Walmart Connect Adds Negative Keywords to Sponsored Products

August, 2026
Abdullah Zafar

Walmart Connect Adds Negative Keywords to Sponsored Products

Walmart Connect has introduced negative keywords for Sponsored Products, giving advertisers more control over which customer searches trigger their ads. The update is designed to help sellers reduce wasted spend, filter irrelevant traffic, and improve campaign efficiency.

What’s New?

Negative keywords are now available for manual Sponsored Products campaigns and automatic campaigns using fixed bidding. Advertisers can use two match types:

Negative exact match: Prevents an ad from showing only when the customer’s search exactly matches the excluded keyword.
Negative phrase match: Prevents ads from showing when the search contains the full excluded phrase, even when additional words appear before or after it.

For example, adding “dog food” as a negative exact keyword blocks the exact search “dog food.” Using it as a negative phrase keyword can also block searches such as “white dog food” or “dog food for puppies.”

Why It Matters for Walmart Sellers

Negative keywords give advertisers another lever for controlling Sponsored Products campaigns. Sellers can exclude searches that generate clicks without meaningful results while continuing to capture related, high-value searches.

For Marketplace sellers in particular, this can help make limited advertising budgets work harder by reducing spend on irrelevant traffic. Larger suppliers can also use the feature to manage overlapping products, brands, and branded search traffic more precisely.

Where Sellers Can Use It

Negative keywords can be added when creating a new campaign or applied to ad groups within existing campaigns. The feature is available through Walmart Connect Ad Center and supported partner platforms, including Pacvue, Skai, Quartile, Teikametrics, and DataCaciques.

What This Means for Your Walmart PPC Strategy

This update adds another optimization layer alongside budgets, bids, keywords, and products, which are the four core levers Walmart Connect identifies for campaign optimization.

A successful Walmart Sponsored Product ads strategy is to review search-term performance regularly, identify irrelevant or inefficient queries, and use negative exact or phrase match strategically rather than simply reducing bids across an entire campaign.