What Is Walmart Connect? How to Advertise on Walmart

Walmart is the largest retailer in the world, and for suppliers, that reach isn’t just a selling opportunity — it’s an advertising one too.

Walmart Connect is Walmart’s retail media platform, giving suppliers and marketplace sellers the ability to put their products in front of the right customers at the right moment — whether they’re searching on Walmart.com, browsing the app, or walking through a store. With more than 150 million weekly shoppers and $4.4 billion in ad revenue in fiscal year 2024, Walmart Connect has grown into one of the most powerful retail media networks in the country.

As an official member of the Walmart Connect Partner Network, 8th & Walton is uniquely positioned to help suppliers navigate this platform — combining deep Walmart expertise with formal recognition within Walmart’s retail media ecosystem.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know — what Walmart Connect is, how it works, the advertising options available, how to get started, and how to use it effectively as a Walmart supplier.

What Is Walmart Connect?

Walmart Connect is the media division of Walmart, built to help suppliers and marketplace sellers reach Walmart customers through targeted advertising across digital, in-store, and off-site channels. Think of it as Walmart’s answer to retail media — a platform that turns Walmart’s massive shopper data into a precision advertising tool for the brands that sell there.

Formerly known as Walmart Media Group, the platform was rebranded to Walmart Connect in 2021 to reflect its broader ambition: connecting brands with customers across every touchpoint in the shopping journey, not just on Walmart.com.

What makes Walmart Connect different from a traditional digital ad platform is the data behind it. Because Walmart operates both online and in thousands of physical stores, it has access to a rare combination of online browsing behavior and real in-store purchase history. That first-party data powers every campaign on the platform — helping your ads reach shoppers who are already in a buying mindset, rather than just browsing the internet.

Campaigns are managed through Walmart Connect Ad Center, a self-serve platform where suppliers can build, launch, and optimize campaigns with full visibility into performance. Whether you’re running your first sponsored product ad or managing a full-funnel omnichannel strategy, Ad Center is where it all happens.

What Are the Benefits of Walmart Connect?

Here are the advantages of working with Walmart Connect:

Unmatched Audience Reach: Walmart serves more than 150 million customers every week across its stores, website, and app. That’s not just a large audience — it’s an audience that’s already shopping. Walmart Connect gives you direct access to those customers at the moment they’re most likely to buy.
Powerful First-Party Data: Because Walmart owns both the retail and the media platform, it can offer something most ad networks can’t: targeting built on actual purchase behavior. You’re not guessing at intent based on browsing habits — you’re reaching customers based on what they’ve already bought, searched for, and put in their cart, both online and in-store.
Omnichannel Advertising: Walmart Connect bridges the gap between digital and physical retail in a way few platforms can. You can run campaigns that reach customers on Walmart.com, the Walmart app, in-store digital screens, and even across the broader web — all within a single platform. For suppliers selling in stores, this is a meaningful advantage.
Improved Search Visibility: Sponsored Search ads can help your products appear higher in Walmart’s search results, which matters enormously in competitive categories. If your item isn’t showing up in the first dozen results, Walmart Connect is one of the most direct ways to change that.
A Strong Platform for New Product Launches: Launching a new item at Walmart is one of the hardest moments in a supplier’s journey. Walmart Connect gives new listings a fighting chance by driving early traffic, generating initial sales velocity, and building the kind of momentum that helps an item establish itself in search rankings organically over time.
Measurable Results: Walmart Connect’s reporting tools give you a clear view of how your campaigns are performing — impressions, clicks, conversions, and return on ad spend — so you’re never left guessing. Walmart’s closed-loop measurement even allows you to track the impact of your ads from initial exposure all the way through to purchase, both online and in-store.

Walmart Connect Advertising Options

Walmart Connect offers a range of ad formats designed to reach customers at every stage of the shopping journey — from initial discovery all the way through to purchase. Here’s a breakdown of what’s available:

Onsite Display

Onsite Display ads use eye-catching visuals to reach shoppers across Walmart’s site and app — on the homepage, search pages, category pages, and item pages.

Unlike Sponsored Search, which targets customers actively searching for a product, Onsite Display uses Walmart’s first-party data to reach customers based on their browsing and purchase history, making it a strong tool for building brand awareness and driving consideration earlier in the funnel.

Offsite Media

Walmart Connect also allows suppliers to reach Walmart shoppers beyond Walmart’s own properties. Through partnerships with platforms including The Trade Desk, TikTok, and Roku — part of Walmart Connect’s Connected TV (CTV) strategy —offsite media campaigns use Walmart’s first-party data to target Walmart customers as they move across the broader web, social media, and streaming platforms.

