TNOMADS / Services / Retail Media

Retail Media

Walmart Connect — full-funnel
at scale.

Reach 150 million weekly Walmart shoppers across Sponsored Search, Display, CTV, and the new retail-powered social formats.

What is Walmart Connect?

Walmart Connect is Walmart's retail media network. It lets brands buy sponsored search, display, in-store and connected TV advertising against Walmart's first-party shopper data, with sales attributed across walmart.com and physical stores. It is the second-largest retail media network in the United States after Amazon.

Formats: Search, Display, Video, In-store, CTVPricing: CPC and CPMAttribution: Online + in-storeAccess: Self-serve & managed

What is Walmart Connect?

The fastest-growing retail media network in the US.

Walmart Connect is the retail media arm of Walmart — the world's largest retailer, reaching around 150 million customers per week (Walmart-reported) across its website, app and US store estate. Walmart's advertising business generated approximately $6.4 billion globally in fiscal year 2026, up 46% year over year, with Walmart Connect in the US growing 41% in Q4.[1] Across nine consecutively disclosed quarters it has grown between 22% and 33%, consistently outpacing both retail and e-commerce sales growth.[2]

What separates Walmart Connect from other retail media networks is its omnichannel footprint. Walmart can close the loop between a digital ad and a physical store purchase — a capability few networks can match at this scale. Combined with the 2024 acquisition of Vizio and a CTV advertising expansion, Walmart Connect has evolved from a search-only network into a full-funnel media platform.

In 2026, Walmart Connect launched self-serve social media advertising through Meta (with TikTok expanding later), an integration with Google DV360 for YouTube campaigns using Walmart first-party data, and its AI advertising assistant Marty — making it one of the most technically advanced retail media networks available.

01

Sponsored Search

Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands in Walmart.com search results. Auction-based, keyword and item targeting. Self-serve via Walmart Connect Ad Center.

02

Display & Video

On-site display placements across Walmart.com, plus off-site programmatic display and video through Walmart's DSP. Powered by Walmart's first-party purchase signals.

03

Connected TV (via Vizio)

Post-Vizio acquisition, Walmart Connect offers CTV inventory directly. Brands can now run full-funnel campaigns from awareness on the TV screen to conversion at checkout.

04

In-Store Media

TV Wall ads, self-checkout screens, and in-store digital placements — now becoming self-serve accessible. Reaches shoppers at the point of purchase decision.

2025–2026 platform developments

Why Walmart Connect is different now.

AI

Marty — AI Advertising Assistant

In January 2026 Walmart Connect introduced AI-powered advertising tooling, including a conversational assistant that helps brands build, optimise and troubleshoot Sponsored Search campaigns.[1] Walmart has also been developing advertising formats tied to Sparky, its AI shopping agent. Treat agent-adjacent formats as early-stage: they are worth testing, not yet worth planning a budget around.

AI OptimizationAgentic CommerceSparky
SOCIAL

Retail-Powered Social Media

Walmart audiences can be activated off-site across social platforms, with add-to-cart functionality shortening the path from exposure to basket. This is one of the more meaningful recent developments for brands whose upper-funnel spend has historically been impossible to connect to Walmart purchases. Performance claims circulating for these formats come from platform-supplied benchmarks rather than independent measurement, so treat them as directional and validate against your own results.

MetaTikTokClosed-LoopiROAS
MEASUREMENT

Incremental ROAS Benchmarks

Walmart's structural measurement advantage is omnichannel attribution: it can connect an online ad exposure to an in-store purchase, which most retail media networks cannot. That is the reason Walmart-reported returns should not be compared like-for-like against Amazon-reported returns. Comparative lift figures published by networks about their own performance are not independently audited, so use them to frame a test rather than to justify a budget.

iROASSales LiftDV360Circana
$6.4BWalmart global advertising revenue in fiscal year 2026, up 46% year over year [1]
41%Walmart Connect US growth in Q4 FY2026, during the peak holiday period [1]
22–33%the range Walmart Connect has grown across nine consecutively disclosed quarters, consistently outpacing retail sales growth [2]
Jan 2026Walmart Connect introduced AI advertising tools including a conversational assistant for Sponsored Search [1]

The TNOMADS approach

Walmart Connect rewards structure and patience.

