U.S. retail media network advertising crossed $61.4 billion in annualized spend through Q1 2026, according to a new benchmark report released Monday by eMarketer, marking a 22% year-over-year increase and signaling that the category has entered a phase of genuine multi-network competition for the first time since Amazon Advertising defined the segment in 2018.
Amazon still commands the largest share — roughly 74% of total retail media dollars — but that figure has slipped four percentage points over the past 18 months as Walmart Connect, Instacart Ads, and a cluster of mid-tier grocery and home improvement networks pull incremental budget from CPG, DTC, and marketplace sellers who once defaulted everything to Sponsored Products campaigns.
For Shopify merchants who also sell on Amazon and Walmart simultaneously, the shift is forcing a real reallocation conversation inside marketing teams and agencies that previously treated retail media as an Amazon line item.
What is driving the acceleration in retail media spend in 2026?
Several structural forces converged in the first half of 2026. Third-party cookie deprecation in Chrome, which Google completed in Q4 2025, pushed brand advertisers toward first-party-data environments — exactly what retail media networks offer. Networks like Walmart Connect now let advertisers match shopper purchase histories against CPG brand CRM files through clean room integrations built on Snowflake and LiveRamp’s infrastructure.
At the same time, Amazon’s own ad auction inflation has pushed average CPCs for high-volume Sponsored Products keywords above $4.20 in categories like supplements, home goods, and pet care, according to Pacvue’s Q1 2026 Benchmark Report. That price pressure is pushing mid-market sellers — those doing $2M to $20M annually on Amazon — to experiment with Walmart Connect’s comparatively cheaper off-site display inventory.
“We moved about 18% of our Amazon display budget to Walmart Connect in Q1 and saw a 31% lower cost-per-acquisition on replenishment SKUs. The audience overlap is real, and the auction isn’t nearly as crowded yet.” — Dara Khojasteh, VP of Growth at Grove Collaborative
Instacart Ads has also benefited from its integration into the broader Google Ads ecosystem, a partnership that allows grocery brands to serve shoppable Instacart placements directly from Google Shopping campaigns — a workflow that requires minimal incremental setup for brands already running Google Performance Max.
How is Walmart Connect specifically gaining ground against Amazon?
Walmart Connect’s reported ad revenue hit an estimated $4.8 billion in the trailing 12 months ending March 2026, up from $3.4 billion in the prior period, per eMarketer. The network has invested heavily in its demand-side platform interoperability, launching direct integrations with The Trade Desk and DV360 in late 2025 that let programmatic buyers activate Walmart’s 144 million weekly shopper audience outside of Walmart.com itself — across connected TV, display, and audio.
For marketplace sellers, Walmart Connect’s Sponsored Products product has matured significantly. Auto-targeting campaigns on Walmart now return usable search term reports, and the network added a placement-level bid modifier in March 2026 that lets sellers suppress spend on in-store pickup placements when their fulfillment costs make those conversions unprofitable.
- Walmart Connect’s average Sponsored Products CPC: $1.18 (vs. Amazon’s $4.20+ in competitive categories)
- Walmart’s off-site display inventory now reaches approximately 89% of U.S. adults monthly
- Walmart Connect added 1,200 new advertising sellers in Q1 2026 alone
- Clean room integrations with Snowflake now active for CPG advertisers
- The Trade Desk and DV360 DSP integrations launched October 2025
“Walmart Connect is no longer a checkbox for retail media diversification. For our clients in the household consumables space, it’s become a genuine demand generation channel, not just a visibility spend.” — Lindsay Boyajian Hagan, Chief Marketing Officer at Conductor
How are Amazon sellers and DTC brands actually restructuring their media budgets?
The most common pattern emerging across agencies contacted for this story is a tiered reallocation model: Amazon Advertising retains the majority of lower-funnel, conversion-intent budget — particularly Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands targeting high-commercial-intent keywords — while incremental dollars flow to Walmart Connect and Instacart for mid-funnel retargeting and new-to-brand acquisition.
Tinuiti, which manages over $4 billion in annual digital media spend and is among the largest Amazon Advertising partners, reported in its own Q1 2026 Retail Media Benchmarks that clients allocating at least 15% of their retail media budget to non-Amazon networks saw a 9% improvement in blended return on ad spend versus single-network allocators — driven primarily by lower CPAs on Walmart and incrementality gains measured via geo-based holdout tests.
