51:09):
Oh, sure it shouldn’t be a very lengthy process, to be honest. And Jason and the Teikametrics team can can let you know to get in touch with our teams. And to go through the onboarding process. There’s obviously some forms and information that we’ll need from you. But assuming that all of that is readily available, it should take no more than three to five days, I would say generally. So it’s not a very difficult process, we try to make it as seamless as possible.
Jason Magee (51:47):
Yep and as always, whether you’re registering to advertise or sell on Walmart. Just make sure you have your ducks in a row and you have all the proper documentation that’s required. It’s very important that you give Walmart specifically what they need to be able to evaluate your account in a seamless process. Just because to be candid, Stephanie could probably touch on this as well, but the amount of people applying to sell on Walmart, not to mention, trying to advertise. It’s a huge influx so you make sure you make it as easy for the Walmart team to run their standard operating procedure. That’s also what makes Walmart so great is not just letting anybody and everybody in. It’s a very curated experience. And that’s why sellers and retailers are seeing so much success on the platform.
Stephanie Prasad (52:34):
Yeah and on that note, if you’re not registered yet for advertising. I would encourage you to do that as soon as possible. So that you’re not caught up in the holiday rush of advertisers trying to get on. So do it as soon as possible once you’ve got all the all those ducks in a row as Jason mentioned.
Andrew Waber (52:59):
Awesome. Well, I think that’s a good note to end on. And so again everyone online, you’ll be receiving a recording of this webinar along with the stack. So you can take a look and review the material after the fact. And we’ll send that along roughly 24 hours from now, so keep an eye out for that. Again, thank you to Jason, thank you to Stephanie. And thank you all for coming here and hope to see you on the next one. Bye-bye.