It’s a powerful way to reinforce your message and drive shoppers back to Walmart.

In-Store Advertising

For suppliers selling in physical Walmart locations, in-store advertising options include digital screens, self-checkout kiosks, television wall placements, and in-store audio. With over 170,000 digital screens across more than 4,700 United States stores, these placements offer a unique opportunity to influence purchase decisions at the exact moment a customer is in the aisle.

Walmart Connect now also offers In-Store Demos through the platform, giving suppliers another hands-on way to engage shoppers directly at the point of purchase.

Brand Shop and Shelf

Brand Shop is a virtual storefront on Walmart’s site that lets eligible suppliers tell their brand story, showcase their full product assortment, and create an always-on destination for customers to explore. Shelf acts as a shoppable landing page that supports specific media activations. Both are self-serve tools available through Ad Center.

Walmart Connect Targeting Options

One of the most compelling aspects of Walmart Connect is the quality of the data behind its targeting. Because Walmart operates at the intersection of online and in-store shopping, the targeting options available here go deeper than most digital advertising platforms. Here’s what suppliers can work with:

Keyword Targeting

Keyword targeting allows you to serve ads to customers based on the specific search terms they use on Walmart.com. You select the keywords most relevant to your products, set bids for each, and your ads appear when customers search those terms. This is the most direct way to reach high-intent shoppers — people who are actively looking for what you sell.

Automatic Targeting

If you’re new to Walmart Connect or want to gather data before going fully manual, automatic targeting is a good starting point. Walmart’s algorithm selects keywords and placements on your behalf based on your product information and category, testing what works and building a performance foundation. It requires less hands-on management and can surface keyword opportunities you might not have thought to target manually.

Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting uses Walmart’s first-party purchase and browsing data to reach customers based on what they’ve actually done — what they’ve bought, searched for, and engaged with — both on Walmart.com and in physical stores. This is one of Walmart Connect’s most powerful differentiators, giving suppliers access to targeting signals that most ad platforms simply don’t have.

Contextual Targeting

Contextual targeting places your ads alongside relevant content and product categories, reaching customers who are browsing in spaces related to your product, even if they haven’t searched for it directly. This is particularly useful for driving discovery among shoppers who might not know your product exists yet.

Audience Targeting

Walmart Connect allows you to build and target specific audience segments based on demographics, life stage, and shopping patterns. Want to reach households with young children, frequent grocery buyers, or customers who recently purchased in your category? Audience targeting makes that level of specificity possible.

Keyword Retargeting

Keyword retargeting allows you to re-engage customers who have previously searched for relevant terms on Walmart.com but didn’t convert. These are warm audiences — shoppers who have already demonstrated interest — making them some of the highest-value customers you can reach.

Run of Site

Run of Site targeting places your display ads broadly across Walmart’s site and app without restricting to specific audiences or keywords. It’s a useful tool for maximizing reach and brand awareness when your goal is visibility at scale rather than precision targeting.

Getting Started With Walmart Connect Ad Center

Walmart Connect Ad Center is the self-serve platform where you build, launch, and manage your campaigns. Getting started is more straightforward than many suppliers expect. Here’s how to do it:

