How to Measure Walmart Connect Performance? Key Walmart Advertising Metrics

Walmart Connect offers direct access to one of the largest omnichannel retail audiences in the U.S., paired with rich first-party data and closed-loop attribution across both online and in-store sales. As media budgets shift toward retail media networks, understanding how Walmart campaigns perform and their impact on total business outcomes is critical for teams managing complex, multi-channel strategies.

This article provides a focused look at the most important Walmart Connect metrics, how to monitor and analyze them effectively, and how to integrate that data with the broader marketing stack to drive smarter decisions at scale.

What Is Walmart Connect? 

Walmart Connect ad solutions and formats

Walmart Connect offers several advertising formats to reach shoppers across different channels and stages of the customer journey:

• Sponsored products (Sponsored search ads): Appear in search results and product detail pages to boost visibility of individual SKUs. Ideal for middle- and bottom-of-funnel targeting and driving direct sales.
• Sponsored brands (Sponsored search ads): Feature a custom brand logo, headline, and multiple SKUs. These ads help increase brand awareness while also driving traffic to curated product listings or brand pages. 
• Sponsored videos (Sponsored search ads): These ads feature short video ads that play within the search results feed. These video ads are keyword-targeted and designed to grab attention and boost product discovery and consideration.
• Onsite display ads: Appear on Walmart.com and the Walmart app in high-traffic areas, such as homepages, category pages, and cart pages. This type of ads offers advanced targeting based on behavior, demographics, and purchase history.
• Offsite display and programmatic (via Walmart DSP which is powered by The Trade Desk): Brands can use Walmart's first-party data to reach customers on third-party websites, mobile apps, Connected TV platforms, audio streaming services, and even within gaming apps. It greatly extends the reach of the ads and still feeds into Walmart's closed-loop measurement system.
• In-store media: Includes TV walls, screens near the deli or bakery, self-checkout screens, point-of-purchase signage, and in-store radio. These formats reinforce digital campaigns with in-store messaging, enhancing omnichannel engagement.
• In-store demos: Walmart Connect offers experiential marketing opportunities. Brands can set up in-store demos, sampling stations, or even special events to create hands-on engagement with products. This type of in-store advertising can be especially valuable for impulse categories and local marketing.
• Brand shops and shelves (digital storefront): In addition to paid ad placements, Walmart Connect provides a tool for brand-building on Walmart's site. A Brand Shop is essentially a free, customized microsite on Walmart.com where a brand can tell its story and showcase its full catalog of products. Advertisers can design their Brand Shop with banners, videos, and product groupings to create an immersive shopping experience for customers.

This diverse media mix enables advertisers to build full-funnel strategies within a single platform.

What Are the Benefits of Running Ads with Walmart Connect? 

Walmart Connect offers a unique advantage in the retail media landscape by combining massive reach with closed-loop measurement, which means you can tie media exposure directly to online and in-store transactions. 

• Reacs: With over 150 million weekly shoppers across digital and physical channels, advertisers gain access to one of the largest and most consistent first-party audiences in the U.S. This allows for granular targeting at scale, across devices and shopping environments.
• Attribution model: The platform links ad impressions directly to both online and offline sales, offering closed-loop measurement. Advertisers can track ROAS and in-store lift with confidence, making it easier to justify spend and optimize campaigns in real time.
• Omnichannel experience: Few platforms enable advertisers to run unified campaigns across ecommerce, mobile apps, and brick-and-mortar stores. Walmart Connect does, providing consistent messaging from awareness to conversion and allowing marketers to drive measurable impact at every stage of the funnel.
• Cost efficiency: Walmart Connect's average CPC frequently falls below Amazon's, typically $0.50–$2.00, compared to Amazon's $0.50–$5.00+, with click-through rates notably higher (3x) and a 25% higher return on ad spend than Amazon.

To sum it up, Walmart Connect provides brands a high-ROI, cost-effective advertising environment. 

What Are the Key Metrics to Analyze Walmart Advertising Performance? 

Unlike some open ad ecosystems, Walmart Connect provides a mix of traditional digital advertising KPIs and retail-specific metrics tied to actual sales behavior.

Walmart Connect performance metrics

Walmart Connect sales and revenue metrics

Tracking these metrics in tandem allows teams to identify patterns, diagnose issues, and scale what works. 

What Is Walmart Connect Campaign Performance Dashboard? 

One of Walmart Connect’s biggest strengths is the transparency and depth of its performance reporting.

The Walmart Connect Ad Center features Performance Dashboards that provide advertisers with on-demand access to all their key campaign metrics, updated frequently.

