Walmart Connect Advertising in 2026: The Second-Marketplace Playbook for Established Brands

Walmart's advertising business pulled in roughly $6.4 billion in its most recent fiscal year, up about 46% and growing something like six times faster than Walmart's overall retail sales. That's not a rounding error in someone else's P&L. It's the clearest signal yet that the second-largest retail media network in the country has stopped being optional for brands that already treat Amazon as a core channel.

We see the same pattern across our client portfolio. A brand scales to eight figures on Amazon, squeezes the account until TACoS settles into the low teens, and then hits the ceiling every Amazon-native brand eventually hits: you can only harvest so much demand inside one marketplace. Walmart Connect is where a lot of that next dollar of profitable growth actually lives in 2026. The catch is that "cheaper than Amazon" gets repeated so often that brands walk in expecting free money, and Walmart doesn't work that way. Let's get specific.

What Walmart Connect Is in 2026

Walmart Connect is Walmart's retail media network, the advertising arm that lets brands buy placement across Walmart's site, app, in-store screens, and a fast-growing off-site footprint. Think of it as the Walmart parallel to Amazon Ads. It sells against first-party purchase data from one of the largest retailers on earth, and that data is the whole reason the network keeps compounding.

The scale is worth sitting with. US retail media advertisers spent around $60 billion in 2025 and are on track for roughly $71 billion in 2026. Amazon still owns close to 80% of that. Walmart Connect holds about 8% and is taking share quickly, and eMarketer expects Amazon and Walmart together to capture close to 90% of every incremental retail media dollar in 2026. If you're allocating new budget across retail media, the math funnels you toward those two names whether you love the concentration or not.

The Walmart Connect Ad Formats You Can Actually Buy

The menu maps closely to Amazon, which makes onboarding easier for a team that already runs Amazon Ads. The buckets that matter:

• Sponsored Products: keyword and category-targeted PPC that shows in the search grid, carousels, and under the buy box. This is where most brands should start and where most of the volume sits.
• Sponsored Brands: your logo, a headline, and up to four products at the top of search. Same shelf-defense logic you already run on Amazon.
• Sponsored Videos: product placements with video, which Walmart reports drive materially higher engagement than static units.
• Onsite Display: banners across the homepage, search, item, and topic pages, useful for launches and audience building.
• Off-site and Walmart DSP: programmatic display, streaming and connected TV, audio, and mobile bought through Walmart's DSP, which is built with The Trade Desk. This is the layer that stretches Walmart's shopper data beyond Walmart.com.

One number is worth internalizing before you plan a budget: Walmart reports that shoppers exposed to both sponsored search and onsite display are up to three times more likely to buy and spend up to 40% more. The formats compound on each other. Running Sponsored Products alone leaves most of the network's value on the table, which is exactly the mistake most first-year Walmart advertisers make.

Walmart Connect vs Amazon PPC: The Benchmarks That Matter

Here's the comparison every brand asks us for. These figures are directional, pulled from 2025 and 2026 agency and analyst reporting rather than our own client data, but the pattern holds across sources.

Metric	Amazon Ads	Walmart Connect
Typical blended CPC	$0.50 to $5.00+	$0.50 to $2.00
CPG-category CPC	~$1.30 to $1.50	~$0.40 to $0.80
Sponsored Products ROAS (typical)	Category-dependent	~5:1
Platform-average ACoS (2026)	Category-dependent	~32%
Auction competition	High	Lower, rising

The headline is real. Walmart CPCs run lower, and in matched CPG categories they can sit roughly 55% below Amazon. For a brand grinding against $1.30 clicks on Amazon, $0.60 clicks on Walmart look like a gift.

Now the honesty beat, because this is where brands get burned. Cheaper clicks are not the same thing as cheaper customers. Walmart's traffic volume is a fraction of Amazon's, average order values tend to run lower, and Teikametrics' 2026 benchmark found that full-year 2025 Walmart ROAS actually slipped around 18% as more advertisers piled in and CPCs crept up. A lower entry cost paired with rising competition and thinner baskets is a market that rewards disciplined operators and punishes spray-and-pray. We've watched brands drop an Amazon-sized budget into Walmart on day one, chase impression share, and torch their efficiency inside a quarter. The cheaper auction is an advantage only if you respect that it's a smaller, different pond.

