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Walmart’s Self-Serve Marketing portal in Seller Center allows you to invest in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and promote your products in Google search results through shopping ads. If you're participating in the program, you’re responsible for being aware of and compliant with all policies, rules, and guidelines that apply to all advertising placements. Failure to adhere may result in account suspension or termination from the Marketplace program.
In this guide, you’ll learn how the SEM program works and the guidelines and requirements to participate.
How does it work?
Once you set up and launch your campaign, your Google shopping ads will appear in the ads section of Google.com search results during a relevant search for products like yours. Walmart’s proprietary bidding algorithms are designed to optimize the items and budget selected within a campaign to help achieve the highest possible return on ad-spend (ROAS) and incremental gross merchandise value (GMV) for your business.
Here’s an example of where ads will populate:
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When you add an item to a campaign, it goes through two different phases of bidding: Learning and Optimizing:
Learning: The learning phase is the initial stage of bidding, where our algorithm analyzes how your item performs on Google Shopping Ads. During this phase, our algorithm focuses on driving traffic to your item and collecting data on how many impressions, clicks and conversions it gets. You may see a limited number of impressions and clicks or an inconsistent ROAS. This is normal and means that our algorithm is testing different bid levels and learning from the results. This takes an average of 7-10 days and may take longer if there’s high competition in Google.
Optimizing: The optimizing phase begins immediately after the learning phase ends and is the final stage of bidding. At this point, our algorithm has learned enough about your item and to only bid at a level at which additional spend is expected to return an optimal ROAS. This serves to limit campaign spend on items that have been underperforming. During the optimizing phase, you may see an increase in spend at a stable or increasing ROAS, which indicates that our algorithm is spending wisely and maximizing your revenue from ads. However, if the algorithm determines that it isn’t able to generate an optimal ROAS for an item, it’ll reduce spending on that item. This may happen if the item has low demand, high competition or other factors that affect its performance.
Guidelines and requirements
To use Walmart’s Self-Serve Marketing portal in Seller Center, U.S. and international sellers will need to meet the following eligibility requirements:
Your last payout must be equal to or greater than the minimum threshold on the last day of the statement period.
U.S. sellers only: If your payout doesn’t meet the requirement above, you must have an active U.S. ACH account on file.
If you don’t meet those requirements on the last day of the statement period, then all running campaigns will be stopped, and you'll be restricted to read-only access.
Payment via credit card is only available to a limited number of sellers at this time. If you have a payment hold or suspension on your account, you won’t be eligible to use SEM.