Walmart Deals 2026: 8 Numbers That Should Shape Your Approach 

Planning for this year’s Walmart Deals, June 22-28, tends to follow a familiar sequence: finalize the budget, confirm the listings are clean, and let the campaigns run. The brands that consistently pull ahead aren’t doing something dramatically different. They’re doing the same things with more precision, better timing, and a clearer read on where this year’s market has shifted.

In 2026, that read matters more than usual. Retail media CPCs fell across every single category in Q1, the first time that’s happened in seven years of Skai’s tracking data. Walmart-specific spend is up 30% year-over-year while costs are down. The peer set is investing aggressively. The question isn’t whether to invest in the event. It’s whether your plan accounts for where the real leverage actually is.

Here are eight numbers that frame exactly that. 

The audience is real, the window is narrow, and the intent is yours to capture

40% more spend when consumers see Sponsored Search and Onsite Display together

Most Walmart advertisers still run Sponsored Search as if it’s the entire media program. It’s the default, it’s measurable, and it works. But Walmart Connect data shows consumers exposed to both Sponsored Search and Onsite Display spend up to 40% more on the brand compared to those exposed to Sponsored Search alone. During a high-traffic event, when deal intent peaks, that gap compounds quickly.

The tactical mix worth assembling before the window opens:

• Sponsored Products. Use as the workhorse with brand term targeting enabled, so competitors can’t claim your branded queries during the surge. 
• Sponsored Brands. Custom images in premium placements signal value and savings faster than copy alone. 
• Sponsored Brand Video and Sponsored Videos. The formats that hold attention in dense search results and educate on product benefits in seconds. 
• Onsite Display. Extends reach beyond search and keeps the brand in front of consumers between visits.

Mapping these formats to consumer mindset matters too. Awareness searches are broad, and that’s where Sponsored Brands and Display do the heaviest lifting. Consideration searches are more specific, which is where Sponsored Products and Videos convert efficiently. Purchase searches are highly specific and favor tight Sponsored Products targeting. Most programs over-index on the last phase and neglect the first two. The event is the best possible time to fix that.

How Skai helps. Skai lets you plan, launch, and optimize Sponsored Search and Onsite Display in a single workflow rather than two parallel programs. Cross-format budget rebalancing happens during the event, not after. Keyword Harvesting surfaces emerging search terms inside the window, including new event-specific queries that don’t exist in your historical data, so you capture demand competitors miss. Portfolio-level reporting shows which format combinations are converting and at what cost, letting you double down on the math in real time.

Walmart Connect can have a direct influence on ~150 million U.S. customers every week

Roughly 150 million U.S. customers move through Walmart every week, and customers exposed to a brand’s Walmart Connect ads are, on average, 6x more likely to buy that brand’s items. High-traffic events concentrate that audience around deal intent, giving you a stretch of focused consumer attention that’s genuinely difficult to replicate at other points in the calendar.

That makes the event window the single best new-to-brand acquisition opportunity on Walmart. Sponsored Videos and Onsite Display reach consumers who aren’t already searching for you, which is a large and valuable cohort when traffic spikes. Behavioral and contextual targeting through Walmart DSP extends that reach off Walmart’s owned properties, keeping the brand present across the open web and CTV as consumers move through their consideration cycle.

The half of the play that tends to get skipped is post-event. The buyers you acquire during the window are worth retaining. Brands that get this right build post-event audiences from event purchasers, run sequential creative against them through July and August, and use Walmart DSP for off-site re-engagement. The event creates the cohort. The post-event plan determines its value.

How Skai helps. Skai’s audience workflows let you build event-purchaser cohorts and re-engage them across Sponsored Brands, Onsite Display, and Walmart DSP in the weeks after the event. Combined with Skai’s cross-retailer audience insights, you can see how your event-driven cohorts perform across the rest of your retail media program, not just Walmart in isolation.

The market just handed advertisers an efficiency window. It won’t stay open forever.

Every retail media category saw CPCs fall year-over-year in Q1 2026

This is a first in seven years of Skai’s tracking data. Whether you’re in Health, Apparel, Electronics, Beauty, or CPG, every retail media category saw the cost to compete drop year-over-year in Q1 2026. Broad-based efficiency across every category at once is rare, and it’s directly setting the table for the summer event window.