🔑

Keyword strategy for Walmart

Walmart's search algorithm and shopper vocabulary differ from Amazon. We build Walmart-specific keyword frameworks — including bilingual EN/FR for Canadian campaigns on Loblaws Advance — based on actual query data.

📈

NTB acquisition focus

Most Walmart Connect accounts we audit have cannibalization between auto and manual campaigns — spending on loyal buyers who would convert anyway. We restructure toward true new customer acquisition.

🔗

API-powered reporting

We build Walmart Connect API pipelines for consolidated weekly reporting across ad groups, keywords, placements, and campaigns — with 90-day lookback and cross-retailer comparison.

The vocabulary

What are the components of a Walmart Connect programme?

Sponsored Search
Keyword-targeted product ads in Walmart search results and browse pages. The highest-volume format and the core of most accounts, bought on CPC through auction.
Sponsored Videos
Video creative appearing in search results, giving brands a storytelling format inside a high-intent surface. Useful where the product needs explanation rather than just visibility.
Sponsored Brands
Banner-style placements featuring your logo and multiple products at the top of search results, used for brand presence and category defence.
Display & off-site
On-site display plus off-site inventory bought against Walmart audiences, extending reach beyond walmart.com while retaining Walmart purchase attribution.
In-store media
Digital screens, audio and demo activations across Walmart's physical estate — a channel with no direct Amazon equivalent and increasingly integrated with online campaign planning.
Vizio & CTV
Connected TV inventory through Walmart's Vizio acquisition, linking retail shopper data to streaming exposure with closed-loop measurement back to Walmart purchases.
Walmart Luminate
Walmart's data and insights suite, giving suppliers visibility into shopper behaviour, category performance and campaign effect beyond standard ad reporting.
Item page & content readiness
Titles, images, attributes and stock status. Walmart's organic ranking and ad eligibility are both sensitive to content completeness, so listing quality is an advertising prerequisite, not a separate workstream.
New-to-brand (NTB)
Purchasers new to your brand within the lookback window. Walmart's NTB definition and window differ from Amazon's, so the numbers are not directly comparable across networks.
Omnichannel attribution
Walmart's ability to attribute an online ad exposure to an in-store purchase. It is the network's structural advantage and the main reason Walmart-reported ROAS is not comparable to Amazon-reported ROAS.

Comparisons

How does this compare to the alternatives?

Walmart Connect vs Amazon Ads

The two networks that between them capture the overwhelming majority of net-new retail media investment.

Walmart ConnectAmazon Ads
ScaleApproximately $6.4B global ad revenue in FY2026Approximately $68B global ad revenue in 2025
AttributionOnline and in-store purchases, omnichannel by designOnline purchases; physical retail attribution far more limited
Competition & CPCsLower auction density in many categories, though tightening as seller count growsHighly mature, dense auctions in most categories
Platform maturityImproving quickly; reporting and tooling still less granularDeep tooling, extensive APIs, clean room via AMC
Upper funnelVizio CTV, in-store media, off-site displayDSP, Prime Video, Twitch, Streaming TV
When to use whichAmazon has the deeper toolset and larger audience; Walmart has omnichannel attribution and, in many categories, less auction pressure. For most CPG brands the question is not which to choose but what share Walmart should hold — and that answer has moved upward for three consecutive years.

Walmart Sponsored Search: Automatic vs Manual campaigns

The structural decision that determines whether your account produces usable data.

AutomaticManual
Targeting controlWalmart selects search terms based on item contentYou choose keywords and match types
Best useDiscovery of converting search termsScaling and controlling terms you already know convert
Main riskCannibalising manual campaigns and bidding on your own brand termsMissing demand you have not thought to target
Data valueHigh — if the search term report is actually minedHigh — clean read on known terms
When to use whichRun both, but with a defined relationship between them: automatic for discovery, manual for scale, and negatives in the automatic campaign for every term promoted to manual. Running both without that discipline is the most common cause of Auto/Manual cannibalisation, where the two campaigns bid against each other on the same terms.