How Walmart Fits an Amazon-First Portfolio

The right question isn't "Walmart or Amazon." It's what Walmart does for blended margin that Amazon can't. Two answers show up over and over across the accounts we manage.

First, incrementality. A meaningful slice of Walmart's shoppers aren't your Amazon shoppers. The buyer base skews value-conscious and family-focused, and categories like health and wellness, home and kitchen, baby and kids, and beauty over-index there. If your Amazon growth has flattened, some of what you'll pick up on Walmart is a genuinely new audience rather than demand you'd have captured anyway. That's the definition of incremental, and it's the only kind of growth worth paying a new platform tax to reach. We pressure-test this with the same incrementality lens we apply to any new channel: is this net-new revenue, or are we just moving the same customer between carts?

Second, margin structure. Walmart's referral fees generally run in the 6% to 15% band, often a point or two under Amazon in the same category, with no monthly seller subscription. Pair that with lower CPCs and, for the right catalog, the contribution margin on a Walmart sale can beat the same unit sold on Amazon even at lower volume. That's the number that should drive the decision, not top-line GMV. Fulfillment matters here too. Walmart Fulfillment Services tends to price 15% to 25% under FBA at comparable service levels, with no fourth-quarter storage spike, which quietly protects margin during the exact months Amazon storage fees balloon.

A Disciplined Walmart Connect Launch

When we stand up Walmart Connect for a brand already winning on Amazon, the sequence is deliberately boring, because boring is what protects efficiency:

1. Fix the listings before the ads. Titles, images, content, and reviews carry the conversion. Ads amplify a strong listing; they can't rescue a weak one.
2. Start with Sponsored Products on proven winners. Port your best Amazon SKUs and search terms, not the entire catalog. Let the data tell you what travels.
3. Bid to profit, not impression share. Set targets off Walmart's economics and your real margins, not the ACoS number you're used to seeing on Amazon.
4. Layer display and video once search converts. That's how you capture the compounding effect between formats instead of paying for reach that doesn't close.
5. Read incrementality, not just platform ROAS. Watch blended new-to-brand rate and total-account contribution margin. Walmart earning its keep should show up at the portfolio level, not just in its own dashboard.

None of this is exotic. It's the same operator discipline that took these brands to eight figures on Amazon, applied to a channel that behaves differently enough to punish autopilot.

What Changed in 2026 and Why It Matters Now

Two shifts make this the year to take Walmart seriously rather than pencil it in for someday. Walmart closed its roughly $2.3 billion Vizio acquisition and is now wiring connected-TV exposure directly to closed-loop Walmart sales. Its content-to-commerce CTV push reported a median 44% new-to-brand buyers on those campaigns, which is exactly the incremental-reach argument upper-funnel brands have wanted retail media to prove. At its 2025 Marketplace Seller Summit, Walmart also cut referral fees on qualifying categories, expanded next-day fulfillment across major metros, and tightened the link between the marketplace and its physical stores. The platform is spending real money to pull established brands in. Early, disciplined advertisers tend to bank the lower-competition CPCs before the rest of the category crowds the auction.

When Walmart Isn't Your Next Channel Yet

We won't pretend Walmart is right for every brand this quarter. If your catalog skews premium against a value-first shopper base, the price positioning can fight you. If your Amazon account still has obvious efficiency left on the table, fix that first, because a leaky primary channel doesn't get healthier by adding a second one. And if your team can't yet staff a new marketplace's listing, inventory, and ad operations properly, a half-run Walmart presence will underperform and sour everyone on the channel. Be honest about which of these describes you before you expand. Expansion for its own sake is how brands end up managing two mediocre channels instead of one great one.

The Bottom Line

Walmart Connect isn't a smaller copy of Amazon Ads. It's a different auction with different economics and a different shopper, and for brands that have already wrung the easy growth out of Amazon, it's the most obvious place to find incremental, profitable revenue in 2026. Treat it like a serious second channel with its own margin model, not a spot to recycle your Amazon budget and hope. That portfolio-level view, modeling channel mix and blended margin instead of chasing platform ROAS in isolation, is how our full-service team runs multi-marketplace brands, and it's the same discipline behind the Amazon advertising programs that got most of them to eight figures in the first place. If you're weighing Walmart as your next channel, tell us your category and margins and we'll model whether it's genuinely incremental or just expensive. Want proof first? The outcomes are the fastest way to see how we think about growth across a portfolio.