Advertising on Walmart can help your products reach shoppers who are already searching for products like yours.
But starting a Walmart advertising campaign is not simply about choosing a product, setting a budget, and turning on ads. Your products need to be ready to convert before you put money behind them.
For most new advertisers, Sponsored Products are the best place to start. They are pay-per-click ads that can appear across Walmart search results, product pages, and other high-visibility placements.
This guide walks you through the process of getting started, choosing the right products, setting up your first campaign, and deciding what to do once you have enough data to optimize.
What do you need before advertising on Walmart?
Before creating a campaign, make sure you have the basics in place.
At a minimum, you should have:
- An active Walmart Marketplace seller account
- Products listed on Walmart Marketplace
- Products that are in stock
- Complete and accurate product listings
- Competitive product offers
- Access to Walmart's advertising platform
The important part is not simply being eligible to advertise. Your products should also be ready to receive paid traffic.
Make sure your products are retail-ready
Do not advertise every product in your catalog just because it is eligible.
Start with products that have:
If the product page is weak, advertising can simply send more shoppers to a page that fails to convert them.
How to start advertising on Walmart
The process can be broken down into six steps:
- Become a Walmart Marketplace seller
- List and prepare the products you want to advertise
- Get access to Walmart advertising
- Choose your first ad type
- Create and launch your campaign
- Monitor performance and optimize
Let's look at each step.
1. Become a seller on Walmart Marketplace
If you are not already selling on Walmart Marketplace, this is where you need to start.
Complete your seller registration, set up your account, and make sure your products are available for purchase.
You cannot build a useful advertising campaign before you have products that shoppers can actually buy.
Already selling on Walmart?
You can skip this step.
Instead, identify the products you want to advertise and move directly to checking whether those products are ready for paid traffic.
2. Prepare the products you want to advertise
Your next step is to make sure the products you plan to promote have strong product pages.
Focus on the areas that directly affect whether a shopper will click and buy:
- Product title
- Description
- Images
- Product attributes
- Price
- Inventory
- Reviews
- Fulfillment
Start with the products you actually want to grow rather than trying to optimize your entire catalog at once.
Prioritize products that already have demand
Good candidates include:
- Best-selling products
- Products with strong conversion rates
- Seasonal products approaching peak demand
- New products that need initial visibility
- Products competing in crowded categories
- Products with healthy inventory
Avoid putting significant ad spend behind products that are consistently out of stock, poorly reviewed, or difficult to understand from the product page.
Advertising amplifies the product you already have. It does not fix a fundamentally weak offer.
3. Get access to Walmart advertising
Once your products are live, you need access to Walmart's advertising platform.
You can manage Walmart advertising through its self-serve advertising platform or use a third-party advertising partner.
For most sellers who are just getting started, the self-serve option is the simpler place to begin.
You can learn how your products perform, understand the campaign structure, and build your own advertising process before introducing additional tools.
Don't overcomplicate this step
You do not need an advanced advertising setup to launch your first Walmart campaign.
Start with Walmart's own platform, learn how your products perform, and add complexity only when your advertising program requires it.
4. Choose the right Walmart ad type
Walmart offers several advertising formats, but you do not need all of them to get started.
The main options include:
Start with Sponsored Products
Sponsored Products are the most natural starting point because they connect your products with shoppers searching and browsing for relevant products.
They work on a cost-per-click basis, so you pay when shoppers click on your ads.
For a new advertiser, this makes Sponsored Products a practical way to start learning how Walmart advertising works without building a much broader media strategy.
Once you understand which products and searches generate profitable sales, you can decide whether additional formats make sense.
5. Choose between automatic and manual campaigns
Sponsored Products can be approached through automatic or manual campaigns.
The main difference is how much control you have over targeting.
Automatic campaigns
With automatic targeting, Walmart's system determines relevant targeting based on your product information.
