The Difference Between Amazon PPC & Walmart Advertising

In an epic battle between Walmart and Amazon, it’s hard to tell which option would be best. Walmart is the king of brick and mortar, while Amazon wins on click and order. So, when it comes to advertising, which is better between Amazon and Walmart?

Because of Amazon’s experience in online advertising, Amazon holds a crucial advantage in PPC. However, Walmart is more suitable in situations where you are locally established. Depending on your advertisement focus, either Amazon or Walmart can be effective. Below, we will go into the details behind each advertisement platform in this in-depth article.

A few years ago, Walmart couldn’t compete with Amazon regarding online advertising. However, since the announcement of two new programs, Walmart Marketplace and Walmart Connect, Walmart has seen significant growth as an eCommerce platform.

Walmart Marketplace is Walmart’s answer to Amazon’s platform. It enables third-party sellers to utilize Walmart’s platform for sales. Walmart’s new platform grew by about 100% the previous year, up nearly double from the last two years. Given the marketplace’s infancy, it’s still got some hurdles to climb.

However, Walmart is already in the position of being one of the most influential retailers. So when it comes to extending those resources out, Walmart has the capacity. The other area, Walmart Connect, is Walmart’s answer to Amazon Web Services (AWS). We will get into AWS later, but for now, think of it as a giant advertising platform utilizing Walmart’s unique position.

Walmart Connect was previously known as Walmart Media Group, But because of an overall rebranding campaign, the announcement was made in January of 2021 to make this change. Walmart Connect seeks to leverage its extensive chain of physical storefronts, something that Amazon doesn’t have. Still, Amazon PPC has several advantages over Walmart we will go through.

Amazon PPC includes various services which come in multiple forms. These services have been tested, making them proven for effective use with the correct targets and budget.

You are most likely familiar with Amazon Seller Central’s advertisement platform if you are an Amazon seller. From there, you can acquire these forms of advertising:

• Amazon Sponsored Products & Brands
• Amazon Display Ads
• Amazon Posts
• Amazon Influencer Plan

Using their offsite platform, you might be familiar with Amazon Attribution, DSP, audio ads, and other custom ad solutions.

With Amazon PPC, their robust platform of solutions enables users to target people with relative ease online. You’ll find that Amazon’s professional reports and resources have more significant support.

Amazon has been doing this far longer than Walmart. However, Walmart has established multiple physical locations to beat Amazon with directed advertising.

Our next section will delve into the advertising types these two companies share and how they compare.

Both companies offer a solid variety of advertising options. Here’s the type of advertising that they both share:

• Sponsored Product Advertising
• Brand Advertising
• Display Ads
• The Buy Box
• APIs
• Offsite Advertising
• General SEO Practices

Below, we will explore how each applies and how they are similar between the two platforms.

The image shows an advertisement for a new Nintendo game: Get it Together. It links to a specific product and takes up a tiny portion of the screen. The reason I see this advertisement comes from my search for video games. The ad does not follow me when I switch to another department.

Walmart sponsored products ads also come in more standard forms.

Both forms of sponsored products advertising are relatively similar. Both cases involve you targeting a keyword or product category and bidding to receive the most exposure. Here’s how this advertisement compares to a sponsored products advertisement from Amazon.

Product owners who bid the most receive the most exposure, thus increasing their ranks for sales. Typically, the appearance outranks even the top SEO results, enabling the seller to receive the top billing in many situations. Walmart’s chance to hit the right audience is somewhat limited here.

Sponsored products advertising has the potential to follow the user through various websites. This is especially useful when retargeting users. For example, if someone goes to a review site to find out the quality of their desired product, Amazon sponsored ads are almost everywhere. The user is pretty likely to see an Amazon advertisement on this other site. This can be because the site owner is an Amazon affiliate, someone who promotes Amazon products, or Amazon owns the site. They hold many important sites like IMDB, Zappos, GoodReads, and Twitch.

While Walmart owns many assets, most of those are not purely digital. Walmart holds the largest share of the US grocery market. Walmart also has a lot of data to leverage, it is far more difficult to leverage that data. Unless it can find a creative solution, Amazon PPC is generally more effective.

The image above shows Glade, a well-known air freshener company, advertising its fall lineup of scents. If there is one area that Walmart excels at, it’s at creating a brand-centered experience.

Sponsored brands advertising can also hit a particular keyword. However, Walmart doesn’t always target a keyword, as I searched for a multitool when getting the banner above. Check out this other brand-centered advertisement from Walmart’s main page:

Meanwhile, Amazon’s page is more likely to emphasize its brand:

The point being is that the Amazon Brand Registry is something that anyone can access. Because of this, you’ll find a large number of small brands. Small brands are great, but they lack the recognition that Walmart brands do. That is because Walmart is a business that is a bit pickier about who gets the top slot.

