Walmart Connect has announced that as of June 6th, Walmart Advertising will be moving to Advanced Second Price Auction for Sponsored Product and Search Brand Amplifier Advertisements. Up until now, First Price Auction has been the default way to buy sponsored placements within the platform, which means that advertisers pay exactly what they bid on keyword and automatic targeting. This update is big news as it means advertisers can expect to be more efficient in their PPC advertising on Walmart. 

What is an Advanced Second Price Auction?

Walmart Advertising will now follow Second Price Auction bidding, which has become the universal standard of buying digital media across Search, Social, and Programmatic advertising platforms. Instead of paying at the exact bid to serve an ad impression, in an Advanced Second Price Auction, advertisers will now only pay $0.01 higher than the next highest bidder.

What does this mean for Advertisers?

With this new update, Direct Agents projects that more brands will now prioritize Walmart Ads in their eCommerce portfolio while existing advertisers can expect to see many cost savings and efficiency improvements from their campaigns.

This is great news for brands, as marketers can now use those cost savings to expand advertising efforts toward new areas of growth. Consider growing your Automatic Sponsored product campaigns first, as these campaigns will be able to spend and learn more efficiently with Advanced Second-Price Auction. With those new learnings in hand, Advertisers can then utilize search term reports to help expand the number of high growth keywords in their manual campaigns for additional cost savings and improvements in ROI. 

Additionally, we recommend fully optimizing all product pages on Walmart, as SEO relevancy is a key factor in Advanced Second Price Auction on Walmart. For tips on how to improve Walmart Product SEO, check out our blog on Walmart Project Page Readiness here

Marketplace experts at Direct Agents can help grow your advertising efforts on Walmart, Amazon, and more. Reach out at [email protected] today to get started.

Sara Rosenberg, eCommerce Strategist