This makes automatic campaigns a good starting point if you:
- Are new to Walmart advertising
- Don't yet know which searches convert
- Want to discover relevant search terms
- Want a simpler campaign setup
- Need initial performance data
You can use the results from an automatic campaign to understand what shoppers are searching for and which opportunities are generating results.
Manual campaigns
Manual campaigns give you more control over the keywords you target and how you allocate your bids.
They are more useful when you already have data showing which search terms are valuable or when you have a clear understanding of how customers search for your products.
The difference is straightforward:
Automatic campaigns help you discover. Manual campaigns help you control.
Which one should you choose?
If this is your first Walmart campaign, start with automatic targeting.
Use the resulting data to understand which searches generate impressions, clicks, and sales. You can then use that information to build more controlled manual campaigns.
A simple progression is:
Automatic → learn → identify winners → manual → optimize
6. Set your campaign budget and bids
Once you've selected your products and targeting approach, you'll need to decide how much you are willing to spend.
Don't start with the question:
"How much should I spend on Walmart ads?"
Start with:
"How much can I spend to acquire a customer profitably?"
Your budget should account for your product margin, selling price, expected conversion rate, and advertising goal.
For example, a product with a $40 selling price and a healthy margin can support a different advertising cost than a product selling for $10 with a very small margin.
Set a budget you can learn from
Your initial budget needs to be large enough to generate useful data.
At the same time, there is little reason to spend aggressively before you know whether your products, targeting, and offer can convert.
A sensible starting framework is:
- Select a small group of strong products.
- Set a controlled budget.
- Let the campaign collect data.
- Identify products and searches generating meaningful results.
- Move more budget toward the winners.
The goal of your first campaign is not to spend as much as possible.
It is to generate enough data to make better decisions with your next dollar.
7. Launch your first Walmart advertising campaign
At this point, your first campaign should be relatively simple.
For a beginner Sponsored Products campaign:
Campaign type: Sponsored Products
Targeting: Automatic
Products: Best-selling or retail-ready SKUs
Budget: Controlled starting budget
Goal: Generate sales and collect performance data
The basic setup process is:
- Sign in to Walmart's advertising platform.
- Create a new campaign.
- Select Sponsored Products.
- Set the campaign dates.
- Choose automatic targeting.
- Select the products you want to advertise.
- Set your budget and bidding preferences.
- Review the campaign.
- Launch.
You don't need a complicated campaign structure for your first launch.
The objective is to establish a baseline.
What should you advertise first?
Choosing the right products can matter as much as choosing the right campaign settings.
Your first campaign should generally focus on products that already demonstrate some combination of demand, conversion potential, competitive pricing, and reliable inventory.
A simple product selection framework
Prioritize products that are:
- Already generating organic sales
- Well-reviewed
- In stock
- Competitively priced
- Supported by strong product content
- Relevant to a clear set of customer searches
If you have 500 products, don't start by advertising all 500.
Start with a manageable group of products and use the results to determine where additional investment makes sense.
What should you measure after launching?
Launching the campaign is only the beginning.
The first few days and weeks should be treated as a learning period. Your job is to understand where your advertising dollars are producing useful results and where they are not.
Track the core metrics available in your Walmart advertising reports, including:
The important part is not looking at each metric independently.
For example, high impressions with very few clicks may indicate that your product is being shown but isn't compelling enough to earn the click.
High clicks with very few sales point toward a different problem, such as the product page, price, reviews, or overall offer.
How to optimize your Walmart ads
Once you have enough data, optimization becomes much more straightforward.
If you're getting impressions but few clicks
Look at the product itself.
Check:
- Main product image
- Product title
- Price
- Reviews
- Competitive offers
The ad may be winning visibility, but shoppers may have little reason to choose it.
If you're getting clicks but few sales
Move your attention to conversion.
Review:
- Product description
- Images
- Product attributes
- Pricing
- Reviews
- Inventory
- Delivery experience
More clicks won't solve a product-page problem.
If a product is generating profitable sales
Consider increasing its budget or giving it more controlled targeting.
