🚀 This Week’s Walmart Hack: A Walmart Ad Refresher

So you’re ready to ADvance your new business on Walmart. To directly ADdress potential customers. To give your products an ADvantage over your competitors. Have any idea what I might ADvise? 🤔

That’s right, it’s time to talk about ads! You all know the power that an effective advertising campaign has on sales, so this week I wanted to review all of the tools you have at your disposal in the Walmart Marketplace advertising toolbox.

Let’s kick things off with Walmart Sponsored Products ads, which increase visibility to specific product listings. To be eligible for Sponsored Products advertising, your product must be in stock, winning the buy box, and published on Walmart.com.

If these criteria are met, you can advertise your product with the following ad types:

• Search In-Grid Ads – These product listings appear among the organic search results for relevant search terms. These are your best bang for your buck and are obviously the highest ROI right now. It’s the Wild West right now, and Walmart ads are cheap! If I were you, I would be spending the majority of my ad budget on these.
   

• Carousel Ads – These product listings can appear on search results, category pages, and individual product pages, giving them a broader reach site-wide.
   

• Buy Box Banner – The Buy Box Banner is listed just below the organic Buy Box, offering alternative or complementary products.

Brand owners who have onboarded through the Walmart Brand portal have access to some additional high-powered ad types capable of putting their brand front and center (and top and bottom and right and left and anywhere else it might catch eyes):

• Sponsored Brand Ads – Appear at the top of search results and feature your brand logo, a custom headline, and clickable product links.
   

• Sponsored Video Ads – A premium version of Sponsored Brand Ads that includes an auto-playing video. These videos are optimized to stretch the width of the screen and to display optimally on both desktop and mobile, auto-playing when 50% or more of the screen is in view.
   

• Sponsored Display Ads – Brand-based visual ads available in various sizes and placement areas, including the brand new widescreen top of the fold “Enhanced Skyline Placement”. Unlike all of the other ads on this list that are Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Display Ads operate on Effective Cost Per Mille (eCPM), or per every thousand impressions.

The Walmart Marketplace is rapidly growing, but it is still far less competitive among third-party sellers than Amazon is. Now is the perfect time to experiment with which ad types provide the best ROI for your products and brand.

What blows my mind is that for most categories on Walmart, brands aren’t even advertising yet. Go ahead and test this yourself. This presents YOU with an opportunity of a lifetime to capture market share and drive sales while everyone is sleeping.

I have nothing more to ADd, I hope you’ve found this ADvice helpful! Okay, okay, I’m done. Adieu.

🔥 Hot Walmart Seller News: Meet Sparky, Walmart’s New AI Shopping Assistant!

Whether we like it or not, Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. And after Amazon rolled out an AI Shopping Assistant called Rufus in 2024, it should come as no surprise that Walmart has followed suit with its own AI Shopping Assistant, Sparky, here in 2025.

I know that a lot of you are hesitant to embrace AI, and I don’t blame you. Its impact on content and business, and art is wide-reaching and only just beginning. Technology with the power to shift multiple industries is incredible and overwhelming to think about.

But this isn’t Technology Insiders or Philosophy Insiders, this is WALMART Insiders. And in this window, I see a tremendous opportunity.

The key point to note here is that Sparky’s primary objective will be to guide customers to products that they want and brands they can trust. And it’s our job to make it as easy as possible for him to do so!

Consider any and all text data available on Walmart Marketplace product listings. Text data in images, backend search terms, titles, descriptions, bullet points, and everything else.

Before, our main focus was optimizing for search. SEO will continue to be a top priority, but we now must also consider someone intelligent with intent, analyzing all of this text- even if that someone is something, and the intelligence is artificial.

Sparky will also read customer questions to get a clearer picture of what the consumer is looking for. Use this knowledge to your advantage! When you receive feedback or questions from your customers on AND off of Walmart, consider informational updates you can make in your text and responses to help both Sparky and readers get more insight into your product.

This AI shopping assistant is brand new and learning in real time, which means you have a golden opportunity to feed it great data that shines a positive light on your products.

If you like AI, consider Sparky a useful tool to grow your business. If you dislike AI, consider this a case of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. Either way, we have to learn to work with our new AI overlords.

And hey, they’ve got cute doggy names like Rufus and Sparky now. What could go wrong? 🐶

Bonus Tip: Sparky analyzes everything from the data inside your images, your answers to customer questions (feel familiar to Amazon?), your backend SEO, and your videos. Sparky sees ALL.

🙏 THANK YOU for reading this week’s edition!

Your Feedback is valuable. Respond to this email and tell me how you think I could add more value to this newsletter.

Interested in reaching 17,000+ growth-minded Walmart sellers? To become a Walmart Insiders sponsor, reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn!

That’s it for this week!

— Jon