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Walmart Connect Ads: What Amazon Sellers Need to Know Before Running Their First Campaign

If you're an Amazon seller looking at Walmart for the first time, here's the first thing you need to understand: Walmart has a real advertising platform. It's called Walmart Connect, and it's Walmart's version of Amazon's Campaign Manager — with its own Sponsored Search, display advertising, and DSP. The infrastructure is there.

The second thing you need to understand: it is not the same as Amazon. Not even close. And that gap is exactly where most Amazon sellers lose money when they expand to Walmart.

This post is a ground-level orientation to Walmart Connect ads — what the platform looks like, how it behaves differently from Amazon, and how to set up your first campaigns without making the mistakes we see brands repeat over and over.

What Is Walmart Connect?

Walmart Connect is Walmart's retail media advertising platform. It allows brands and sellers on Walmart Marketplace to run paid ads directly on Walmart.com — in search results, on product pages, and across Walmart's broader digital network.

The ad formats available through Walmart Connect include:

• Sponsored Search — keyword-triggered ads that appear in Walmart.com search results. This is the main format we'll focus on in this post, and where the vast majority of your budget should go. Think of it as Walmart's equivalent of Amazon Sponsored Products — but with its own rules, its own data, and its own search behavior.
• Display Advertising — this breaks into two buckets: on-site display ads that appear across Walmart.com pages, and Walmart DSP (Demand-Side Platform), which extends your reach off-site across the broader web using Walmart's first-party shopper data.

Sponsored Search is where you should start and where most of your attention belongs, especially when you're new to the platform. That's what the rest of this guide focuses on.

Think of Walmart Connect as the retail media layer sitting on top of the Walmart Marketplace — the same way Amazon's ad ecosystem sits on top of Amazon. The concept is familiar. The execution is very different.

The Platform Is More Dated Than Amazon — And That Matters

One of the first things you'll notice when you log into Walmart's ads manager is that the interface feels less polished than Amazon's Campaign Manager. That's not just aesthetics — it has real implications for how you manage campaigns.

The most important operational difference: Walmart's reporting lags roughly 48 hours behind. On Amazon, you're essentially working with near-real-time data. On Walmart, you're always looking at what happened two days ago. That slows down your optimization cycles and means you need to be more patient with your decisions before making bid changes or pausing campaigns.

The platform also gives you less granular keyword data than Amazon's Search Term Reports. You can see what's working at a broad level, but the kind of precise, search-term-level visibility Amazon sellers are used to isn't always there. You'll need to build that picture manually, which is exactly why the research phase before you launch matters so much.

The Copy-Paste Trap (And Why It Kills Campaigns)

Here's the single most expensive mistake we see Amazon sellers make on Walmart: they copy their Amazon campaigns — same keywords, same structure, same bids — and paste them into Walmart Connect. Then they wonder why performance is poor.

This approach fails for two reasons.

First, the keywords are different. Both platforms are search engines in their own right, but Walmart shoppers use different search terms to find the same products. The way someone searches on Amazon is not necessarily how someone searches on Walmart. If your keyword list is built on Amazon data, it is not a Walmart keyword list — it's an Amazon list that happens to be running on a different platform.

Second, the search intent is different. Walmart shoppers and Amazon shoppers don't always want the same thing from the same search. Category placements, conversion rates, and which keywords actually drive purchases vary significantly between the two platforms. What converts on Amazon may barely move on Walmart, and there are keywords with strong Walmart conversion rates that barely exist in Amazon's ecosystem.

Brands that do strong, Walmart-specific keyword research consistently outperform brands that import their Amazon work. It's not a shortcut worth taking.

Keywords Are Your Only Real Lever — And There's a Gate Before They Even Work

Here's something most guides on Walmart Connect don't tell you: unlike Amazon, there is no product targeting on Walmart. You can't target a competitor's item ID the way you'd target an ASIN on Amazon. You can't run category-level product targeting. Keyword targeting is essentially your entire toolkit for Sponsored Search — which makes getting your keyword strategy right even more important than it is on Amazon.

But there's something even more fundamental that almost no one talks about: your ads may not get meaningful impressions at all until Walmart places your product on what they call a virtual shelf.

This is something we've observed firsthand managing Walmart accounts, and it was confirmed in a direct conversation with a PPC specialist at Walmart. When you launch a new product on Walmart, the platform has to figure out where your product belongs — which virtual shelves and categories it fits within. Once Walmart places your product, it then evaluates whether the keywords you're targeting are actually relevant to those shelves. If your product placement and your keyword targeting align, that's when you start getting impressions and the campaign begins to ramp. If they don't align — or if Walmart hasn't placed you yet — your campaigns can sit largely dormant no matter how good your bids are.

This is one of the reasons new Walmart campaigns feel slow to start. It's not always a bidding problem. It's often a placement problem. The platform needs time to figure out where you live within its ecosystem before it's willing to serve your ads at scale.

Once your campaigns do start ramping, match types on Walmart behave differently than on Amazon too. The platform takes longer to learn, the data comes back slower, and the relationship between match type and search term coverage is less predictable. That's exactly why we run three separate campaigns — exact, phrase, and broad — with the same keyword set rather than relying on one broad campaign to do everything. You're building a clear picture of what's working at each level of specificity, so when you do have data to act on, you know which match type is actually driving results.

How to Set Up Your First Walmart Connect Campaigns

Here's the launch framework we use when setting up Walmart Connect ads for a brand for the first time.

One Thing Agencies Get Wrong: The ROAS Obsession

A lot of agencies come into Walmart thinking: lower CPC, lower competition, let me just copy the Amazon campaigns over and they'll perform better. That's probably the most counterproductive approach you can take.