The instinct when costs drop is to hold budget steady and pocket the savings. The smarter move is to push. Test new formats, new keyword sets, and new placement combinations while the cost of learning is lower than it’s been in years. Use platform-suggested bids as a floor reference rather than a ceiling. Tier bids by match type so exact-match terms get the highest investment and broad-match gets the lowest, and adjust in increments of 10 to 15% rather than large jumps so you can read each move’s impact before stacking the next one. Keep keyword expansion live during the event itself, because new search terms emerge in real time and the brands that capture them first get cheaper clicks than the ones waiting for the post-event review.

The efficiency window Q1 opened won’t stay open indefinitely. Walmart Deals is the moment to push through it.

How Skai helps. Skai’s AI-driven bid optimization runs this discipline automatically, adjusting against live performance signals across keywords, match types, and placements rather than waiting for a weekly review. Keyword Harvesting flags emerging search terms during the event so you can build them into ad groups while CPCs are still soft. Portfolio-level visibility means a high-ROAS keyword in one ad group can pull budget toward itself without manual intervention.

Walmart retail media spend grew 30% in Q1 as CPCs fell

Walmart retail media spend across Skai’s client base grew 30% year-over-year in Q1 while CPCs fell. Sponsored Products spend sits 47% above its year-ago baseline and Sponsored Brands is up 41%. If your Walmart program is still funded as Amazon-leftover budget, you’re being out-invested in a year where the cost to win has gotten lower, not higher.

One thing that gets easy to overlook when budgets are scaling is that retail readiness is still the price of admission. Items need to be in stock, winning the Buy Box, in the correct taxonomy. Product detail pages need accurate titles, high-quality images, detailed descriptions, and variants properly mapped. Spending more against a fragile listing foundation just buys more impressions of a page that won’t convert.

How Skai helps. Skai’s Item Health monitoring flags listing issues including out-of-stock items, lost Buy Box, and broken PDPs so you can fix them before they cost you spend. Dimension tagging lets you group items, campaigns, and ad groups into meaningful portfolios by category, priority, margin tier, or retail-readiness status, so you manage by what matters during the event window rather than tracking everything at the SKU level.

Three quarters of Walmart advertisers run Sponsored Brands, but the format captures less than 10% of spend

Roughly 75% of Walmart advertisers run Sponsored Brands, and yet the format still captures less than 10% of total Walmart spend. Sponsored Brands CPCs on Walmart fell 20% year-over-year in Q1. There’s meaningful room to scale spend in the format without the cost pressure you’d usually expect when moving budget into a new placement. The accounts that close the adoption-to-allocation gap first will own more branded real estate on the platform during the event window, at a discount.

The creative moves worth making when you scale:

• Custom images. Hero the product with color blocking for contrast and a clear value cue. 
• Graphic text overlays. Add benefit claims and savings messaging, including Walmart Cash or rollback language where relevant. 
• Consistent visual patterns. Ensure multi-product ads read as a cohesive brand moment rather than a product collage. 
• Sponsored Brand Video. Particularly effective for new product launches or features that don’t translate to static imagery.

How Skai helps. Skai’s portfolio tools systematically rebalance budget across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Videos based on live auction dynamics rather than a static allocation set in pre-planning. Creative-performance reporting at the asset level shows which custom images and videos are converting, so you promote winners and retire underperformers mid-event. Automated bid adjustments at the format level let you scale Sponsored Brands investment without losing efficiency on Sponsored Products.

What separates teams that learn from this event from the ones that just survive it

Retail media now represents 22% of total media budgets

Retail media now represents 22% of total media budgets on average and roughly 30% of total digital ad budgets according to eMarketer. It’s a top-three line item, not a supplemental channel. The events that used to feel like discrete campaign moments are now structurally important to how the full media plan performs.