These are the products that deserve more of your advertising investment.
If a keyword or product is spending without producing results
Investigate before simply increasing the budget.
The goal is not to maximize impressions or clicks.
The goal is to generate profitable sales from the products that can support additional advertising.
When should you move from automatic to manual campaigns?
Don't switch to manual targeting simply because manual campaigns offer more control.
Switch when you have enough information to make that control useful.
Your automatic campaign can help reveal which search terms and targeting opportunities are producing clicks and sales.
A practical progression looks like this:
Stage 1: Discover
Use automatic targeting to gather search and performance data.
Stage 2: Identify
Find the searches, products, or targeting opportunities associated with meaningful results.
Stage 3: Control
Build manual campaigns around the strongest opportunities.
Stage 4: Optimize
Adjust bids, budgets, products, and targeting based on performance.
This approach prevents you from making assumptions about customer search behavior before you have data.
Common mistakes when starting Walmart advertising
Advertising weak product listings
If the product page has poor images, incomplete information, weak reviews, or an uncompetitive offer, advertising may simply make the problem more expensive.
Fix the listing before scaling the campaign.
Advertising too many products
Putting your entire catalog into your first campaign makes it difficult to understand what is actually working.
Start with a focused product set.
Starting with overly complicated targeting
You don't need a complex campaign architecture on day one.
Automatic targeting can help you learn before you introduce more manual control.
Focusing only on ROAS
ROAS matters, but it should be considered alongside margin, product price, inventory, and the broader business objective.
A high-ROAS product may have limited growth potential, while a lower-ROAS campaign could be supporting a strategically important product launch.
Increasing spend before understanding performance
More budget does not automatically create better results.
First identify which products and targeting opportunities are working, then scale them.
Ignoring inventory
There's little value in paying for traffic to a product that shoppers cannot purchase.
Keep inventory aligned with your advertising plans, particularly for products receiving significant traffic.
Should you use Walmart Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Videos?
Once Sponsored Products are working, you can consider adding other Walmart advertising formats.
Sponsored Brands are designed to increase brand visibility and showcase multiple products, while Sponsored Videos can help demonstrate products visually.
You don't need to introduce these formats simply because they are available.
Consider them when you have a specific objective that Sponsored Products alone cannot address.
For example:
- Need product-level visibility? Start with Sponsored Products.
- Want greater brand visibility? Consider Sponsored Brands.
- Need to demonstrate a product visually? Consider Sponsored Videos.
- Want broader awareness beyond active product searches? Explore Display or other Walmart advertising solutions.
This keeps your advertising strategy tied to a business objective rather than the number of ad formats you are running.
A simple Walmart advertising strategy for beginners
If you are starting from scratch, keep your first campaign simple.
Week 1: Prepare
Select your strongest products and make sure their listings, pricing, inventory, and product information are ready.
Week 2: Launch
Start a Sponsored Products campaign using automatic targeting and a controlled budget.
Week 3: Learn
Review impressions, clicks, conversions, spend, and attributed sales. Look for products and search opportunities that are producing meaningful results.
Week 4: Optimize
Move more budget toward winners, investigate inefficient spend, and begin building manual campaigns around proven opportunities where appropriate.
After that, repeat the process.
Test → measure → identify winners → optimize → scale.
That is a much better starting strategy than trying to build an advanced Walmart advertising program before you understand how your products perform.
Walmart advertising checklist
Before you launch your first campaign, use this checklist:
- Walmart Marketplace seller account is active
- Products are listed and purchasable
- Products are in stock
- Product titles and descriptions are complete
- Relevant attributes are filled in
- Product images are strong
- Pricing is competitive
- You have selected a focused group of products
- Walmart advertising access is available
- Sponsored Products is the right starting format
- Automatic targeting is appropriate for your first campaign
- Budget is based on what you can afford to learn and scale
- Performance metrics are being tracked
- You have a plan for moving budget toward successful products