Lower CPC is not a signal to be lazy with strategy — it's an opportunity to build something. And the brands that build it correctly discover something that Amazon sellers don't always get: when you gain organic rank on Walmart, your product tends to hold that ranking far longer than it would on Amazon without continuous ad support.

On Amazon, the moment you pull back on spend, you can feel your organic rank slide. On Walmart, the shelf placement and category positioning you earn through early ad investment tends to be stickier. That's a meaningful difference for long-term TACoS and profitability. But you only capture it if you give the platform enough runway in the early stages — instead of cutting campaigns the moment ROAS doesn't look like your Amazon benchmarks.

Walmart's Advertising Business Is Growing Fast — And the Window Is Closing

Here's some context on why this conversation matters right now. Walmart's global advertising business grew 46% in FY26 to nearly $6.4 billion. In Q4 FY26 alone, global advertising was up 37%, with Walmart Connect U.S. up 41%. Walmart's global ecommerce sales grew 24% in Q4 FY26, and the company reported $713 billion in total FY26 revenue.

That's not a secondary platform. That's a retail media business growing at a pace that rivals any digital advertising channel in the market.

The opportunity is still real. But the easy days — when you could run basic campaigns with minimal competition and win page one placements cheaply — are fading. More brands are moving budget to Walmart. CPCs are rising. The gap between Walmart and Amazon ad costs is narrowing. The brands getting in now and building their organic rank are establishing positions that will be much harder and more expensive to win in 18 months.

If you're weighing how Walmart stacks up against your Amazon business, our breakdown of Walmart vs. Amazon in 2026 covers the full picture — including where each platform has the edge and how to decide where to focus your resources.

Before You Spend a Dollar: Get Your Listing Ready First

Walmart Connect ads can drive traffic. But if your listing isn't ready for that traffic, you're paying for clicks that don't convert — and you're getting data that doesn't mean anything.

The number we use as a threshold before touching paid ads: a content quality score of at least 90. Walmart scores your listing on a scale based on completeness and quality — title, description, images, attributes, and more. Below 90, your listing has gaps that will hurt your conversion rate regardless of how good your ad targeting is. You're essentially turning on a faucet into a leaky bucket.

Images deserve special attention here. Your images need to be good enough that a stranger who has never seen your product before actually wants to buy it. That sounds obvious, but most listings that come to us have images that are technically compliant and commercially weak. If your main image and gallery don't make someone want to add to cart, no amount of ad spend fixes that.

Your listing also needs to be seeded with the keywords you believe are going to drive sales before you launch ads. This isn't a set-it-and-forget-it step — you'll adjust your keywords throughout the life of the product as you learn what actually converts. What you think will work at launch is often not what the data shows three months in. But you need a strong starting point built from your competitor research, not copied from Amazon.

The reviews question is where it gets nuanced. Content quality score does factor in reviews, which creates a bit of a catch-22 for new listings — you need a good score to run ads effectively, but you need sales to get reviews. The workaround we recommend: if you sell on Shopify or another platform, look into importing your existing reviews through one of Walmart's approved third-party review vendors. Walmart has a handful of verified platforms that allow you to syndicate reviews from your own website or other channels directly onto your Walmart listing. It won't fully replace organic Walmart reviews, but it gives your listing social proof from day one instead of launching completely bare.

Get all of that in place first. Then turn on ads. Retail readiness isn't optional — it's the difference between ad spend that builds momentum and ad spend that disappears. For a full walkthrough of the Walmart marketing approach we use with brands, including listing setup and retail readiness, start there before touching the ads manager.

What to Actually Expect From Walmart Connect — On Costs and Returns

A lot of guides will give you a CPC range and a ROAS benchmark and call it a day. We're not going to do that, because those numbers are largely meaningless without context.

The honest answer on cost per click: it varies enormously by product category, by how competitive your specific niche is, and by how well your listing converts. A brand selling in a low-competition grocery subcategory is going to see dramatically different CPCs than a brand selling in electronics or beauty. What we can tell you is that CPCs on Walmart are rising year over year as more brands discover the platform and competition increases. The gap between Walmart and Amazon ad costs is real, but it's narrowing — and the brands locking in organic rank now are doing it before that gap closes completely.

On ROAS: a 3x return might be outstanding for one brand and unsustainable for another, depending entirely on margins. Anyone giving you a universal ROAS target for Walmart is giving you a number that may have nothing to do with your business. Set your ROAS expectations based on your own margin structure, not on benchmarks from a different category with different economics.

What you should expect early on is that it takes time. The virtual shelf placement process, the 48-hour data lag, the ramp period for new listings — all of it means Walmart Connect rewards patience in a way Amazon doesn't. The brands that quit after 30 days because they haven't hit their Amazon ROAS targets are making a category error. They're judging a different platform by the wrong standard.

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Walmart Connect is a real advertising platform with real results for brands willing to learn how it actually works. The mistake isn't using it — it's treating it like a copy of Amazon. The keyword research is different. The campaign structure is different. The optimization pace is different. And the organic rank you build through early investment sticks in a way Amazon sellers aren't used to.

The brands winning on Walmart Connect right now aren't the ones throwing Amazon campaigns at it. They're the ones who did the work to understand Walmart on its own terms — and who started before the window got significantly smaller.

For a broader look at how the fastest-growing brands are approaching Walmart as a channel, see our guide on the fastest way to grow Walmart Marketplace sales — covering everything from WFS setup to Flash Deals and tent pole events.