Walmart Marketplace
Does Walmart Have PPC Advertising for Sellers?
Short answer: yes, Walmart absolutely has PPC advertising. But if you're coming from Amazon, it's not what you expect. And that's where most sellers get it wrong.
We've managed Walmart ad accounts across roughly 10 brands with budgets up to $30,000/month. Walmart PPC works — but only if you understand how different the ecosystem actually is from Amazon. Here's the full breakdown.
What Types of Ads Does Walmart Offer?
Walmart's advertising platform — Walmart Connect — offers several ad formats for marketplace sellers:
- Sponsored Search (Sponsored Products) — the core ad type. These are keyword-triggered ads that appear in search results on Walmart.com. This is where 90% of your focus should go.
- Display Ads — retargeting and broader placements on Walmart.com and across Walmart's offsite network.
- Sponsored Brands / Store Ads — drive shoppers to your brand page or brand store on Walmart.com.
- Sponsored Video Ads — video units that appear in search results.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) — ads that run on Google, directing traffic to your Walmart listings.
If you're familiar with Amazon Sponsored Ads, Walmart's Sponsored Search is the closest equivalent. Start there. It's the highest-intent format and will drive the most measurable sales impact.
Walmart PPC vs. Amazon PPC: The Key Differences
Most sellers assume Walmart is Amazon with a different logo. It isn't. Here's what you'll notice immediately when you run your first Walmart campaigns:
| Factor | Amazon PPC | Walmart PPC |
|---|---|---|
| Ad types available | Sponsored Products, Brands, Display, Video — extensive | Sponsored Products, Display, Video, SEM — fewer options |
| Product/ASIN targeting | Yes — robust competitor and category targeting | No — not available in the same way |
| Reporting delay | Near-real-time (~24hr) | ~48-hour delay — slows optimization cycles |
| Keyword data | Detailed Search Term Reports | More limited — less granular |
| Competition level | High — most categories saturated | Low to moderate — significant opportunity remains |
| Cost per click (CPC) | Higher — especially in competitive categories | Lower — in most categories, significantly so |
| Auto campaigns | Valuable for keyword discovery | Very limited — rarely worth the spend |
The biggest takeaway: Walmart gives you less control but more opportunity. Lower CPCs and lower competition mean you can get strong early traction in most categories with a fraction of the ad spend you'd need on Amazon for the same visibility.
Is Walmart PPC Actually Profitable?
The honest answer: it depends on your approach. Amazon gives you more control, which makes profitability more predictable. Walmart gives you less control, but more opportunity if you understand the ecosystem.
We've seen both sides. Here's a real example from a food gift brand we worked with. We focused heavily on seasonal and intent-driven keywords — "gifts for men," "Father's Day gifts," "food gifts," "gifts for foodies" — and layered in product-specific angles like "nuts gifts" based on their catalog.
Results during peak season: ROAS up to 6x, extremely low ACoS, and strong performance scaling during holidays. That kind of result is very achievable on Walmart because in many categories, competition is still genuinely low. You don't need to outbid 50 competitors to get Page 1 placement the way you often do on Amazon.
The Hidden Lever Most Sellers Miss
This is probably the most important thing in this entire post: Walmart PPC does not exist in a vacuum.
Unlike Amazon, where ad performance is largely self-contained within Campaign Manager, your success on Walmart is heavily tied to your account manager relationship and platform-level placement decisions. We've seen this firsthand:
- Products placed on virtual shelves by Walmart perform significantly better than unshelfed products — even with identical ad spend.
- Promotions and deals run through your account manager directly lift PPC performance by increasing the conversion rate that your ad spend is driving toward.
- Internal visibility boosts from Walmart's merchandising team can cause campaigns to ramp faster than ad optimization alone would explain.
If you're a larger brand with access to a Walmart account manager, use them aggressively. In some cases, your Walmart account manager relationship is more valuable than your PPC setup. The two compound each other.
This is one of the reasons managing Walmart as a serious channel — not just an ad account — produces better results than treating it as a set-and-forget ad platform.
Common Mistakes Walmart Sellers Make With PPC
1. Treating Walmart like Amazon
This is the most expensive mistake. Amazon campaigns often gain traction in days. Walmart takes longer to ramp. The algorithm needs time to learn, sales velocity needs to build, and platform trust takes time to establish. Sellers who launch Walmart PPC expecting Amazon-speed results pull the plug too early and conclude "Walmart doesn't work" — when the real issue was impatience.
2. Expecting immediate profitability
For a new Walmart listing with no reviews and no sales history, early-stage ACOS will be high. That's not failure — that's investment. You're building traffic, sales velocity, and platform trust. Even breaking even or taking a small early loss is usually worth it to establish the momentum that makes later campaigns efficient.
3. Ignoring the broader ecosystem
If you're running ads but not using promotions, applying for shelf placements, or leveraging deals, your PPC is working with one hand tied behind its back. The advertisers seeing the strongest Walmart ROAS are running ads as one piece of a broader platform strategy — not as a standalone channel.
How to Structure Walmart PPC Campaigns
Here's the launch framework we use for new Walmart campaigns:
Identify what top competitors in your category are ranking for and bidding on. Walmart's search algorithm has some differences from Amazon's, so don't just copy your Amazon keyword list — validate relevance on Walmart specifically.
Use tools like Helium 10 (which now covers Walmart) to estimate search volume and bid ranges. Prioritize high-intent, high-volume terms — the same principle as Amazon, even if the specific keywords differ.
Unlike Amazon, Walmart auto campaigns are nearly useless right now — they return minimal usable keyword data and are difficult to optimize. Skip auto campaigns entirely and go straight to manual targeting with separate campaigns for exact, phrase, and broad match. Keep 7–10 keywords per campaign maximum for clean data.
Because Walmart's reporting has a ~48-hour delay and gives you less granular data than Amazon, it's easy to think you're doing well when you're actually losing money. Use a profitability tool like Sellerboard alongside Walmart's native reporting to track true margins — including WFS fees, returns, and ad costs together.
Should New Walmart Sellers Use PPC?
Yes. If you're launching a new product on Walmart, PPC is how you build early momentum — traffic, sales velocity, and the review foundation that makes organic ranking possible. Breaking even or taking a controlled early loss on ad spend is almost always worth it to establish traction.
The brands that skip ads on Walmart at launch end up invisible on a platform where the algorithm rewards early velocity. You can't win the organic game without first winning the paid game to get the algorithm's attention.
The Walmart window is still open. CPCs are lower, competition is lower, and page one is genuinely reachable in most categories. That gap is closing as more brands move budgets to Walmart. The sellers who invest now are establishing positions that will be much harder — and more expensive — to win in 18 months.
If you're weighing how much to invest in Walmart versus Amazon, see our breakdown of where brands should focus in 2026 — including the framework for deciding whether your Amazon account is healthy enough to expand.
Walmart PPC works. The platform is less mature than Amazon's, which means less control — but also lower costs, lower competition, and a more accessible path to page one. The brands winning on Walmart aren't treating it as a secondary channel. They're running it with the same strategic intent as their Amazon account: optimized listings, structured ad campaigns, and a long-term mindset toward velocity and rank.
Ready to Make Walmart PPC Profitable?
We manage Walmart advertising for brands doing $1M–$20M in revenue. If you want a clear picture of what Walmart could add to your channel mix, start with a free audit.
Get a Free Walmart Audit