Use these tips to help set up your Display Auction campaigns for success.

Campaign setup

Display Auction provides ample flexibility around campaign setup. Not sure where to start?

Here are some of our recommendations:

• Include a minimum of 25-100 items in your item set. Including more items is best to help ensure you see the full effect of your Display campaign across your product catalog.
• Campaigns house the item set used to attribute sales and other conversion metrics in reporting.

Ad group setup

Group ad groups into campaigns based on your goals.

Remember, ad groups sit underneath your campaign because all ad groups under a single campaign will report on the items included in the item set, which lives at the campaign level.

Your targeting, scheduling and budget all live within your ad group.

Build multiple ad groups under a campaign to test targeting tactics and creative strategy.

To test targeting tactics:

• Include multiple ad groups, each with a different targeting tactic, in the same campaign.
• Once your ad groups have run for at least two weeks, start making bid adjustments. Pause underperforming ad groups and reallocate spend to the top-performing ad group based on your goals.

To test creative strategy:

• Include multiple ad groups, each with a single creative attached, under the same campaign.
• Once your ad groups have ran for at least two weeks, you can pause underperforming ad groups and reallocate spend to the top-performing ad group.

Display incrementality reporting

To receive a Display incrementality report, a single campaign must actively spend over $125,000 and run for a minimum of six weeks and a maximum of twelve weeks. Make sure to set up your campaigns and ad groups accordingly if this is one of your goals.

Bid strategy

The base-bid CPM is the lowest amount you’re willing to pay for impressions. Your actual impression bids will fall within the range between your base bid and your max bid.

If you’re unsure where to begin, we recommend using the suggested base bid as your starting point.

If you haven’t run a guaranteed or Managed Service campaign before, start your bids conservatively and adjust mid-flight.

You can use past guaranteed campaign performance and/or Managed Service campaign performance to determine a minimum and maximum bid for your ad groups. Adjust bids mid-flight to meet your goals.

Mid-flight optimizations

To optimize for delivery, we recommend using the Bid Performance report to optimize your bid strategy as soon as 72 hours after campaign launch. You should monitor your bids daily.

 
To optimize for performance, we recommend running your ad groups for about two weeks before making adjustments. The following actions are designed to improve the performance of underperforming ad groups:

Targeting

• If your targeting is narrow (keyword, behavioral, contextual) and your ad group is underdelivering, try broadening or removing your targeting parameters
• If your targeting is broad (Run of Site) and your ad group is underdelivering, try adjusting your bid.

Bid strategy 

​​Adjust your minimum bid 

If your ad group has broad targeting but is still underdelivering, increase your minimum bid.

Adjust your bid range/increase max bid

Another way to optimize an underperforming ad group is to adjust your max bid. This will help broaden your bid range and increase your chances of winning desired impressions.

Scheduling

Adjust campaign duration

Extend the length of your campaign to help increase the chance that it will deliver in full.

Adjust the frequency cap

Remove or loosen the frequency cap to improve delivery.

Note: Frequency caps limit inventory.

Creatives

Different targeting, same creatives

Try adding a new creative to your ad groups, either by replacing the existing creative or adding an additional creative to each ad group. If you’re still seeing lower than desired performance, take a closer look at your targeting or bid strategy to further optimize your campaign.

Same targeting, different creatives

If you’re running multiple ad groups with different creatives to test performance, optimize spend by reallocating budget mid-flight to the top performing creative.

Reporting

Try adding new brands to a brand-based item set or new items to a item-based item set to see if there’s any impact on performance. Since ad groups are measured against campaign-level item sets, adjusting the item set used for reporting can yield different results.

Some mid-flight general rules

Once your ad group is live, you can:

• Adjust your ad group name
• Add/remove/replace creatives
• Add/remove tactics within your targeting selection

Adjust geotargeting, frequency caps and your end date - Update budget and bids

Once your ad group is live, you cannot:

• Switch between targeting tactics
• Switch between daily and lifetime budget
• Modify your start date

Post-flight learnings

After your campaign ends, take advantage of our easy-to-use reporting tools to gather insights for your next campaign.

Display incrementality reporting

An excellent tool to access deeper insight into the impact of your campaign on omnichannel sales. Used as a factor to determine the effectiveness of a display ad campaign, this form of measurement is the incremental increase of sales by a campaign compared to total sales without the campaign, or baseline sales, for the same time period. To calculate Display incrementality, we measure a test group over a control group of Walmart customers and derive the percentage of increase in sales.

To receive a Display incrementality report, your campaign must actively spend over $125,000 and meet our feasibility requirements.

Buyer analysis

The buyer analysis view provides a high-level breakdown of purchase frequency.

Customers who are exposed to your Display campaign and make a purchase are counted as either "new buyers," "purchased one time," "purchased two times" or "purchased multiple times in the last 12 months."

Metrics are available at three different points of sale: in-store, pickup and delivery. You can view all three combined by selecting "overall."

Bid performance report

Provides a set of historical data to help you understand and optimize your Display Auction bids.
 
Available 36 hours after the launch of your campaign or ad group and is refreshed daily with data from the previous day. 

Can also be accessed and exported from the Campaign performance dashboard.
 
Key metrics:

• Valid bids: Number of bids that were accepted into the auction.
• Win rate: Ratio of winning bids to valid bids.
• eCPM: Effective cost per 1,000 impressions for a specific campaign.
• Delivered impressions: Number of impressions delivered for a specific campaign.
• Ad spend: Amount spent within a specific campaign.