To get the top slot on an advertisement, you’ve got to pay the money and put out a quality product. In many cases, Walmart won’t even let you advertise on specific channels without being in the top 128 results organically. Once you do so, you can pay for a Walmart Search Brand Amplifier (SBA). The SBA is Walmart’s answer to the sponsored brands advertising you see on the top of every page.

With this in mind, you have to be more careful with the brands or product categories you pick. If you can choose a product category with fewer competitors, you have a higher chance to rank. The same can be said about Amazon, but Amazon does not restrict its advertisement.

On Amazon, grouped advertising typically comes in the above form. You see a brand’s logo and three or four products they want you to see in its store.

In this case, the products have no particular name. Instead, you know that this company sells three different types of shoes.

Grouped display advertising enables the seller to feature the best of its product catalog. This can be useful for a few different reasons:

• It allows you to capture a wider audience (men, women, kids, etc.)
• It enables you to have a higher potential conversion rate with multiple product types and more likelihood of appealing to an audience.
• Sellers can feature a collection of complementary products.

Regardless of how you use this advertisement method, you’ll find that Amazon’s positioning is slightly better. That’s because Walmart’s position in these ads is typically at the very bottom.

Scrolling down on Walmart.com will reveal a sponsored “Products you may also like” section. However, this is better known as a carousel.

A carousel, regarding PPC advertising, is what happens when you have a revolving door of various products. From the arrow above, you can probably tell that clicking on it will lead you down the path of multiple products.

Typically, you find these product listings on the product description page. However, Walmart also includes an additional product carousel on the bottom of each search engine results page (SERP).

Walmart also has an “add to cart” button located next to each product on these carousels. Compared to Amazon, that means you can feasibly win with an engaging title and picture with greater quickness.

Walmart’s automatic bidding campaign system is pretty simple. You can set the campaign based on the following factors:

• Name
• Start Date
• End Date
• Total Budget
• Daily Budget

From this point, you can click on the “auto-calculate” button to determine how much this will cost. That way, your total advertising budget for this campaign will be calculated for you.

Much like any other advertising campaign, higher bids get more results. However, Walmart relies on a first-price bidding system. This means that the system is similar to how you would bid for something on eBay.

Everyone is bidding at once, and the highest bidder wins. This means you are more likely to overspend than your competition, leading to a higher potential waste of advertising dollars.

Amazon uses the far more popular form of second-price bidding. Nearly 80 percent of publishers said helped maximize ad revenues.

We know that Amazon’s chosen bidding strategy is cheaper, but does it work? The findings tell us it does, but you are given a secondary option: dynamic bidding.

Dynamic bidding refers to the seller’s willingness to change the bid in the event they are outbid. This means if someone decides to beat you by a penny and your acceptable range is three cents, you will be paying an extra two cents for the campaign.

However, if your competing advertiser decides that four cents are acceptable, you are knocked out of the bidding and receive a notification. At that point, you can choose whether you want to reset the campaign or try another advertising target.

Because Walmart is young, it’s acceptable that it doesn’t have dynamic bidding. However, if Walmart wants to remain competitive in these targeted automatic campaigns, it will need to proliferate and meet these advanced bidding tactics.

When it comes to Walmart Marketplace PPC, manual bidding seems like something of an afterthought. However, it can be a handy tool.

Manual bidding is better in cases where you want complete control. So, you want to target individual keywords at specific bidding rates.

Walmart calls this strategy manual bidding, while Amazon refers to it as fixed bidding. As you might expect, simplicity means that you know what you are going to spend.

The issue? The campaign is dead in the water as soon as you exceed your budget. There is no allowance for how you should respond based on the number of conversions, just a simple go until the pre-set balance is depleted.

This is different from automatic bidding or dynamic bidding in that you can still bid when reaching second place. That means if someone outbids you on a day, you’ll still bid the same amount.

Meanwhile, automatic bidding means you might receive notice of this, and the campaign could be killed based on your settings. However, your settings could also see an advertising increase based on other factors.

Whether it’s Walmart or Amazon PPC, you cannot escape the buy box. The buy box is the frontmost position available on a product description.

If you’ve been reading our content on Amazon, you already know you share product listings with other sellers. Amazon Marketplace is no different, as your success is determined by how you win the buy box.

If you don’t win the buy box, you won’t receive that level of success.

