Walmart: A Growing Giant

When it comes to brick and mortar retailers, Walmart (WMT) is clearly the market leader just by its sheer size. In fact, Walmart’s dominance transfers online where it received 33M visitors in August which was 10% more than the next closest brick and mortar rival, Target (TGT). Not only does Walmart attract more consumers but it is also growing at a faster rate than Target. For the past 6 months Walmart.com has seen double digit year-over-year growth in site visitors, outpacing the growth rate for Target.com.

One might wonder how a giant like Walmart continues to maintain such strong growth. One reason is their aggressive online advertising campaigns. In the past six months, Walmart has run several prominent display ad placements on the front pages of large portals like Yahoo! (YHOO) and AOL.

But just how effective are these six-figure investments?

We took a look at a one-day homepage campaign that Walmart ran on the AOL homepage on August 6th. We compared consumers who were exposed to this ad against a control group of consumers who were not exposed but were otherwise similar in behavior and composition. The comparison of the exposed behavior against a control group allows us to measure the true lift of the campaign on online behavior.

Our data below show that the Walmart campaign had an immediate impact on the exposed consumers, driving an 81% greater rate of visitation to the site just within the first week after exposure. More interestingly, the impact of this campaign carried through to four weeks post exposure. With each passing week after August 6th, exposed consumers visited Walmart.com at a higher rate than the control group. By the fourth week, 27% of exposed consumers had visited Walmart.com which is 52% greater than the control group.

This was only one of multiple homepage campaigns that Walmart has run so far this year. Imagine the compound impact of all these campaigns on site visitation to Walmart.com. Clearly, powerful online advertising is one factor driving this retailer’s online growth.

In addition to running prominent online display advertising, Walmart has also been testing various ad formats, from clickable video to more involved interactive ad units. So in part 2 of this blog series, we will investigate differences in the impact on online behavior for these various ad formats. Stay tuned!

Comments

[Albert Ling]

Not being a US citizen, I didnt even know Walmart.com existed... I'd be very interested in knowing how much of total revenue does online sales contribute?

2009 Sep 28 03:24 PM

[borisb]

Walmart isnt going to grow much going forward because Costco and Amazon.com are both stealing marketshare at accelerated rates.

2009 Sep 29 03:37 PM

[Sphillips]

Wal-Mart is cutting cost in many different ways and that will help them be able to maximize their presence in advertisement. The convenience of shopping for all you basic needs at one location is a great asset. Yeah, there are others doing this like, Target, Costco, etc... But Wal-Mart started it all and have continued to lead the pack. They need to control growth and use logistics professionals to help them utilize current locations and find ways to make those locations more profitable. Wal-Mart has it's problems but it is a big company that will succeed if proper management is in control.

2009 Sep 29 07:13 PM