What is Walmart DSP? The Walmart Demand Side Platform (DSP) is a critical piece of Walmart Connect, Walmart’s advertising service. With Walmart DSP, eligible advertisers can target Walmart shoppers offsite through audio, video, CTV, mobile, video, and display advertising.
One big advantage of Walmart DSP is Walmart’s rich measurement capabilities. Walmart often knows the online and offline behavior of shoppers: Walmart reaches 90% of U.S. households across its online site and its network of physical stores.
With Walmart DSP, advertisers can target shoppers off of the Walmart platform based on this rich user data. Create audiences of high-value shoppers, re-target people who browsed but didn’t make a purchase, make your own custom or lookalike audiences, and more.
What is a Demand-Side Platform (DSP)?
At its most general, a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) automates the bidding process. With a DSP, you can bid in real-time auctions, in multiple exchanges at once.
In the land of retail media, DSP platforms give advertisers access to advertising channels beyond just a traditional shopping site. Amazon’s DSP, for instance, lets marketers bid on ads on streaming TV, Twitch, and other selected offsite channels.
How does Walmart DSP work?
You might already have some familiarity with the concept of a DSP because of Amazon DSP. Like Amazon’s DSP, Walmart DSP enlivens your targeting options: reach shoppers across a range of sites on the open internet and connected TV platforms.
Walmart DSP first launched in 2021, and in partnership with The Trade Desk. Walmart DSP lets you run display and video ads on platforms beyond Walmart’s site and app.
Walmart DSP is best suited for a brand that wants to extend their reach beyond Walmart.com. If you want to activate Walmart shopper data to reach audiences off of Walmart.com, then Walmart DSP is for you.
What audiences are available in the Walmart DSP?
Walmart DSP combines many data points to create a precise targeting system. Walmart DSP lets you target based on its own first-party information, such as:
- Behavioral attributes: Do they have an affinity for your brand? Are they in-market for a product like yours? Are they lapsed buyers?
- Customer attributes: Are they car enthusiasts? How old are they, what is their zip code, and what is their gender?
- Advanced targeting: Plan your ads around sophisticated signals, like weather cues, provided by IBM Watson.
In the Walmart DSP, advertisers can go after key shopping groups like:
- Lapsed buyers: Regular customers who have been slow to re-purchase from you
- High-value shoppers: The shoppers who spend the most on your brand
You can also create your own custom audiences or lookalike audiences.
Lastly, Walmart DSP offers audience matching: If you upload your first-party audience data to Walmart DSP, Walmart Connect can match your shoppers to its own audiences.
What about in-store targeting?
There are many unique capabilities of Walmart Connect, even if you don’t use DSP. One of the benefits of Walmart Connect, in general, is that brands with products that are sold in physical Walmart stores can run ads in those stores. Advertise on TV walls or on self-checkout, and reach shoppers in person.
However, if you want a clearer sense of how those ads performed, the DSP is a good option. Walmart Connect can connect each shopper’s digital and physical footprint for you. Walmart can link both online and offline transactions and interactions, according to Walmart Connect.
Through the Walmart DSP, companies like the razor brand BIC have been able to run local ad campaigns involving those stores.
Further, Walmart DSP lets BIC see how their customers choose to fulfill products from Walmart: in-store pickup, purchase at the register, or home delivery. Those insights allowed the company to become far more precise in its marketing messaging.
Does Walmart DSP have a streaming TV option?
Access to connected TV (CTV) ads is one of the major benefits of Amazon DSP. With Amazon DSP, you can run ads on Twitch, Freevee, Paramount+, and other connected TV platforms.
Similarly, Walmart DSP (offsite) gives eligible advertisers access to a growing network of connected TV ad networks. Walmart DSP’s premium CTV bundle, for example, gives eligible advertisers the option to push out ads on connected TV, accessing TV audiences on platforms like Roku.
Walmart has also announced partnerships with NBCUniversal to run targeted ads in live streams of sports games. Those ads will all leverage Walmart’s own shopper data.
Are frequency caps available in the Walmart DSP?
Managing frequency caps is one of the core appeals of the Walmart DSP. You might be worried that you’re over-exposing the same groups of shoppers to ads, thereby letting spend go to waste.
Walmart DSP can resolve these fears. DSP advertisers can set hard caps on the number of ads per day or per week that a given shopper sees.
What reporting options are available in Walmart DSP?
With Walmart DSP, you can track your performance across a number of performance metrics. Walmart Connect reports performance in ROAS, for example, so you can see a high-level overview of your campaign success.
In general, traditional DSP ads are often awareness drivers, so ROAS is not always a good fit as a KPI.
Walmart DSP offers sales lift reports, so you can map out your incremental sales growth more easily.
Similarly, Walmart Connect’s advanced reporting features also allow you to attribute both online and in-store sales growth (if your product is in Walmart stores) to your Walmart DSP spend.
Want to level up your Walmart Connect strategy?
As you become a more advanced Walmart Connect user, you’re going to need a better way to manage your data and optimize your ads at scale.
By default, Walmart—like Amazon—keeps its data fractured across various reports. Brands and agencies that want to understand how their retail and ads data overlap need a good software partner.
Luckily, Intentwise can help. In Intentwise Analytics Cloud, we now combine both retail and ads data from Walmart into a single view. Meanwhile, our Ad Optimizer for Walmart Connect also lets you:
- Group data together. Want to see the organic retail performance of your products alongside your ads performance? We make this easy.
- Filter and roll up performance. Intentwise lets you see your ad performance across search terms. Want to identify patterns in those search terms? We make it easy: Just roll up by performance with a single click.
- Optimize your ads daily. Intentwise automatically audits your ad account and suggests improvements. Every day, our Recommendations feature delivers campaign optimization tactics for Walmart Connect, available to you as soon as you log in.
Book a demo with us today, and make the most of your Walmart sales channel.
