Walmart Connect rolled out negative keyword functionality for sponsored product campaigns in late July 2026, letting advertisers exclude specific search terms so their ads stop serving on matches such as "dog food" or "running shoes". Amazon shipped the same control in 2019 and Walmart-owned Sam's Club has had it for several years, so this is a seven-year catch-up rather than a new idea in retail media.
The rollout was reported by Digiday on 12 August 2026, in an article on Walmart finally letting advertisers exclude certain search terms. Walmart Connect says the control "can help improve budget efficiency, reduce less relevant traffic and support campaign optimization." The control is live in the Walmart Connect Ad Center and through partner platforms including Pacvue, Skai, Quartile, Teikametrics and DataCaciques.
What Walmart Connect actually shipped
Walmart Connect added the ability to name search terms that a sponsored-product campaign should never serve on. That is the whole feature, and its plainness is the point. Before late July 2026, automatic campaigns on Walmart Connect handed the platform's algorithm full control of placement, with no exclusion mechanism available to the advertiser. If the algorithm decided a query was relevant, the ad served and the advertiser paid, whether or not the advertiser agreed.
Two categories of spend were flowing out through that gap. The first was irrelevant matching, where a product surfaced against queries that had no commercial relationship with it. The second, and the one buyers in the Digiday piece kept returning to, was branded search: shoppers typing the brand's own name, finding the brand's own product, and clicking a paid placement to reach a listing they would very likely have reached anyway.
Access is available in two places. Advertisers can add exclusions directly in the Walmart Connect Ad Center, and the same control is exposed through the partner platforms Digiday names: Pacvue, Skai, Quartile, Teikametrics and DataCaciques. Teams already managing Walmart spend inside one of those tools do not need to move workflow back into the native interface.
Why reported ROAS is supposed to fall after you add negatives
This is the part of the story that matters most, and the part most likely to be misread inside a business. Buyers quoted by Digiday expect reported return on ad spend to drop on paper once cheap branded clicks are stripped out of sponsored-product campaigns. That drop is the expected and correct outcome of the change, not evidence that something broke.
The mechanism is arithmetic. Branded queries convert at very high rates because the shopper has already decided which brand they want before they type. They also tend to be cheap, because fewer advertisers bid aggressively on a competitor's brand name inside a retail media environment. High conversion rate plus low cost per click produces a very flattering ROAS figure on that slice of spend. When that slice sits inside a blended campaign number, it lifts the average for everything else in the campaign, including placements that are performing poorly.
Remove the branded slice with a negative keyword and two things happen at once. Total spend on the campaign falls, and the average quality of the remaining spend, measured by ROAS, gets worse. What is left is prospecting against shoppers who did not arrive already asking for the brand. Those clicks cost more and convert less often, which is exactly what you would expect from demand you have to create rather than demand you are intercepting.
Chris Sheldon of Podean framed the underlying issue in the Digiday piece: "In a world obsessed with incrementality, the least incremental form of advertisement is your branded terms." Ray Easley of Flywheel described the practical cost of the missing control: "Not having negative key terms meant we were spending on key terms not giving us return." The two quotes describe the same problem from opposite ends. One is about the measurement distortion, the other about the cash.
How to tell a healthy ROAS drop from a real one
The difference is visible in order volume, not in the ratio. Pull a baseline before you add a single negative keyword, covering at least 30 days of sponsored-product spend, orders and revenue, and split it into branded and non-branded buckets by hand if the platform will not do it for you. Then watch what happens after the exclusions go live.
- Spend falls, orders hold roughly flat, reported ROAS falls: the excluded terms were harvesting demand that arrived anyway. This is the outcome the change is designed to produce.
- Spend falls, orders fall by a similar proportion, reported ROAS holds: the excluded terms were carrying real volume, and the exclusion list was cut too wide.
- Spend falls, orders fall by more than spend: something in the exclusion list is blocking terms you badly need, and it should be reversed while you work out which one.
- Spend holds, orders fall: the negatives are probably not the cause, and the investigation belongs somewhere else, such as pricing, stock or listing quality.
Whichever pattern shows up, write down the date the negatives went live. Retail media reporting is noisy enough that a change with no recorded start date becomes unattributable within a fortnight.
How Walmart Connect compares with Amazon and Sam's Club on this control
The Digiday article establishes a clear sequence for when this specific control reached each retail media platform, which is worth keeping in front of anyone who has to justify the workload of rebuilding Walmart campaign hygiene.
| Platform | Negative keywords available | What the reporting states |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon | 2019 | Digiday states Amazon shipped the same feature in 2019, seven years before Walmart Connect. |
| Sam's Club (Walmart-owned) | Several years ago | Digiday states the Walmart-owned warehouse chain has had the control for several years. No specific launch date is given. |
| Walmart Connect | Late July 2026 | Rolled out in the Ad Center and through partner platforms including Pacvue, Skai, Quartile, Teikametrics and DataCaciques. |
What the Digiday report did not say
Three questions that a working advertiser will ask immediately are not answered in the source, and guessing at them would be worse than leaving them open.
