Sam’s Club creates retail media network partner program

Sam’s Club is connecting advertisers with a certified network of agencies and technology providers.

The warehouse club retailer, a banner of Walmart Inc., is now providing advertisers participating in its Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP) retail media network access to the MAP Partners Club. The organization of authorized third-party partners launches with three technology companies — CommerceIQ, Pacvue and Skai — and two managed service partners — Flywheel and Stackline.

Partners can help advertisers participating in MAP add features such as bidding and budget optimization, day-parting, and advanced analytics and insights to their campaigns. MAP participants can immediately buy sponsored product ads and promotional technologies provided by Commerce IQ, Pacvue and Skai, using a self-service interface.

In addition, MAP advertisers can immediately begin buying Sam’s Club MAP ads via Flywheel and Stackline. Sam’s Club says it will add more partners and functionalities to the program in the near future. Once approved, partners in the program will be identified with color-coded badges for categories such as tech and agency.

"One of the pillars of our mission here at MAP is to make it easy to buy for our advertisers," said Austin Leonard, head of sales, Sam’s Club Member Access Platform. "We know that our advertisers often work with multiple partners for media planning and execution across multiple networks and ad tech providers. Through MAP Partners Club, they can leverage world-class partners to integrate Sam’s Club advertising, providing one place to buy and assess the performance of sponsored product campaigns — all while driving growth."

Sam’s Club pioneers new search ad attribution feature

Sam’s Club also recently began enabling MAP advertisers to attribute in-store purchases to their search ads. MAP collects real-time, first-party omnichannel data on customer transactions, including in-store, in-app and online.

As a result, Sam’s Club says MAP delivers accurate transaction data, without extrapolation or panel estimates. This gives advertisers the ability to see exactly what revenue is generated by which ads, including search and sponsored products campaigns.

For Sam’s Club MAP advertisers, the retailer reports that overall return on ad spend (ROAS) has increased an average of nearly 30% since adding in-store sales to the attribution mix.

In February 2023, the retailer began making real-time, intelligently retargeted display advertising available across tens of thousands of sites on the open web through MAP. Provided in partnership with The Trade Desk and LiveRamp (RAMP), this offering leverages first-party member data, advertiser data and artificial intelligence (AI)-based, real-time behavioral insights from Sam’s Club.

As a result, in addition to serving personalized ads in real time to Sam’s Club shoppers who have expressed interest in a product but have not yet made a purchase, MAP can stop serving ads to customers, even when they are not on Sam’s Club properties, once they make a related purchase.

[Read more: Sam’s Club optimizes retargeting on ad platform]

Bentonville, Ark.-based Sam’s Club, a division of Walmart Inc., operates nearly 600 stores in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.