That shift means the event strategy can’t operate in isolation. Roughly 30% of paid search and 34% of paid social spend is now directed at driving traffic to retailers, meaning those channels are already feeding the Walmart funnel whether or not they’re coordinated with retail media campaigns. The brands that win these events align all three: paid social driving awareness and consideration upstream, paid search picking up branded and category demand, retail media converting at the point of purchase. Sequential creative across the three ensures the same consumer sees complementary messages at each stage rather than competing ads.

How Skai helps. Skai is one of the few platforms managing retail media, paid search, and paid social in the same workflow. That means coordinated event activation across all three channels, including shared audiences, sequenced creative, and unified pacing, along with a cross-channel Path to Conversion view that shows how off-Walmart spend influenced on-Walmart conversion during the event.

52% of brands are shifting display dollars from open-web DSPs to retail media DSPs

More than half of advertisers are currently reallocating display dollars from open-web DSPs to retail media DSPs, driven primarily by closed-loop attribution, cited by 57% as the deciding factor. For Walmart specifically, that means more competition for Walmart DSP inventory during high-intent windows and a stronger attribution case than ever for layering display into your event strategy.

The setup matters as much as the allocation. Match the campaign objective to the actual outcome you want at each phase: awareness in the pre-event days, engagement during the peak, conversion as the window winds down. Display Videos in 5- to 45-second formats handle the upper-funnel storytelling that pure search ads can’t. Retargeting consumers who browsed your category or product pages but didn’t convert captures delayed buyers in the days after the event closes. Running multiple creatives in each ad group lets the platform optimize toward the visuals that actually engage without requiring manual rotation.

How Skai helps. Skai brings Walmart DSP planning and execution into the same workflow as Sponsored Search, so display dollars don’t operate in a separate silo. Cross-format performance reporting shows exactly how Sponsored Search and Onsite Display are working together, making that 40% spend lift visible in real time. AI-driven creative and bid optimization handles the in-flight tuning that manual operation can’t sustain during a high-traffic window.

Only 15% of brands report strong measurement confidence

Seven in ten brands report meeting or exceeding their retail media goals, but only 15% report strong measurement confidence. Three-quarters of the industry is somewhere between struggling and getting by. High-traffic events compress the window for course-correction to hours, not days, and the brands with in-flight measurement infrastructure are the ones answering “what should we change right now?” during the event rather than “did this work?” after it’s over.

In practice, in-flight measurement during an event window means hourly pacing checks across campaigns, automated alerts when delivery or performance drifts outside expected ranges, near-real-time delivery performance visibility, and bid and budget adjustments triggered by live signals rather than the next business day’s review. Post-event measurement is just as important: first-time-buyer cohort analysis, share of voice changes during the window, and path-to-conversion data that shows which format combinations actually drove the growth.

The gap between teams that come out of this event with a replicable playbook and teams that come out with a post-mortem is almost entirely a measurement infrastructure question. It’s worth solving before the window opens.

How Skai helps. Skai’s Budget Navigator, Automated Alerts, and AI-driven optimization keep the program agile while traffic is moving, not in the report you’ll read on Monday. Post-event, Skai’s audience re-engagement workflows turn event purchasers into the seed audience for the next campaign cycle. Share of Voice tracking gives competitive context to what your numbers actually mean.

Conclusion: Stay data-driven to win

Eight numbers, three themes, and one underlying point: Walmart Deals, June 22–28, lands this year on top of the most advertiser-friendly retail media economics in recent memory, with costs down, intent up, and a peer set that’s committing real budget. The brands that come out ahead will be the ones that closed the Sponsored Brands allocation gap, aligned paid search and paid social to the retail media program, and had the measurement infrastructure to adapt in real time.

If you’re building the plan now, the single highest-leverage decision is making sure the event strategy connects to the rest of your commerce media program rather than running as a standalone campaign. That’s where the compounding happens, and that’s where most teams are still leaving performance on the table.

Skai’s Retail Media solutions enable marketers to plan, activate, and measure campaigns across 200+ retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart, as part of a broader commerce media strategy. AI-powered pacing, product intelligence, and keyword tools help teams meet consumers across the journey and tie spend to sales with confidence.

Ready to see what these shifts mean for your 2026 plan? Schedule a quick demo.