Walmart Connect vs Instacart

Both matter for grocery and household CPG, for different reasons.

Walmart ConnectInstacart
Retail footprintWalmart's own stores and walmart.com2,200+ retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores
Shopper intentBroad — general merchandise through to groceryAlmost entirely grocery and household basket-building
Data typeWalmart first-party, online and in-storeDeterministic logged-in purchase behaviour
Best forScale, omnichannel reach, category shareGrocery basket penetration across multiple retailers at once
When to use whichWalmart gives you scale within one retailer. Instacart gives you presence across many retailers in a single buy. Grocery and household brands with distribution beyond Walmart usually need both. See Instacart advertising.

Real results

What does this work look like in practice?

Industry · Consumer Packaged Goods

Scaling investment without sacrificing efficiency

2.3ROAS maintained while scaling
↑Monthly budget pacing improved
↑Media investment increased, efficiency preserved

Challenge

Campaigns consistently delivered strong efficiency but were under-delivering against available budget.

Our approach

  • Reviewed campaign pacing
  • Reallocated investment towards the highest-performing campaign types
  • Refined keyword segmentation
  • Improved budget distribution

Results

  • Maintained approximately 2.3 ROAS
  • Improved monthly budget pacing
  • Increased media investment while preserving efficiency

Business impact

The account transitioned from protecting efficiency to scaling profitable growth.

Case studies are presented by industry rather than by client name. Figures are drawn from live account analysis. Engagements marked prior agency engagement were delivered by Ana Perez Ibarz in a previous agency role; the work and results are hers, the client relationships were the agency's. TNOMADS does not identify clients or publish client performance data without written consent.

Frequently asked questions

Common questions, answered directly.

Walmart Connect is Walmart's retail media network. Brands buy sponsored search, display, video, in-store and connected TV advertising against Walmart's first-party shopper data, with purchases attributed across both walmart.com and physical stores.
Walmart reported approximately $6.4 billion in global advertising revenue for fiscal year 2026, up 46% year over year, making it the second-largest retail media network in the United States behind Amazon. [1]
Suppliers selling into Walmart and third-party marketplace sellers, subject to eligibility requirements. Non-endemic advertisers — brands not sold at Walmart — can also buy certain audience and off-site inventory.
Sponsored Search, Sponsored Videos, Sponsored Brands, on-site and off-site display, in-store digital media and audio, and connected TV inventory through Vizio.
Search is bought on CPC through auction, so there is no fixed price; display and CTV are typically CPM. Self-serve entry is accessible, while managed service and premium placements carry higher commitments. Budget from your category's competitive density rather than from a published rate.
In many categories CPCs remain lower, though the gap is closing as seller numbers and auction density rise. Treat any current cost advantage as a window rather than a permanent structural feature.
It depends on where your sales and distribution sit. If Walmart is a meaningful share of your retail revenue and you are not advertising there, that is usually the larger opportunity. Most CPG brands need both, weighted to their actual channel mix.
Walmart attributes conversions from ad exposure across both online and in-store purchases. That omnichannel view is the network's structural advantage — and the reason Walmart-reported ROAS should not be compared like-for-like against Amazon-reported ROAS.
There is no defensible universal benchmark. Reported ROAS varies enormously by category, price point, attribution window and whether in-store conversions are included. Set your target from contribution margin, and compare your account against its own trend rather than a published average.
Separate brand from non-brand. Define an explicit relationship between Automatic and Manual campaigns, with negatives preventing them competing. Group items by margin and objective. Keep acquisition budgeted separately from harvesting, or acquisition will always lose the efficiency comparison.
When Automatic and Manual campaigns bid against each other on the same search terms, raising your own CPCs and muddying performance data. It is one of the most common findings in Walmart account audits and is fixed with negative keywords, not bid changes.
Very. Walmart search behaviour generates substantial off-category and low-intent traffic, and without a systematic negative programme a meaningful share of spend goes to terms that will never convert. It is usually the fastest available efficiency gain.
Directly. Titles, images, attributes and stock status affect both organic ranking and ad eligibility. Advertising an item with incomplete content is buying traffic to a page that will underconvert, so content readiness is an advertising prerequisite.
Revenue from shoppers new to your brand within Walmart's lookback window. Because the definition and window differ from Amazon's and Instacart's, NTB figures should be tracked as an in-account trend rather than compared across networks.
Walmart's data and insights suite for suppliers, providing shopper and category visibility beyond standard ad reporting. It is a separate commercial product from Walmart Connect and is typically negotiated as part of a supplier relationship.
It gave Walmart owned connected TV inventory, so brands can now buy streaming exposure against Walmart shopper data with closed-loop measurement back to Walmart purchases. Walmart controls the hardware, operating system and shopping data across that chain.
Yes. Walmart Canada operates its own retail media offering with its own structure and requirements. Bilingual English and French keyword coverage is necessary, and copying a US account structure across without adaptation usually underperforms.
Yes, with reporting endpoints for campaign, ad group, keyword and placement data, subject to partner access requirements. Lookback windows are capped, so reporting infrastructure needs to store history rather than relying on retrieval.
Search campaigns typically need four to six weeks to gather enough data for confident optimisation, and longer in low-volume categories. Walmart accounts reward structural patience more than frequent bid intervention.
It depends on whether your category is decided in the aisle. In-store media is difficult to measure at the same granularity as digital and is generally best bought as part of a planned retail moment rather than as an always-on line.
Self-serve access is straightforward; running it well is not. The common failure is treating Walmart as a smaller Amazon and porting across structures, benchmarks and assumptions that do not hold on a different attribution model.
It is usually the second-largest line after Amazon for CPG brands with Walmart distribution. Alongside Instacart, Kroger and Target it forms the multi-retailer layer. See retail media strategy.