These dashboards are omnichannel, meaning they display the performance of your ads across Walmart’s e-commerce sites, apps, and physical stores.

There are typically separate dashboards or views for Sponsored Products vs. Display ads, since each format has its own set of metrics and attribution, but both are available in a unified interface.

What kind of data can you see? 

Virtually all the metrics discussed earlier are visible, including impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, sales revenue, units sold, ad spend, and ROAS, all broken down by campaign and over time.

The Walmart dashboard offers a variety of reporting views:

• Daily Performance reports showing trends by day),
• Campaign Performance reports with summaries for each campaign,
• Page Type Performance showing how your ads did on search pages vs. product pages vs. category pages, for example,
• Platform Performance displaying results by device type: app, desktop, mobile web.

How to Optimize Walmart Connect Ad Performance? 

Achieving strong results on Walmart Connect requires not just using the right ad formats, but also continuously optimizing your campaigns. 

Here are several strategies and best practices that brands and advertisers can apply to improve Walmart ad performance.

1. Map ad products to clear business objectives and shopper journeys

Every Walmart Connect ad format serves a distinct purpose. Performance begins with selecting the right ad unit based on where the shopper is in their purchase journey.

• Sponsored Products should be used for high-intent moments to drive conversions.
• Sponsored Brands are best for category-level awareness and positioning.
• Display Ads (on-site and off-site) can be leveraged for retargeting or new customer acquisition based on behavioral signals.

Aligning campaign objectives to the right placement ensures better budget utilization and enables meaningful performance benchmarking.

2. Develop a tiered and controlled keyword targeting strategy

Efficient keyword targeting is critical to maximizing ROAS within Sponsored Search campaigns.

Marketers should:

• Segment keywords into branded, generic/category, and competitor clusters.
• Use match types strategically, favoring exact and phrase matches to maintain targeting precision.
• Regularly mine search term reports to identify new opportunities and suppress non-converting queries via negative keywords.

Advanced teams go a step further, applying budget caps and bid modifiers by keyword type to prioritize profitability over volume.

3. Prioritize high-conversion SKUs through SKU-level optimization

Ad efficiency on Walmart Connect is heavily influenced by the retail readiness and historical performance of individual SKUs. 

To maximize return, campaign budgets should be allocated based on a combination of conversion potential, profitability, and operational readiness at the item level.

Audit SKU performance across multiple dimensions, including sales velocity, conversion rate, click-through rate (CTR), gross margin, and inventory turnover. 

Based on this data, build dynamic SKU tiers to guide budget allocation:

• Tier 1: High-margin, high-conversion SKUs with full in-stock status and optimized PDPs.
• Tier 2: Emerging or seasonal SKUs with moderate performance or lower visibility.
• Tier 3: Low-margin, low-conversion, or operationally constrained SKUs should be minimized, unless they are tied to specific objectives.

Align bidding strategies by SKU tier, with more aggressive CPC bids applied to Tier 1 products and controlled spend limits for lower tiers.

4. Implement automated campaign monitoring 

Manual monitoring of Walmart Connect campaigns across SKUs, ad types, and KPIs can introduce blind spots, delay response times, and increase the risk of wasted spend.

Introducing a Marketing Data Governance tool enables proactive oversight and alerts when campaign performance deviates from predefined thresholds.

With automated campaign monitoring, brands can:

• Set custom rules for critical metrics like ROAS drop, under-delivery, or SKU-level conversion decline.
• Get real-time alerts via Slack, email, or dashboard when issues arise, such as ads serving to underage users, budget pacing inconsistencies, or PDP content errors.
• Enforce data quality controls by identifying gaps or anomalies in performance reporting across Walmart Connect and related retail datasets.

Layering governance on top of performance monitoring significantly reduces the lag between issue detection and resolution, protecting budget and sustaining performance across campaigns.

5. Ensure product detail pages (PDPs) are retail-ready

A well-optimized PDP can significantly increase post-click conversion rates, which in turn improves ad relevance scores and lowers CPC.

Key elements to include into your PDP audit:

• Bullet points clearly communicate differentiators, technical specs, and benefits in a scannable format optimized for mobile and voice search.
• High-resolution imagery provides multiple angles, scales, packaging, and product-in-use views.
• Ratings and reviews that are recent, verified, and average 4.0 or above, along with a consistent flow of review activity to support trust signals.
• Full inventory is available across top-performing regions, with support for multiple fulfillment options (pickup, delivery, ship-to-home).
• Accurate attribution and categorization are in place, including GTINs, UPCs, brand ownership, and attribute tagging to avoid listing suppression.
• Everything is compliant with policy: no prohibited claims, missing disclaimers, or content duplication from other retail or DTC platforms.

