Walmart Connect in 2026: Strengths, Gaps, and Real Competitive Pressure
Walmart Connect has quietly become the third major retail media network in the U.S., but execution gaps and measurement limitations are keeping serious ad budgets parked on Amazon.
By David Navarro ·
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7 min read
For most of the past decade, retail media meant Amazon. Then, slowly, it meant Amazon and a few other names. By May 2026, Walmart Connect has earned its seat at the table — pulling in an estimated $4.8 billion in annual U.S. ad revenue, up from $3.4 billion in 2024, according to eMarketer’s Q1 2026 retail media forecast. That trajectory is real. So are the friction points that prevent it from absorbing a bigger share of the roughly $62 billion U.S. retail media market.
This review looks at where Walmart Connect is actually delivering for Shopify and marketplace sellers, where it’s still falling short, and how it stacks up against Amazon Advertising, Kroger Precision Marketing, and the emerging Instacart Ads platform heading into the second half of 2026.
📊 Industry News · By The Numbers
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4.8billion
Growth
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3.4billion
Impact
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62billion
Revenue
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240million
Efficiency
What Has Walmart Connect Actually Built in the Last 18 Months?
The most significant infrastructure change at Walmart Connect has been the aggressive buildout of its Sponsored Search and Display tiers, combined with the rollout of what the company is calling Connected Commerce Audiences — a data product that layers Walmart+ membership signals, in-store purchase history, and Sam’s Club behavioral data into a single targeting layer.
That data asset is genuinely differentiated. Walmart processes roughly 240 million customer transactions per week across in-store and digital channels, and Walmart+ membership has crossed 32 million subscribers as of Q1 2026, per Walmart’s own investor disclosures. That first-party data depth is something neither Kroger nor Instacart can match at scale.
“The Walmart+ audience signal is the real story here. When we layered it into our Sponsored Products campaigns in Q4 2025, our ROAS on grocery-adjacent SKUs went from 2.8x to 4.1x in six weeks. That’s not incremental — that’s structural.” — Danielle Forde, VP of Retail Media, Tinuiti
💡 Article Summary
Key Insights
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What Has Walmart Connect Actually Built in the Last 18 Months?
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Where Is Walmart Connect Still Falling Short for Serious Advertisers?
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How Does Walmart Connect Compare to Amazon Advertising and Kroger Precision Marketing?
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Who Is Actually Running Walmart Connect Effectively Right Now?
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What Is Walmart Connect’s Roadmap for the Rest of 2026?
Source: Ecommerce Times
Walmart has also made meaningful moves on the self-serve side. The Connect platform’s campaign manager UI received a significant update in February 2026, closing some of the workflow gap that had long frustrated agency buyers accustomed to Amazon’s Campaign Manager interface. Bulk editing, dayparting controls, and a cleaner keyword harvest tool are now table stakes features that are actually usable.
Where Is Walmart Connect Still Falling Short for Serious Advertisers?
Despite the momentum, Walmart Connect carries structural limitations that keep it from fully competing with Amazon Advertising at the mid-market and enterprise level.
Measurement fragmentation: Walmart’s attribution model still defaults to a 14-day view-through window that inflates ROAS figures for display campaigns. Advertisers trying to run apples-to-apples comparisons against Amazon’s more configurable attribution windows consistently report confusion. Walmart has promised multi-touch attribution parity since 2024, and as of this writing, it has not arrived.
DSP maturity gap: Walmart’s demand-side platform (DSP), built on the infrastructure it inherited from its 2021 investment in The Trade Desk partnership, still lacks the programmatic depth that Amazon’s DSP delivers. Off-site retargeting in particular remains clunky, with limited publisher network reach compared to what Amazon can offer through its owned-and-operated properties and partner exchanges.
Sponsored Brands limitations: Amazon’s Sponsored Brands product — particularly video and Store Spotlight formats — has no true equivalent on Walmart Connect. Walmart’s brand-building ad formats lag by roughly two to three product generations, which is a real disadvantage for DTC brands trying to run full-funnel campaigns on a single platform.
API access inconsistency: Several agency leaders report that the Walmart Advertising API still has reliability issues at scale. Campaign automation tools like Pacvue and Perpetua have Connect integrations, but the depth of automation parity with their Amazon modules is meaningfully lower.
“We manage eight-figure budgets across retail media networks. Walmart Connect is a required buy for our CPG clients — the reach is there. But we’re still doing a lot of manual work on the back end that Amazon eliminated from our workflows two years ago.” — Marcus Reilly, Head of Commerce Media, Wpromote
How Does Walmart Connect Compare to Amazon Advertising and Kroger Precision Marketing?
The honest competitive picture is that Walmart Connect sits in a clear second place in U.S. retail media, well ahead of Kroger Precision Marketing and Instacart Ads in raw scale, but with a wide gap still separating it from Amazon’s $47 billion-plus global ad business.
