Sam’s Club optimizes retargeting on ad platform

Sam’s Club is helping its advertising partners avoid sending customers repetitive promotions.

The warehouse club retailer, a banner of Walmart Inc., is making real-time, intelligently retargeted display advertising available across tens of thousands of sites on the open web through its Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP) retail media network.

[Read more: Sam’s Club streamlines ad targeting]

This new feature, provided in partnership with The Trade Desk and LiveRamp (RAMP), leverages first-party member data, advertiser data and artificial intelligence (AI)-based, real-time behavioral insights from Sam’s Club. Now, 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.

MAP retargeting automatically connects ads to shopper’s membership data and behavior. Advertisers are able to track those results right up to the point of sale by using MAP’s reporting feature.

Real-time retargeting works for a variety of customer scenarios, including:

• A customer has browsed a specific item on the Sam’s Club site or placed an item in their cart, but did not complete the purchase.
• A customer visited a specific landing page, brand page or shelf page on the Sam’s Club site, but did not make a purchase.
• A customer placed an order online to be picked up in-store but still plans to shop the store while they’re there. MAP’s real-time retargeting allows advertisers with complementary products to deliver relevant ads between order placement and store checkout.

“We’re obsessed with helping our members,” said Austin Leonard, head of sales, Sam’s Club Member Access Platform. “We’ve all had the experience of seeing ads for items we have already purchased. Our solution allows us to avoid that irritation, creating a better member experience and greater efficiencies for brands.

“Advertisers are now able to target based on what we know members are actually in market for, right now,” said Leonard. “We can then stop serving these members ads once they complete their purchase at any Sam’s Club or on any device. This is a unique solution brand partners have been waiting for and an additive experience for our members.”

Sam’s Club focuses on targeted ads

MAP is part of Sam’s Club’s newly-formed growth organization – led by Kieran Shanahan, chief growth officer, Sam’s Club – that includes representatives from the product, strategy, marketing & membership, and MAP areas of the business.

In tandem, with its June 2022 rollout of MAP, the company also launched a self-service platform for sponsored product ads.  in tandem, the company is also launching a self-service platform for sponsored product ads. 

Sam’s Club is offering these new platforms to enable its partners to buy search ads in an automated way. The retailer also initiated a programmatic partnership with independent demand-side platforms LiveRamp, IRI, and TradeDesk.

[Read more: Sam’s Club connects ad platform to media marketplace]

Based in Bentonville, Ark., Sam's Club, a division of Walmart Inc. operates nearly 600 stores across the U.S., including Puerto Rico.