Walmart Goal Structure / Targeting types

A deep dive into Walmart goal structures and targeting types.

Mitchell Bergin avatar
Written by Mitchell Bergin
Updated over a week ago

This guide will take you through:

As many of you probably already know, Perpetua runs goals instead of campaigns. These goals launch multiple campaigns simultaneously and allow for easy management and tracking.

For Walmart there are only two distinct goal types that can be launched, universal or brand based:

Types of Goals 🎯

Universal

The most basic type of goal you can launch is called a 'Universal' goal. This type of goal works best for brands that don't have much brand presence on Walmart.com or when launching products with very little or no advertising history

Note: a universal goal launches two campaigns, an auto and a manual keyword campaign

Manual Campaign

  • The manual keyword campaign will target both keywords added by the user and those auto harvested from the auto campaign. These keywords could include category, competitor or branded terms.

  • The manual keyword campaign will target keywords for each match type (exact, phrase, broad) and bids will be set at the keyword level

Auto Campaign

  • The auto campaign is a broad campaign where bidding is done at the item level, and it allows you to appear on keywords that you wouldn't be able to bid on manually due to organic hurdles

  • Using the advanced settings tool, you are able to tell our ad engine the number of conversion you would like a keyword to reach before it will be automatically harvested into the manual campaign, where bids will then be set at the keyword level

Brand-Based

The other targeting type is a brand-based goal. This type of goal is best used for products that have some sort of brand recognition, and when pulling keyword reports it is evident that customers are often using branded terms to search for your products.

Note: a brand based goal will launch three campaigns for you: an auto, an unbranded manual, and a branded manual campaign

Unbranded manual campaign

  • You will be targeting unbranded relevant keywords such as product, category and competitor terms

Branded manual campaign

  • You will be adding any branded phrases and common misspellings to this segment of the goal

Setting Target ACoS & Budgets

  • Look at the past 30 days Budget to set your initial budget, and set a low target ROAS (1.00 - 1.50).

  • Your branded segment can have a higher target ROAS (2.00 - 3.00), unless you are running it for brand defense. If you are actively protecting your brand terms since you know you are being targeted, keep target ROAS low to ensure the ad engine can bid high enough

Negative Matching ❌

A differentiator on Walmart from other marketplaces is that Walmart does not currently offer the ability to negative match keywords. Meaning that keywords harvested through the auto campaign that serve no relevance to your product may still be targeted.

However, when using Perpetua, if a keyword has a low conversion rate, our ad engine will automatically begin to lower bids until it reaches a point where your bid is too low to win on that keyword - resulting in no spend on that keyword which essentially has the same effect as negative matching a keyword.

Article last updated January 2024. If you find this information to be out of date, please contact hello@perpetua.io.

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