Amazon vs. Walmart Advertising: 5 Differences That Change How You Budget
Amazon has ASIN targeting and free query data. Walmart has in-store screens and a 30% private-label shelf. Five ad differences that change your budget.
Both platforms sell ads against purchase intent. Almost everything downstream of that works differently, and two of the differences run opposite to what most sellers expect.
Amazon and Walmart both put sponsored placements in front of shoppers who came to buy. Past that, the platforms diverge in five ways that matter to your budget.
Amazon runs four self-serve ad formats plus a managed programmatic tier. Walmart runs three self-serve formats plus off-site and in-store inventory. Walmart’s private brands take roughly 30% of its sales volume while Amazon’s take about 3%, so house-brand pressure runs the opposite direction from the common assumption.
Amazon lets you target a specific competitor product by ASIN and Walmart still does not. Amazon gives brand-registered sellers query-level funnel data at no cost, while Walmart’s equivalent depth lives in a paid supplier platform. And Walmart can put your ad on a screen inside a physical store, which Amazon has no answer for.
If you run both platforms off one strategy document, at least three of those five are quietly costing you money.
Walmart reached their impressive $606 billion number through the strength of their 3335 physical locations. Even though their year-over-year eCommerce growth was 11.98% compared to Amazon’s 4.61% year-over-year eCommerce decline, brick and mortar is Walmart’s bread and butter.
It’s pretty clear that Amazon needs to keep their eyes on the rear-view mirror.
What is significant is that both companies are competing for more commercial bandwidth on each other’s traditional selling stronghold. Amazon is trying to gain a foothold in the retail market, while over the last 12 months, Walmart has exploded onto the eCommerce stage.
The scale gap closed in 2025
Amazon’s net sales increased 12% to $716.9 billion in 2025, compared with $638.0 billion in 2024. Walmart’s total revenues reached $713.2 billion for fiscal 2026, which ended January 31, 2026, on net sales of $706.4 billion across 10,955 retail units. Two companies, roughly $1.4 trillion combined, within half a percent of each other.
The ad businesses are not close. Amazon’s advertising services reached $68.6 billion in FY 2025, growing 22% year over year. Walmart’s is a fraction of that but growing faster: in Q2 FY27, reported August 20, 2026, Walmart’s global advertising business was up 38%, including a 43% increase in Walmart Connect excluding VIZIO.
For a seller, faster growth on the smaller platform means the cheap-CPC window on Walmart is closing, not open indefinitely. We covered what that compression looks like in Walmart Connect Grew 43%. Your CPCs Are Next.
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Get a Category Competition Review1. Amazon has more formats and more surface to buy
Amazon offers five ad types: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, Sponsored TV, and Amazon DSP. The first four are self-serve formats you can switch on from your seller account. Sponsored Display reaches off Amazon. Sponsored TV runs non-skippable video across Prime Video, Fire TV Channels, Twitch, and third-party publishers.
Walmart Connect gives you Sponsored Search, Sponsored Brands, and onsite display, with a self-serve onsite display platform launched with an auction-based buying model, real-time forecasting, and on-demand reporting in mid-2026.
The practical difference is not the count. It’s that Amazon gives you four distinct ways to reach the same shopper at four points in their week, and Walmart gives you two strong ones and a display product that’s still maturing. Budget accordingly: on Amazon you can build a funnel inside the ad console. On Walmart you’re mostly buying the bottom of it.
2. Walmart’s house brands compete with you harder than Amazon’s do
This is the one that surprises people. The received wisdom says Amazon copies your product and undercuts you, so Walmart is the safer harbor. The numbers say otherwise.
Walmart sees about 30% of its overall sales volume come from private label products. Only 3% of Amazon’s sales volume is attributable to private label. Five Walmart brands had over 50% U.S. household penetration in the past year, including Great Value at 86%, Equate at 75%, and Mainstays at 70%.
Twenty-one Walmart U.S. private brands each do more than $1 billion in sales, and Walmart sells under a total of 90 owned brands. Great Value alone does more than $27 billion a year globally.
Ten to one, in the direction nobody expects.
What this does to your ad plan: on Walmart, the shelf you’re bidding into often has a Walmart-owned product sitting on it at a lower price, in a category where the house brand already has the household. Your keyword bid buys the click. It does not buy the price comparison that happens two seconds later. On Amazon, the private-label pressure is real in a handful of categories and close to absent in most.
Check your category before you assume which platform is friendlier. If you sell grocery, household consumables, health and beauty, basic apparel, or budget electronics, you are competing with a Walmart brand that has more household reach than you do.
3. Amazon lets you target competitors. Walmart still doesn’t.
Walmart closed one of its two biggest targeting gaps this summer. In late July, Walmart Connect gave advertisers the ability to exclude specific search terms for Sponsored Products campaigns through negative keywords, now available in the Walmart Connect Ad Center. The rollout date was July 29, 2026.
That change is bigger than it sounds. Before it, the standard workaround was splitting match types across separate ad groups so you could shut off the ones bleeding budget. That structure is no longer necessary, and if you built your Walmart account that way, it’s now working against you.
The gap that remains is product targeting. Walmart Connect does not currently allow product targeting, which is a feature available on Amazon. That makes keyword strategy your primary lever. On Amazon you can put a Sponsored Products or Sponsored Display ad directly on a competitor’s detail page by ASIN. On Walmart, you cannot buy that placement at all.