For top-performing items, teams often run PDP audits weekly to maintain conversion consistency.

6. Integrate real-time inventory monitoring into campaign execution

Serving ads for out-of-stock or low-inventory products results in wasted spend and shopper dissatisfaction.

To mitigate this:

• Automate SKU pausing based on inventory thresholds.
• Sync inventory feeds with Walmart Connect via APIs or third-party data platforms.
• Create campaigns specifically for overstocked or high-turnover inventory to accelerate sell-through.

Inventory awareness must be embedded into the campaign lifecycle, rather than being treated as a post-launch consideration.

7. Automate bid adjustments based on real-time performance thresholds

Static bids can’t respond to the velocity of retail changes. To stay competitive:

• Use rule-based bidding to adjust based on ROAS, inventory status, or margin.
• Leverage Walmart Connect dynamic bidding features, when applicable, for real-time auction optimization.

Automation frees up resources and ensures your budget is always working toward its most efficient return.

How to Eliminate Blind Spots in Walmart Campaign Performance?

Walmart Connect provides in-depth visibility into campaign performance through its native analytics and attribution capabilities, spanning online, in-store, and omnichannel impact. 

But unlocking full value requires more than reviewing isolated metrics. It takes disciplined analysis at the SKU, tactic, and audience level, supported by real-time monitoring and clean, structured data.

Improvado integrates Walmart Connect with the rest of your marketing and sales stack, consolidating retail media, paid channels, CRM, and BI platforms into a single, reliable view. This enables advanced performance analysis, cross-channel benchmarking, and faster decisions at every level of the organization.

See how Improvado can unify your Walmart Connect data and drive smarter performance—book a demo today.

FAQs

What are the key metrics for Walmart?

The most important metrics for evaluating Walmart Connect campaign performance focus on efficiency, conversion, and shopper behavior across digital and in-store touchpoints, including:

1. Impressions: Track the number of times your ad was served across Walmart digital properties. Useful for measuring reach and visibility.
2. Clicks: Show how often users engage with your ads by clicking through to product detail pages.
3. Click-through rate (CTR): Indicates the effectiveness of your creative and targeting by showing the ratio of clicks to impressions.
4. Cost per click (CPC): Measures the average cost paid per click. Helps evaluate bidding efficiency and compare spend across campaigns.
5. Attributed sales: Total sales (online and in-store) tied to ad views or clicks, within a set attribution window. This includes omnichannel sales captured through Walmart's closed-loop measurement.
6. Return on ad spend (ROAS): Calculates the revenue generated per dollar spent. A critical metric for assessing overall campaign performance.
7. New-to-brand sales: Measures how many purchases come from first-time buyers of your brand at Walmart. Useful for understanding acquisition impact.
8. Conversion rate: Percentage of clicks that lead to purchases. Reflects both product-market fit and PDP quality.
9. Page type performance: Breaks down performance based on placement (search, browse, PDP). Helps identify which environments drive the best results.
10. Performance by tactic (for display ads): Provides visibility into how different targeting strategies (audience, contextual, geo) are performing during live campaigns.

What are Walmart seller performance metrics?

Walmart seller performance metrics are a set of operational standards that all marketplace sellers must consistently meet to provide a consistent, high-quality customer experience.

There are five key metrics that Walmart actively tracks and evaluates, typically over a rolling 30-day period:

• Cancellation rate: The percentage of orders canceled by the seller after an order is received. Walmart's target is below 2%. High cancellation rates indicate unreliability and can negatively impact a seller's standing.
• On-time delivery rate (OTD): The proportion of orders delivered on or before the promised delivery date. Walmart requires an OTD of greater than 95%. This ensures customers consistently receive their orders as expected.
• Valid tracking rate (VTR): The percentage of orders with valid, traceable tracking information provided to Walmart and customers. The goal is to maintain a VTR above 99%; valid tracking is crucial for transparency and trust.
• Refund rate: The percentage of orders refunded for reasons attributable to the seller, such as damaged goods or incorrect items. Walmart expects a refund rate of less than 6%.
• Seller response rate: The percentage of customer messages and inquiries answered within 48 hours. Sellers are expected to meet a response rate above 95% to ensure prompt customer service.

Consistently poor performance metrics can lead to listing suppression or reduced Buy Box eligibility, which in turn makes those items ineligible for ad campaigns.