Confirm Your Eligibility: Before you can advertise on Walmart Connect, you need to be an approved Walmart supplier or marketplace seller in good standing. Make sure your product listings are live, accurate, and meet Walmart’s content quality standards — ad placement is influenced by listing quality, so this step matters more than it might seem.
Access Walmart Connect Ad Center: Go to advertising.walmart.com and sign in using your Supplier Center or Seller Center credentials. If you’re a first-time user, you’ll complete a brief account setup process that includes your business information, product categories, and payment details. Account approval typically takes one to two business days.
Set Your Campaign Objective: Before logging into Ad Center, define what you want your campaign to accomplish. Are you launching a new product and need early visibility? Trying to defend search placement in a competitive category? Building brand awareness ahead of a seasonal event? Your objective will shape every decision that follows — ad format, targeting approach, and budget.
Choose Your Campaign Type and Ad Format: Select the ad format that best fits your goal. For most suppliers getting started, Sponsored Products is the recommended entry point — it’s the most widely used format, the easiest to set up, and delivers strong results for driving search visibility and sales. As you grow more comfortable with the platform, you can layer in Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Videos, and Onsite Display.
Select Your Targeting Approach: For your first campaign, Walmart recommends Automatic targeting. The platform selects keywords and placements on your behalf, tests what’s working, and builds a performance dataset you can learn from. Once you have enough data, you can transition to Manual targeting for greater control over specific keywords and bids.
Set Your Budget and Bids: Set a daily budget and total campaign budget. Walmart recommends a minimum daily budget of $100 to maintain visibility during peak shopping hours and give the algorithm enough room to optimize. If you’re using manual bidding, set bids at the item level based on each product’s margin, price point, and how competitive its category is. Dynamic bidding is also available and adjusts your bids in real time to improve conversion efficiency.
Select Your Products: Choose the products you want to promote. For best results, start with your ten to fifteen best-selling items or the products most important to your current business goals. A focused product set gives the algorithm enough data to work with while keeping your campaigns manageable and easy to analyze.
Launch and Monitor: Once your campaign is live, give it time to gather data before making significant changes. Check performance regularly through Ad Center’s reporting dashboard, which tracks impressions, clicks, conversions, and return on ad spend. Use those insights to adjust bids, swap in stronger products, and refine your targeting over time.

How to Use Walmart Connect Like a Pro

Getting your first campaign live is just the beginning. The suppliers who see the strongest returns from Walmart Connect aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets — they’re the ones who approach the platform strategically and refine their approach over time. Here are the best practices that separate strong performers from the rest:

Start With Your Best Items, Not Your Full Catalog. It’s tempting to advertise everything, but spreading your budget thin across too many products rarely produces meaningful results. Start with your top sellers or the items most critical to your business goals, and build from there once you have performance data to guide your expansion.
Make Sure Your Listings Are Ready Before You Spend. Advertising drives traffic — but if your product listings are thin, poorly imaged, or missing key content, that traffic won’t convert. Before investing in Walmart Connect, make sure your titles, descriptions, images, and content scores are as strong as possible. A great ad pointing to a weak listing is wasted spend.
Use Automatic Campaigns to Build, Manual Campaigns to Optimize. A proven approach is to run automatic campaigns first to discover which keywords are driving clicks and conversions, then use that data to build targeted manual campaigns around your best performers. Running both simultaneously — automatic for discovery, manual for control — gives you the best of both worlds.
Match Your Bids to Your Margins. Not every product deserves the same bid. Higher-margin items can support more aggressive bids, while lower-margin products need tighter controls to stay profitable. Build your bidding strategy around the economics of each item rather than applying a blanket approach across your entire campaign.
Don’t Set It and Forget It. Walmart Connect rewards active management. Check your campaigns regularly, identify what’s working and what isn’t, and make incremental adjustments. Small changes to bids, budgets, and product selection compound over time into meaningfully better performance.
Lean Into Seasonal Moments. Walmart Connect offers specialized advertising packages around key retail events — Back to School, Black Friday, holiday, and more. These periods bring significantly higher shopper traffic, and suppliers who plan their campaigns in advance and invest in seasonal placements are better positioned to capture that demand.
Layer Your Ad Formats for Full-Funnel Impact. Sponsored Products are great for capturing high-intent shoppers, but combining them with Sponsored Brands and Onsite Display creates a more complete presence across the shopping journey. A customer might discover your brand through a display ad, search for it later, and convert on a sponsored product — each format plays a role in that path.
Track the Right Metrics for Your Goals. Return on ad spend is an important metric, but it isn’t the only one that matters. If you’re launching a new product, impressions and click-through rate may be more meaningful early indicators than immediate return on ad spend. Define what success looks like for each campaign before you launch, and measure against those goals specifically.
Consider Working With a Walmart Connect Partner. If managing campaigns in-house feels like too much to take on alongside everything else a Walmart business requires, Walmart Connect’s Partner Network includes approved agencies and solution providers who can manage your advertising on your behalf. Working with a partner who understands the Walmart ecosystem — not just the ad platform — can make a significant difference in results.

Walmart Connect Frequently Asked Questions

Is Walmart Connect part of Walmart?

Yes. Walmart Connect is Walmart’s own retail media division — it’s not a third-party platform. It was built and operated by Walmart to give suppliers and marketplace sellers a direct way to advertise to Walmart’s customer base using Walmart’s own first-party data.

When was Walmart Connect launched?

Walmart Connect launched under its current name in 2021, when Walmart rebranded its advertising division from Walmart Media Group to Walmart Connect. The rebrand reflected the platform’s growing ambition to connect brands with customers across digital, in-store, and off-site channels — not just on Walmart.com.