- Match types. The reporting does not state whether Walmart Connect supports exact, phrase or broad negatives, or whether exclusions are single-term only. Check this in the Ad Center before writing a list, because the answer changes how many entries you need.
- Limits. No campaign-level or account-level cap on the number of negatives is mentioned. If you plan a list of several hundred terms, confirm the ceiling before you build it.
- Scope. The reporting covers sponsored-product campaigns. It does not say whether the control extends to Sponsored Brands or to display placements on Walmart Connect.
What to check in your Walmart Connect account this week
The work here is small and mostly clerical, which is why it tends to get postponed. A single afternoon covers it for most accounts.
- Export the search term report for the longest window the Ad Center gives you, and sort it by spend descending rather than by order count.
- Mark every term containing your own brand name and its common misspellings. Do not exclude them yet. Total the spend and the attributed revenue for that group so you know the size of what you are about to switch off.
- Mark terms with meaningful spend and zero attributed orders across the full window. These are the uncontroversial exclusions and they should go first.
- Decide the branded question deliberately. Some categories genuinely need defensive branded coverage on a marketplace because a competitor is bidding on the brand name. Others are paying to be shown to shoppers who typed the brand into the search bar. The Digiday quotes point at the second case, and the answer depends on your own search term report rather than on a rule.
- Add the exclusions in the Ad Center or through whichever partner platform runs the account, then leave the campaign alone for a full purchase cycle before judging the outcome.
What this means for Thai marketers
The Digiday reporting concerns Walmart Connect in the United States and says nothing about Thailand. Two things still transfer.
The first is direct. Thai exporters and brand owners selling through Walmart Marketplace have an account-level action available now that was not available in June 2026, and the branded-spend question above applies to their accounts exactly as written.
The second is structural. The pattern Walmart Connect just closed, automated placement with weak exclusion controls, is the normal operating condition of sponsored ads on Lazada and Shopee. Automatic campaign types dominate, exclusion tooling is limited compared with search advertising, and the same two leaks apply: irrelevant matching and paid interception of shoppers who were already searching for the brand. Sellers cannot fix a platform limitation, but they can measure the size of the leak. Pull the search term or keyword report, split branded from non-branded, and calculate what share of marketplace ad spend is going to queries that already name the shop or the brand. That number is usually larger than the team expects, and it changes how the channel gets budgeted against everything else in the e-commerce marketing mix.
Why this is a useful teaching case for search advertising
Negative keywords, search term mining and the separation of branded from non-branded reporting are the same three practices whether the auction sits inside Walmart, a Southeast Asian marketplace or Google. The Walmart story is unusually clean because it shows the counterfactual: an entire mature ad platform running for years without exclusions, and buyers describing in plain language what that cost them.
The practice that carries over is the routine, not the feature. Search term reports get read on a schedule. Terms with spend and no return get excluded. Branded and non-branded performance get reported separately so that neither hides inside the other. Accounts that already run this loop in Google Ads can port it to Walmart Connect in an afternoon, because the thinking is identical and only the interface changes.
There is also a reporting lesson worth carrying into any conversation with a finance team. A campaign whose ROAS improves every quarter while its non-branded volume shrinks is not improving. It is concentrating spend on the demand that was already there. Splitting the report is what makes that visible, and the split costs nothing.
FAQ on Walmart Connect negative keywords
When did Walmart Connect add negative keywords?
Walmart Connect rolled the control out in late July 2026, according to Digiday's 12 August 2026 report. Amazon shipped the equivalent feature in 2019, and Walmart-owned Sam's Club has had it for several years.
Where do I add negative keywords on Walmart Connect?
In the Walmart Connect Ad Center, or through partner platforms including Pacvue, Skai, Quartile, Teikametrics and DataCaciques. Both routes carry the same control, so the choice depends on where the account is already managed.
Does Walmart Connect support negative match types?
The Digiday report does not say. It confirms that exclusions exist for sponsored-product campaigns but does not state whether exact, phrase or broad negative match types are supported, so check the Ad Center directly before building a list.
Will my ROAS go down if I exclude branded search terms?
Reported ROAS will very likely fall, and that is the expected result. Branded clicks are cheap and convert at high rates, so removing them lowers the blended average while removing the spend that was least likely to have created an incremental sale.
Does this change apply to Sponsored Brands or display on Walmart Connect?
The reporting covers sponsored-product campaigns only. It does not state whether the exclusion control extends to Sponsored Brands or display placements, so treat those formats as unconfirmed until Walmart Connect documents them.
If you sell on a marketplace and have never split branded from non-branded ad spend, that report is the cheapest diagnostic available and it usually pays for the afternoon it takes. Relevant Audience works on marketplace and search advertising for brands in Thailand and across the region, and we are happy to look at the numbers with you.
