Walmart Connect introduces long-awaited negative keyword feature, granting brands greater control over ad placements
Brands advertising with Walmart Connect now have access to a significant new tool: the ability to designate negative keywords and prevent their ads from being shown on unwanted search queries. This update is designed to help advertisers optimize their spending and ensure visibility only in relevant customer searches across the Walmart platform.
Negative keywords now available for Walmart advertisers
Late July saw the addition of a negative keyword feature in Walmart Connect, allowing brands to stop their ads from surfacing on specific search terms. This function is operational via both the Walmart Connect Ad Center and third-party platforms—such as Pacvue, Skai, Quartile, Teikametrics, and DataCaciques—as highlighted in a Walmart Connect blog post.
Brands are now able to filter out poor-performing or irrelevant search queries—examples include keywords like “dog food” or “running shoes”—to ensure that their ads reach shoppers most likely to convert. According to Walmart Connect, “This offers a higher level of control, allowing the blocking of low-performing or misaligned terms without unintentionally filtering out related high-value traffic.” The post also emphasized the benefits of improving campaign efficiency, reducing wasted ad impressions, and enhancing sponsored product optimization.
According to Walmart Connect, marketplace sellers with tight marketing funds can now make their ad spend last longer by sidestepping non-relevant search queries; at the same time, large suppliers with several brands or product categories are better positioned to avoid undesirable internal competition in search results by making use of negative keywords for more nuanced campaign adjustments.
Meeting long-standing advertiser demands and industry standards
This feature responds to a long-standing demand from advertisers and agencies, who have called for more control—especially in automatic campaigns, where Walmart, not the advertiser, selects which keywords trigger ads. Until this update, manual campaigns permitted keyword targeting, but automatic campaigns lacked an option for brands to screen out non-essential or wasteful search terms.
Walmart is joining competitors like Amazon, which launched negative keyword controls in 2019, as reported by PPC Hero. Meanwhile, Sam’s Club Connect, another Walmart property, has provided negative keyword functionality for quite some time, as their LinkedIn account reports.
Chris Sheldon, consulting leader at Podean and among the first to use Walmart Connect, pointed out that before this launch, advertisers were forced to buy on brand terms in all automatic campaigns since the ad platform debuted in late 2019. With Walmart’s e-commerce business booming amid Covid, requests for negative keyword support multiplied. As Sheldon put it, “It really has been, basically since Covid, since e-comm exploded at Walmart, a begging to get them to release this.”
Walmart Connect’s own website acknowledges that automatic campaigns maximize exposure, but points out that, until now, the absence of negative keywords prevented brands from avoiding unproductive search traffic.
Potential impacts on ad budgets and campaign performance
Alicia Marshia, who manages strategic partnerships at Pacvue, noted strong demand from clients of all sizes for this targeting capability and emphasized that big advertisers need to prevent their own products from competing against one another within search results.
Experts anticipate improved efficiency in spending as brands can bypass search terms that drive little to no conversions. Ray Easley, Flywheel’s senior director of commerce, shared the example of an eyewear advertiser avoiding placements next to wine glasses, stating: “Not having negative key terms meant that we were spending on key terms that were not giving us return. You could have a big spend pile that goes toward a search term, but no conversion.”
Although advertisers will be able to prioritize top-performing search terms, this may increase competition for these high-value keywords and potentially raise cost-per-click rates. Sheldon warns that as brands reduce spend on branded queries—which usually yield stronger returns—their ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) numbers might drop, requiring explanation to business stakeholders.
Nonetheless, Marshia advises keeping some investment in branded keywords as a defensive move, while taking advantage of the new flexibility in campaign targeting. Easley reported that his team is already collaborating with clients to pinpoint low-performing keywords for exclusion and closely measuring post-change campaign improvements.
Wider implications and industry maturity
The leap to negative keywords reflects an evolving retail media network’s maturation and a clear response to advertiser needs. Marshia pointed out that with this latest upgrade, Walmart Connect aligns itself with other leading retail media platforms and may free up advertising budgets for newer initiatives such as connected TV—one of Walmart’s strategic priorities.
As advertisers grow more advanced, the expectation is that improved search campaign efficiency and more refined budget allocation, enabled by this feature, will open the door for brands to adopt broader awareness and consideration campaigns based on precise keyword targeting.