The feature that should have shipped years ago
Amazon has had negative keywords since 2013. Google even longer. Walmart Connect launched Sponsored Products as a serious self-serve platform years ago and, until recently, offered zero way to exclude specific searches from triggering your ads.
On July 29, 2026, that changed. Walmart Connect rolled out negative keyword exclusions for Sponsored Products to all US advertisers. Per Modern Retail and Pacvue, the feature supports negative exact match and negative phrase match at both campaign and ad group level, for both manual and automatic fixed-bid campaigns. It's live in the Walmart Connect Ad Center and through technology partners including Pacvue, Skai, Quartile, Teikametrics, and DataCaciques.
This closes a feature gap that has been costing Walmart advertisers real money for years.
Why the absence mattered more than brands admitted
Without negative keywords, every search Walmart's algorithm decided was "relevant" to your product could trigger an ad — regardless of whether the intent behind it made sense for your brand.
The problems were predictable. A supplement brand could surface for searches that match the broad category but represent a completely different purchase decision. A brand with multiple product lines might find its premium SKUs appearing when someone types in a search that maps to its entry-level range. A brand defending its own terms could waste budget on adjacent queries where conversion rate is structurally low.
There was no hard exclusion. You could tighten keyword targeting or lower bids, but you could not tell the platform: never show my ad here. Average daily spending on Walmart Sponsored Products grew 25% year over year in Q2 2026, according to Nova Data. If a meaningful portion of that spend was going against irrelevant queries, the dollar cost of that gap grew with every increase in total investment.
What to do in the first week
Don't try to build a comprehensive negative keyword strategy immediately. That requires search term data you may not have fully surfaced yet.
The immediate move is pulling your Walmart Sponsored Products search term report and looking for four categories of problematic queries you can safely block now.
Competitor brand names where you cannot win on price. If you are a mid-range brand appearing when someone types a competitor's name at a lower price point, that traffic converts at a fraction of the rate of your own terms.
Category mismatches — queries that look semantically adjacent to your product but represent a genuinely different purchase category. A food brand appearing for cleaning supplies. A fitness brand surfacing for medical equipment. These have near-zero conversion relevance regardless of what Walmart's matching logic says.
Generic informational queries with no purchase signal. Terms like "how to," "what is," or review-type searches for a category rather than a specific product tell you the searcher is not in buying mode.
Brand name variants and misspellings that don't map to your actual product range. High volume, near-zero conversion, and the algorithm has been pulling you into them through broad relevance scoring.
Apply broad exclusions at campaign level. Use ad group level for more surgical exceptions — where you need to block a term for one product line but not another.
The harder question this forces
Here's the uncomfortable part.
If your Walmart Sponsored Products ROAS has looked strong for the past few years, some of that number may reflect ads served to people who were going to buy anyway. When there are no query exclusions, campaign ROAS gets calculated across all intent levels, including low-intent browsing where your ad happens to appear alongside an organic purchase decision. That inflates the ROAS figure without generating the sale.
Adding negative keywords won't answer that question retroactively. But the ROAS your campaigns produce from this point forward will be calculated on cleaner traffic. That comparison — pre-negatives versus post-negatives ROAS — will tell you more about what you've been paying for than anything else.
Before you scale Walmart budget based on historical ROAS data, understand what percentage was driven by genuine purchase intent versus broad match noise. The new exclusion controls give you the tools to start separating the two. Most advertisers will not like what they find, but that information is worth having before you commit to a bigger Q4 investment on the platform.
What this means for your retail media stack
Walmart Connect is now a platform where serious performance advertising discipline applies. You can build negative keyword lists from actual search term performance data, structure campaigns with proper query controls, and run the same hygiene that Amazon advertisers have maintained for over a decade.
The timing matters. The brands that move first will build cleaner baseline data going into Q4. Those that wait will enter the holiday window with the same accumulation of irrelevant query traffic they've always had — and now a feature that could have cleaned it up sitting unused.
If you want to see how your retail media allocation looks across platforms and where query-level budget waste is most likely occurring, the free audit at Gromerce maps it in three minutes.
Walmart Connect now has the one control that should have been there from the start.
Sources: Modern Retail, Nova Data, AdExchanger, August 2026