Winning the Walmart Buy Box is pretty much identical to winning the Amazon Buy Box. Much of this goes back to being the best at what you do.

This includes meeting these requirements:

• An on-time shipment rate of 99%
• Having an incredibly low order defect rate (lower than 2% for the past 90 days)
• Maintaining a consistent stock of products (inventory management)
• Following Walmart’s price parity rule
• Ensuring that you can ship items quickly
• Have a valid tracking rate for 95% of items shipped (excluding freight items)
• Following Walmart’s price leadership rule
• Maintaining good Walmart SEO practices
• Offering free shipping
• Gaining excellent customer feedback (four stars or higher)

Regardless of what online marketplaces you use, you’ll find that these requirements are pretty standard across the board. However, two of these are unique to Walmart.

The Walmart Price Parity rule ensures that you are not using your Walmart product listing to draw attention to a cheaper product offsite. If you sell a single product at a far lower price off Walmart’s site, they will remove your listing.

Keeping cheaper products offsite encourages people to utilize Walmart’s price matching guarantee. This can encourage shoppers to call in to get a lower price.

Also, other shoppers may choose your listing on another site over Walmart’s listing. This is a bit of non-competitive behavior and one of the cons to selling products on Walmart.

When using Walmart-sponsored product advertising (or Amazon-sponsored product advertising), working from a data-driven mindset is essential. That’s why the experience of Amazon is important, as they offer greater detail in their product ads dashboard.

The Walmart Ad Center is a complete dashboard that splits information on display ads and sponsored products ads. While the ad center has received positive reviews from large corporations, it feels a bit lacking.

This is mainly because Walmart’s Self Serve platform for display advertising was released in 2021. This self-serve platform enables sellers and advertisers to utilize automation, something Amazon has had under its belt for years now.

That being said, Walmart is integrating its advertising platform with various partners. These include companies like Flywheel, Kenshoo, Pacvue,andTeikametrics.

Where Amazon focuses on making an approachable platform, there is some potential in what Walmart will be bringing to the table in the future.

When it comes to advertising features, Amazon has a lot of options unique to here. Here is what they currently have over Walmart Marketplace PPC:

Amazon’s Affiliate program is full of many advertisers that make a small portion of Amazon’s profits. The result is all the advantages that come with WOM (Word-of-Mouth) advertising with an army of affiliates willing to do it.

It is said that over 100 thousand sites are using this program. That’s a staggering amount of people, and likely only a fraction of those people based on the referenced link.

Despite Amazon’s slashing of commission rates, there is still incredible popularity in the program. Many business owners use it to gain passive income, a popular topic for making money.

This also doesn’t count the Amazon Influencer Program. The Influencer Program enables Amazon-approved influencers to promote your product.

While you can choose to pay influencers off of Amazon, Walmart has no protection for using this strategy. Regardless, you can get it done if you find trustworthy influencer sources.

But Amazon has one additional bonus regarding influencers: Amazon Live.

Amazon Live is a unique method for influencers to share their product preferences directly on Amazon. If you check them out now, you’ll probably find some live broadcasts.

Because of the number of live projects available here, it’s a 24/7 version of the Home Shopping Network. For those familiar with old cable TV, it’s a constant advertisement of products.

Typically, influencers share their experience with fellow users. As an advertising program, it’s a bit of an odd choice. However, it can be handy, especially for those in the beauty or fashion category.

Amazon Posts is technically not a form of advertising. However, you’ll find that this beta platform enables you to create content that can be found on competitor’s product listings and search results.

Because we’ve already created an in-depth article on the subject, we recommend you check it out. You’ll find that on-site content creation and product reviews are unique to Amazon and likely very far off for Walmart.

Because Walmart has nearly 5000 stores, you can create display advertising in those stores. Many of those stores have large, flatscreen TVs where Walmart tells shoppers about unique products.

Many of those products are available at the customer’s location. However, some products are becoming Walmart Marketplace-specific, encouraging people to gain awareness about the new platform.

If you don’t have the skillset to create these ads, Walmart Advertising Partners can step in. With cooperative partnerships, your brand can find significant success on this platform.

The Walmart Pro Seller Badge is automatic recognition from Walmart of your success in an unusual form of advertising. It enables you to boost your exposure and gain customer confidence with greater ease.

Amazon’s choice, a recognition for a top product, is the only equivalent to this feature. But to become a pro seller, you need to meet these requirements:

• A delivery defect rate of less than 10%
• A listing quality score of 70% (60% for non-trending areas of your product catalog)
• More than 100 orders in the past 90 days
• No trust and safety or performance standards violation
• A cancellation rate of less than 2%

You can find these features under your Walmart Seller Central dashboard. Look under the “Growth Opportunities” section under your Listing Quality Dashboard for details.