Is Walmart Connect only for Walmart products?

Primarily, yes — Walmart Connect is designed for suppliers and marketplace sellers who are actively selling products on Walmart. That said, Walmart has begun offering off-site media options to non-endemic brands, meaning companies whose products aren’t sold at Walmart but whose offerings are relevant to Walmart customers.

For most suppliers reading this, however, Walmart Connect is squarely focused on helping you advertise the products you already sell there.

How much does Walmart Connect cost?

Walmart Connect uses an auction-based pricing model, meaning costs vary based on competition, category, and the ad format you’re using. Sponsored Search ads are cost-per-click, so you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. On-site display campaigns operate on an effective cost per thousand impressions model, meaning you pay per thousand impressions. Walmart recommends a minimum daily budget of $100 for Sponsored Products campaigns to maintain visibility and give the algorithm enough data to optimize.

There’s no single fixed cost — your spend is ultimately determined by your budget, your bids, and how competitive your category is.

What is Walmart Connect Ad Center?

Walmart Connect Ad Center is the self-serve platform where suppliers and marketplace sellers build, launch, and manage their Walmart Connect campaigns. You access it at advertising.walmart.com using your Supplier Center or Seller Center credentials.

Ad Center gives you full control over campaign setup, targeting, budgets, bids, and performance reporting — all in one place. It’s separate from Seller Center, which is used to manage your marketplace account more broadly.

How is Walmart Connect different from Amazon Advertising?

Both platforms are retail media networks built on first-party shopper data, but there are meaningful differences. Walmart Connect’s biggest advantage is its omnichannel reach — because Walmart operates thousands of physical stores in addition to its digital properties, it can connect online ad exposure to in-store purchase behavior in a way Amazon simply can’t.

Walmart also tends to have a lower cost-per-click in many categories, making it a more efficient entry point for suppliers who are newer to retail media advertising.

Do I need a large budget to get started?

Not necessarily. While Walmart recommends a minimum daily budget of $100 for Sponsored Products to build momentum, you don’t need an enterprise-level budget to see results. Starting focused — with a handful of strong products, a clear goal, and a manageable budget — is a more effective approach than spreading a large budget thin across too many campaigns at once.

How 8th & Walton Can Help

Walmart Connect is a powerful platform — but like most things at Walmart, getting the most out of it requires more than just setting up an account and running a few ads. It requires understanding how advertising fits into your broader Walmart strategy, how your listings affect your ad performance, and how to interpret the data coming back at you.

That’s where 8th & Walton comes in — and we’re now an official member of the Walmart Connect Partner Network.

We’ve spent decades helping suppliers navigate every dimension of the Walmart business — from supply chain and accounting to ecommerce, retail media, and everything in between. Our team brings over 300 years of combined Walmart experience to every client engagement, and our inclusion in the Walmart Connect Partner Network reflects our deep expertise in helping suppliers build and execute advertising strategies that drive real results.

We understand how Walmart Connect fits into the bigger picture of supplier performance, and we know what separates suppliers who see real returns from those who spend without results. As a fixed-fee, non-commission firm, our recommendations are always in your best interest — not driven by ad spend incentives.

Whether you’re just getting started with Walmart Connect, trying to improve the performance of existing campaigns, or looking for a more strategic approach to retail media as part of your overall Walmart account, our team can help you move forward with confidence.

We also offer training resources for suppliers who want to build internal capability — including courses that cover Walmart’s advertising tools, ecommerce execution, and the broader Walmart ecosystem.

If you’re ready to make Walmart Connect work harder for your business, we’d love to talk.

Conclusion

Walmart Connect has grown from a relatively new advertising platform into one of the most significant retail media networks in the country — and for Walmart suppliers, it’s becoming harder to ignore.

The combination of Walmart’s unmatched shopper reach, powerful first-party data, and a growing suite of ad formats means there are more ways than ever to put your products in front of the right customers at the right moment. Whether you’re trying to launch a new item, defend your search placement, build brand awareness, or drive in-store sales, Walmart Connect has tools built for each of those goals.

The suppliers who will get the most out of the platform are the ones who approach it strategically — with strong listings, clear objectives, and a willingness to learn and adjust over time.

If you’re not yet advertising on Walmart Connect, now is a good time to start. And if you are, there’s likely more performance available to you than your current campaigns are capturing.

Either way, 8th & Walton is here to help you get there.