Walmart finally lets advertisers exclude certain search terms

Retail Media Landscape // August 11, 2026 Walmart finally lets advertisers exclude certain search terms By Mitchell Parton Ivy Liu Walmart’s advertising platform is giving brands more control on where they show up in searches, marking a significant change in how their ad budgets are spent.

In late July, Walmart Connect said it would give advertisers the ability to exclude specific search terms for sponsored-products campaigns through “negative keywords.” This way, brands’ ads won’t show on a customer’s search query if it matches an excluded term that they enter, like “dog food” or “running shoes.”

This feature is now available in the Walmart Connect Ad Center and through partner technology providers such as Pacvue, Skai, Quartile, Teikametrics and DataCaciques, according to Walmart.

“This offers a higher level of control, allowing the blocking of low-performing or misaligned terms without unintentionally filtering out related high-value traffic,” Walmart Connect said in a blog post. “This added control can help improve budget efficiency, reduce less relevant traffic and support campaign optimization across Sponsored Products campaigns.”

“For Marketplace advertisers, negative keywords can help make limited budgets work harder by reducing spend on irrelevant traffic,” the company continued.

“For Walmart suppliers, negative keywords can help support more advanced campaign management across larger brand and product portfolios, including campaigns where multiple products or brands may compete for the same search terms or branded traffic considerations.”

Some advertisers and consultants have been waiting a long time for this change, given that it can exclude irrelevant search queries or searches where customers are already seeking out their exact brand.

This is especially relevant within automatic campaigns where Walmart’s search algorithm places ads, rather than manual campaigns where advertisers individually choose which keywords they want to bid on. Amazon has had a negative keywords feature since 2019, according to advertising trade publication PPC Hero.

Even the retail media network for Walmart-owned Sam’s Club has had negative keywords for at least several years, per Sam’s Club Connect’s LinkedIn account.

Chris Sheldon, a consulting leader at marketplace marketing agency Podean — who was an early adopter of Walmart Connect — said that since the retail media network’s inception in late 2019, brands have been buying on those brand-specific terms with Walmart only because they had no choice if they wanted to do automatic campaigns.

Walmart Connect tells advertisers on its website that automatic campaigns offer maximum exposure. “One thing Amazon has never been able to convince brands to do is spend a ton of money on branded terms,” said Chris Sheldon, a consulting leader at marketplace marketing agency Podean, who was also an early adopter of Walmart Connect.

“In a world that’s obsessed with incrementality, the least incremental form of advertisement is your branded terms.” Sheldon said he was surprised by Walmart’s decision, as the company was likely taking in a lot of ad revenue on branded terms — or exact branded search-term/product matches — before this change.

But brands and adtech partners have been demanding the feature from the company for years, he added. “This was not some quiet little request that just kind of gained popularity in the past couple years,” Sheldon said. “It really has been, basically since Covid, since e-comm exploded at Walmart, a begging to get them to release this.”

Alicia Marshia, a strategic partnerships manager at Pacvue who works with Walmart Connect, said this ask has been coming from brands of all shapes and sizes, and that she has also been trying to convince Walmart Connect to add negative-keyword functionality.

“It was really trying to help [Walmart] underscore and prove up the value in being able to truly control your media spend,” Marshia said. Marshia said for large brands, this will also help them control or better understand how their different products compete with each other for placements on the same search terms.

It can also help brands avoid spending on low-conversion or confusing terms, said Ray Easley, senior director of commerce for Flywheel, a firm that helps CPG brands with retail and media opportunities at Walmart. For example, an eyeglasses brand could use negative keywords to avoid its sponsored listing being shown next to wine glasses.

“What we’re primarily focused on is how this is going to help leverage opportunities to spend budget better,” Easley said. “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 towa