For DTC brands that sell on their own Shopify storefront but also maintain Amazon and Walmart marketplace presence, the calculus is more nuanced. Attribution remains fragmented: Walmart Connect’s attribution window defaults to a 14-day click, while Amazon uses a 14-day click and 14-day view by default, and neither integrates cleanly into Triple Whale or Northbeam without manual data connectors.
Several agencies have begun building custom Looker Studio dashboards that pull Walmart Advertising API data alongside Amazon Advertising API data to give DTC founders a unified retail media view — a workflow that remains significantly more manual than most operators would like.
What does the rise of non-Amazon retail media mean for mid-market sellers specifically?
For sellers doing between $1M and $15M annually, the retail media diversification opportunity is real but operationally demanding. Running effective campaigns on both Amazon and Walmart simultaneously requires either a sophisticated in-house media team or an agency partner with active Walmart Connect certification — a credential that remains far less common than Amazon Advertising accreditation across the agency landscape.
Tools like Pacvue and Perpetua have added Walmart campaign management functionality, but category coverage gaps remain. Perpetua’s Walmart module, as of June 2026, supports Sponsored Products but does not yet support Walmart’s Display or Video ad formats, limiting its utility for brands trying to run full-funnel Walmart strategies from a single automation platform.
- Pacvue supports Walmart Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Display as of Q1 2026
- Perpetua’s Walmart coverage limited to Sponsored Products as of June 2026
- Teikametrics added Walmart bid automation in February 2026
- Manual Walmart campaign management still requires Walmart Seller Center access separate from API tools
“The honest answer is that most $5M Amazon sellers aren’t ready to run Walmart Connect well. The tooling is 18 months behind where Amazon tooling was in 2022. But the brands that build the operational muscle now will have a durable cost advantage in 12 months.” — Jeremy Doddridge, Head of Marketplace Strategy at Tinuiti
Are newer retail media networks outside Walmart and Instacart worth the operational overhead?
Beyond the top three networks, a fragmented second tier is competing for incremental budget. Home Depot’s Orange Apron Media, Lowe’s One Roof Media Network, Target Roundel, and Kroger Precision Marketing each generated estimated ad revenues between $800 million and $1.6 billion in the trailing 12 months, per eMarketer estimates.
For category-specific brands — power tools, garden, kitchen — these networks offer high-intent shopper audiences that Amazon’s broad marketplace cannot match. A cordless drill brand advertising on Orange Apron Media is reaching a consumer actively shopping at a home improvement retailer, with purchase recency data unavailable anywhere else.
The friction is meaningful, however. Each network requires a separate onboarding process, separate creative specs, and a separate reporting environment. None of the major multi-channel retail media management platforms have achieved full parity across all tier-two networks. Most operators surveyed for this story said they were running no more than three retail media networks simultaneously before operational quality degraded.
What should Shopify and Amazon sellers actually do with this data right now?
The operational playbook that’s emerging from practitioners in the space breaks down into three phases. First, audit your Amazon Advertising cost-of-sale by category and identify SKUs where ACoS has exceeded your margin ceiling — these are the strongest candidates for budget reallocation to Walmart Connect or Instacart, where auction density is lower.
Second, verify that your Walmart Marketplace product listings are conversion-ready before scaling ad spend. Walmart’s search algorithm weighs listing completeness, in-stock rate, and review count heavily in organic ranking — running Sponsored Products against listings with fewer than 15 reviews or missing rich media content burns budget against an organic deficit that ads cannot overcome.
Third, invest in cross-network attribution infrastructure now, before budget scales. Whether that means a custom Looker Studio build, a Northbeam data connector, or a dedicated retail media analytics platform like Skai or Pacvue’s reporting suite, operators who lack a unified view of retail media spend will misallocate budget as network diversification increases.
The broader signal from the eMarketer data is straightforward: retail media is no longer an Amazon-or-nothing proposition. For the operators who move early on Walmart Connect infrastructure and analytics, the arbitrage window — cheaper CPCs, less auction competition, growing shopper data fidelity — remains meaningfully open heading into Q3 and Q4 2026.
