Context
As a Business Operations Intern on Fluent's Walmart Connect (WMC) team, I kept running into the same open question internally: which advertisers were actually winning placement on Walmart.com's post-checkout page, and was Fluent's own inventory being served the way the team assumed. Rather than wait on secondhand reporting to answer that, I designed and ran an internal research study to find out directly.
The Question
Methodology
I designed a lightweight but structured data collection process:
- Recruited Fluent employees across the US to make a small purchase (under $10) on Walmart.com or the Walmart app
- After checkout, participants screenshotted each ad served, clicking "Decline" between ads to capture up to three ad slots per submission
- Each participant self-reported their location, the platform used (web or app), and whether they were a first-time or returning Walmart shopper
- Submissions were collected and tracked through a shared internal channel, then compiled into a single dataset for analysis
21 app / 24 web
Findings
Of the 93 total ad slots filled across all submissions, Fluent campaigns accounted for the large majority of what shoppers actually saw.
Beyond the headline split, the study surfaced four distinct usability issues in how the ad experience was actually being served to shoppers:
- Creative mistargeting: ads appearing for products or services that didn't match the shopper's context
- Inconsistent ad stacking order: the sequence ads appeared in varied unpredictably between sessions
- Fixed-slot and rotating-slot inconsistency: some ads were locked to a fixed first position while others rotated through the remaining slots, and that distinction wasn't being tracked clearly
- Variable ad-slot counts: the number of ads shown differed across sessions in ways that weren't explained by platform alone
Impact
I shared these findings with the WMC team, including the visibility issue showing that a meaningful share of offer-ad inventory was appearing well below the fold, after the checkout confirmation itself. That finding was passed along to Walmart's product team, who moved offer ad placement higher on the page as a direct result.
Reflection
This project taught me that useful research doesn't always require a formal study design. Sometimes the fastest way to answer a real business question is to go collect the data yourself, directly, from real users, rather than waiting on existing reporting to catch up. The honest limitation worth naming: while the study spanned 14 states, a large share of participants were concentrated in just two of them, which likely skewed some of the platform and campaign-level findings. A follow-up study with a more geographically balanced sample would be the natural next step.