Kroger Precision Marketing, which runs on 84.51°’s data infrastructure, has the most precise CPG-level audience segmentation in the market — its purchase-based targeting for grocery categories is arguably better than Walmart’s. But Kroger’s reach ceiling is lower, and its digital commerce footprint doesn’t match Walmart’s. Brands running national retail media buys typically treat Kroger as a targeted CPG play, not a primary channel.
Instacart Ads had a strong 2025, particularly after the platform rolled out Shoppable Display and its AI-powered Carrot Ads suite. Its CPMs are competitive and its conversion attribution for grocery is clean. But Instacart’s user base skews heavily toward urban, high-income households — useful for premium brands, limiting for mass-market SKUs.
For Shopify-native DTC brands selling on Walmart.com specifically, the calculus is different. Walmart Connect’s sponsored search products are table stakes for any brand running an active Walmart marketplace presence. The question is whether to expand into Walmart’s display and offsite products, and the honest answer in 2026 is: not yet, unless you have a dedicated retail media team that can manage the attribution complexity.
Who Is Actually Running Walmart Connect Effectively Right Now?
The brands getting the most out of Walmart Connect share a few operational characteristics. They have clean product catalog data — Walmart’s ad relevance scoring penalizes listings with incomplete content scores. They are active Walmart+ fulfill-from-store or two-day delivery eligible sellers, which gives their Sponsored Products higher placement priority. And they’re running Walmart Connect through an agency or in-house team with a dedicated Connect seat, not through an Amazon-first agency that treats Walmart as an afterthought.
In the CPG vertical, brands like Church & Dwight and Energizer have publicly discussed using Walmart Connect’s closed-loop measurement to connect in-store lift to digital spend — a use case that Walmart’s omnichannel data architecture handles better than most retail media networks precisely because of its physical store footprint.
For marketplace sellers on Walmart.com, the practical entry point is Sponsored Products. Minimum budgets are accessible — campaigns can run on as little as $100 per day — and competition levels in many categories are meaningfully lower than Amazon, which translates to lower CPCs in niches where Walmart’s marketplace is still maturing.
“Our clients who treat Walmart Connect as a reach extension of their Amazon strategy are leaving money on the table. The competitive CPCs in home goods and sporting goods right now are a window. It won’t stay this uncrowded.” — Sarah Kim, Director of Marketplace Strategy, Pattern
What Is Walmart Connect’s Roadmap for the Rest of 2026?
Walmart has signaled several near-term platform developments worth tracking. The company is expected to expand its Connected TV (CTV) ad inventory through its Vudu and Walmart+ streaming integrations — a direct play to compete with Amazon’s Prime Video ad tier, which launched an ad-supported tier in late 2023 and has since become a significant premium video inventory source for Amazon DSP buyers.
Walmart is also reportedly in advanced stages of rolling out an AI-powered campaign optimization layer it’s been piloting internally under the name Project Compass. Details are thin, but the feature set is expected to include automated bid adjustments based on real-time inventory signals — a genuinely differentiated capability that Amazon doesn’t currently offer natively, and one that would directly address the wasted spend problem sellers face when running Sponsored Products against out-of-stock ASINs.
The other major development is Walmart’s expanded agency API program, which is expected to give certified partners deeper access to audience segment data for campaign targeting — a move that would close some of the programmatic gap with Amazon DSP and make tools like Pacvue and Skai more effective on the Connect platform.
Is Walmart Connect Worth the Budget Allocation for DTC and Marketplace Operators?
For operators already selling on Walmart.com, the answer is clearly yes — Sponsored Products on Connect are a commercial necessity, not an optional test. Organic visibility on Walmart’s marketplace is increasingly pay-to-play in competitive categories, and CPCs remain favorable compared to Amazon in many niches.
For DTC brands not yet selling on Walmart.com but considering Walmart Connect as an offsite acquisition channel, the value proposition is murkier. The platform’s offsite display and CTV inventory is improving but not yet at the point where it delivers the accountability and scale that justifies diverting significant budget from Meta or Google.
The structural bet on Walmart Connect is really a bet on Walmart+. If the membership program continues to grow its subscriber base and deepen behavioral data signals, the targeting layer that sits underneath Connect’s ad products will become increasingly hard to replicate. That data moat is Walmart Connect’s clearest long-term competitive advantage — and the reason why the platform deserves more operational attention from sellers than it typically gets.
Best fit for: CPG brands with Walmart retail distribution, marketplace sellers in home, sporting goods, and baby categories, brands with clean catalog content scores and two-day delivery eligibility
Not yet ready for: Full-funnel DTC acquisition, brands needing programmatic DSP depth comparable to Amazon, operators without dedicated retail media management capacity
Tools to use with it: Pacvue, Skai, Perpetua (with noted API limitations), Flywheel Commerce Cloud for blended Amazon/Walmart reporting
Watch closely: Project Compass AI optimization rollout, CTV inventory expansion via Vudu, and the agency API program update expected in Q3 2026
Walmart Connect is not Amazon Advertising. It may never be. But for the operator who treats it as a standalone platform with its own distinct strengths — first-party data depth, omnichannel attribution, and a still-undercrowded auction in many categories — the returns are real and the upside window remains open.