Despite the focus being Walmart PPC ads, PPC should eventually lead to SEO. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a big deal here at DataHawk. That’s why we have a whole set of features you can use to grow your Amazon business.

When it comes to SEO, both Walmart and Amazon have similar practices:

In other terms, Walmart SEO is sometimes called product optimization. Optimizing is just a fancy way of making your product listing most attractive for organic search. That way, if someone searches for relevant keywords, they will find your product.

Optimization on Walmart’s system hits these areas:

• Utilizing high-quality images
• Using keywords in product titles and descriptions
• Ensuring you detail your product using product attributes
• Adding appropriate negative keywords

An awareness of these topics gives you a chance for a solid organic ranking. If you want to check out the details, I recommend checking out this article.

Negative keywords on Walmart are the same as negative keywords elsewhere. These are keywords you specifically want to exclude on your product listings.

Typically, negative keywords are those you exclude from PPC campaigns. For example, you don’t want to include brand keywords in your non-branded PPC campaigns. On the other side, you don’t want your brand keywords to show up in non-branded ad campaigns.

In SEO, you’ll want to avoid mentioning unnecessary topics. Do not mention all of the things your product is not. Instead, focus on what your product can do for the customer.

Below, we will look at some of the best practices you should keep in mind regarding Walmart Advertising.

The ultimate goal of most advertising is to improve your sales performance. If your ads aren’t doing that, you need to find an alternative method.

Pay regular attention to the Walmart performance dashboard. You can easily compare earnings and profit margins to the amount you spend per campaign.

If you run multiple ad campaigns, you might need to add them together. If you run them into different years, be sure to break them down over daily budgets instead.

If ads are not working, here are some suggestions of what you can try next:

• If you are receiving a lot of views and no conversions, change your target keyword(s)
• If you aren’t earning much for Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), reduce the bid amount and see if your rank drops.
• Perform regular reviews of what your competitors are doing and always ask yourself how you can do better.

Remember, you do not want to rank for negative keywords. For example, branded keywords and non-branded keywords should not have any crossover.

For example, if you sell a multitool that doesn’t include a pocket knife, you don’t want to appear in the “multitool with a pocket knife” keyword list. However, if you choose to bid for many variants of multitool, that will likely be on the list.

Everything your product is not should not be in the product description. To be sure that also applies to your ads, be sure to exclude meaningless keywords.

Once your products begin to make sales from organic traffic, you can move those products out of the PPC list. For those with limited advertising budgets, you can move that budget to where it will be more meaningful.

In this case, we are referring to low-performing products that need exposure. Sometimes, the areas that those targets are in are too competitive. Also, you might have had a negative review in the early goings to trounce your chances.

Regardless, PPC exists to supplement SEO, and the two work in tandem as long as you remember to boost your weaker products. We are only as good as our weakest team player, so be sure your team of products excels.

When comparing the two advertising options, Amazon has some unique options that don’t fit the Walmart bill. We will go through these below:

With the Amazon Brand Registry in full swing, there is a clear preference for building brands on Amazon. Amazon does this to compete with Walmart, which is known for producing and maintaining powerful brands.

This is perhaps one point that Amazon struggles at, as the strange amalgamation of what works on the world’s most customer-centric company (in this case, Amazon) is confusing. Amazon needs to work hard to catch up with Walmart’s brand power.

Product Attribute Targeting is a unique aspect of Amazon targeting that exists a bit in Walmart. However, PATs are more established given the wide range of data you can use.

For example, you can choose to limit your products to appear next to other products with mediocre reviews. If you have a five-star product, it can be a great way of poaching some of those sales.

Currently, Walmart Advertising doesn’t have something that has this level of effectiveness. As time goes on, we will likely see something like this.

When choosing the best advertising platform, the answer to this question depends on your priority. However, Amazon has more experience and more features, so the better overall choice is still Amazon.

Walmart is the better choice for those who benefit most from local advertising. These include people who sell products at the local Walmart. Large and heavy objects are also more successful with local advertising.

Amazon Advertising is excellent for people who want to focus on online efforts. They are more cost-effective given the second-highest bidding strategy. Also, Amazon can target consumers online with incredible effectiveness.

Regardless of your preference, it is crucial to choose an advertising strategy that works. We hope with this article, we get you in the right direction. If you need more help, get in contact with our advisory services team for a more personalized approach.