Why TNOMADS

Why run Walmart Connect with TNOMADS?

11+retail media platforms managed, so Walmart is not treated as Amazon
US+CAlive experience across both Walmart markets, including bilingual
APIreporting built directly against the Walmart Connect API
1:1the consultant who builds the account also runs it

About the author

Who wrote this page?

Ana Perez Ibarz

Senior Retail Media Consultant

Amazon AdsAmazon DSPAmazon Marketing Cloud Walmart ConnectInstacartRetail Media Strategy

Last reviewed 16 August 2026

Ana Perez Ibarz is the founder of TNOMADS Consulting and has spent 13+ years in retail media and performance marketing. She manages live campaign operations across Amazon Ads (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud), Walmart Connect, Instacart, Kroger Precision Marketing, Target Roundel, Loblaws Advance, DoorDash, Criteo, Google Ads and Meta.

On Walmart Connect, Ana manages live accounts across US and Canadian markets for food, beverage and household brands, including bilingual English and French keyword frameworks for Canada, negative keyword programmes at portfolio scale, and reporting built directly against the Walmart Connect API rather than exported from the interface.

She works as a subcontracted specialist for agencies as well as directly with brands, and writes on retail media measurement, incrementality and commerce media architecture. Based in Granada, Spain; operating across North America and Europe.

More about Ana and TNOMADS →

Sources

Where do these figures come from?

A note on these sourcesThe figure of approximately 150 million weekly customers is Walmart-published rather than independently audited. Performance claims for newer formats — agent-adjacent placements, off-site social activation — generally come from platform-supplied benchmarks rather than independent measurement, so use them to frame a test rather than to justify a budget.

Related services

What should you read next?

Instacart Advertising

Multi-retailer grocery reach that complements Walmart's single-retailer scale.

Amazon PPC

The same search disciplines on a denser, more mature auction.

Retail Media Strategy

How much of your budget Walmart should actually hold.

Retail Media Audit

Find cannibalisation and wasted spend before adding budget.

Incrementality

Whether Walmart's omnichannel attributed sales are genuinely incremental.

Amazon DSP

The programmatic comparison point for Walmart's off-site and CTV inventory.

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