So the same $5,000 buys different things. On Amazon a slice of it goes to conquesting and defensive ASIN targeting on your own pages. On Walmart, all of it goes into the keyword auction, which means Walmart budgets concentrate faster and hit diminishing returns sooner on a narrow keyword set.
4. Who gets the data, and who pays for it
The older version of this comparison held that Amazon hides seller data and Walmart shares it. That has not been true for a while.
Amazon Brand Analytics groups aggregate customer data into Customer Journey Analytics, Customer Loyalty Analytics, Search Analytics, and Consumer Behavior Analytics, with dashboards including Search Query Performance, Search Catalog Performance, Top Search Terms, Repeat Purchase Behavior, Demographics, and Market Basket Analysis.
It is included at no additional cost with a Professional selling account and Brand Registry enrollment. Search Query Performance gives brand-registered sellers the exact queries shoppers type, the impressions those generate, and how many turn into clicks, cart adds, and purchases. Above that sits Amazon Marketing Cloud, with event-level clicks, impressions, and conversions accessed through a SQL query interface.
Walmart’s depth lives in Scintilla, run by Walmart Data Ventures. It was renamed from Walmart Luminate, and while the basic form comes at no added cost to suppliers, the charter version requires a subscription. That framing matters: it is built around suppliers, so a marketplace seller does not get the same view a 1P supplier does.
Where Walmart genuinely wins is closed-loop measurement to the physical store. Walmart can tell you a CTV impression preceded a purchase on a store trip. Amazon has no equivalent, because it has no store trip.
Read that as a trade, not a ranking. Amazon gives you deeper free search diagnostics. Walmart gives you attribution across a channel Amazon doesn’t operate in.
5. Where the ads go when they leave the search bar
Amazon’s answer off the search results page is DSP and streaming: Prime Video, Fire TV, Twitch, and third-party inventory, bought against Amazon purchase signals. It’s a strong stack, and self-serve Sponsored TV brought the entry point down considerably. Our DSP service page covers how that tier works.
Walmart’s answer is structurally different, and 2026 was the year it got serious. Walmart acquired Vibe.co for $1.4 billion to bring self-serve streaming TV into Walmart Connect, combining self-serve ad capabilities with the retailer’s first-party customer data, closed-loop measurement, and owned media properties such as the Vizio smart TV OS. That closes the gap with Amazon DSP for small and mid-market advertisers who never cleared DSP’s minimums.
Then there’s inventory Amazon cannot match at any price. Brands can run campaigns on digital TV Wall screens in Walmart stores, sponsor content on self-checkout kiosks, run in-store audio ads, or execute sampling and demos. Roughly 4,600 U.S. stores of physical ad surface, attached to the same shopper ID that buys online.
If your product has an in-store presence at Walmart, this is the single biggest reason to treat Walmart Connect as its own channel rather than a smaller copy of your Amazon program.
How to split the budget
Start from what each platform can do that the other cannot, and fund those first.
Amazon gets the conquesting budget, because ASIN targeting exists there and nowhere else. Amazon gets the search diagnostic work, because Search Query Performance is free and shows you where the funnel leaks. Walmart gets the in-store-adjacent spend if you have shelf presence, and it gets a genuine keyword rebuild now that negative keywords exist. Both get a category check against house brands before you set bids.
What neither should get is a copy-pasted keyword list. That’s the most common mistake we see when a brand adds its second marketplace, and it usually shows up as a Walmart account that spends efficiently on brand terms and nothing else.
Canopy Management is a full-service omnichannel agency based in Austin, Texas. We run Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop, Shopify, Meta, and Google for brands doing $20K to $1.5M in monthly revenue, with the same dedicated brand manager owning the account for the life of the engagement.
The numbers we lead with: $3.3 billion in partner revenue, 84% average year-over-year profit increase, and 99.1% partner retention.
Schedule a strategy session to see how we’d approach your account.
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Talk to a Cross-Platform Ads TeamFrequently Asked Questions
Not for Sponsored Products, which any Professional seller can run. Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored TV all require Brand Registry enrollment. If you’re brand-registered you also get Brand Analytics at no extra cost, which is the real reason to enroll before spending.
An active Walmart Marketplace or supplier account and items you hold the Buy Box on. Ads won’t serve on listings where you’ve lost the Buy Box, so listing health gates your ad spend more directly than it does on Amazon. Start on a handful of items rather than the whole catalog.
Generally yes, though the gap narrows every quarter as more advertisers arrive. Treat any CPC benchmark you read as a snapshot rather than a plan, and re-baseline your own numbers quarterly. Your category matters more than the platform average.
Yes, if you built separate ad groups by match type to control search terms. That workaround adds management overhead you no longer need. Pull a 30-day search term report, add negatives on the non-converting tail, then consolidate the ad groups.
Whichever one your category’s shoppers already use, which is usually Amazon for discovery-driven products and Walmart for replenishment and household goods. Running both badly is worse than running one well. Add the second once the first is profitable and you have someone to own it.
Use it as a starting hypothesis, not a plan. Search behavior differs enough that a straight import typically overspends on terms with no Walmart volume. Rebuild from Walmart’s own search term data after 30 days of running.
