Winning Walmart Deals in 2026: A Three-Phase Walmart Connect and Skai Playbook

Summer’s biggest commerce media moments are just around the corner. Walmart’s annual summer high-traffic event, Walmart Deals, June 22-28, anchors the season for retail media programs across categories.

Walmart Connect’s momentum heading into the event is unmistakable. In Q1 2026, Sponsored Products on Walmart Connect grew 47% year-over-year, with Sponsored Brands up 41%. Advertisers are pouring more weight into brand visibility as the platform’s ad ecosystem matures into a competitive standalone channel.

If you’re reading this, your plan is probably already in motion. Budgets approved, deals locked, creative in QA. The strategic work is mostly behind you. What’s left is execution, and the small refinements between now and Day 1 that can shift the event from “we hit our numbers” to “we materially outperformed.”

What follows is a three-phase playbook designed to surface those refinements: the pre-event ramp, the event days themselves, and the post-event window where the next set of wins gets locked in. Pick what applies to your accounts. The goal is helping you tighten the plan you’ve already built.

Phase 1: build coverage, lock down guardrails, pre-stage the audiences

The pre-event window is about operational readiness. By Day 1 of the event, your team should be reading dashboards, not configuring them.

Audit your Walmart Connect coverage across every format

Walmart Connect now spans Sponsored Search, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Videos, and Walmart DSP. The accounts that win the summer event are usually the ones running fully stacked format coverage. The accounts that struggle are often the ones still treating Sponsored Products as the only format that matters.

Around 75% of Walmart advertisers now run Sponsored Brands, but the format still captures less than 10% of total Walmart Connect spend. That’s a wide gap between adoption and allocation. With Walmart Sponsored Brands CPCs falling 20% YoY, there’s room to push more budget into the format without cost pressure. The summer event is the highest-leverage moment to test that allocation shift.

Sponsored Videos and Walmart DSP deserve their own lines in your event plan. Walmart Connect’s expanding DSP inventory is increasingly where brands capture the upper- and mid-funnel demand that translates into event-window conversions on-site. If your media plan doesn’t span all four formats by Day 1, you’ve left coverage on the table that competitors will gladly take.

Configure the Skai guardrails that catch what you’d miss

Three configurations matter most in the final ramp.

Pacing Monitor thresholds. High-traffic events have their own pacing dynamics. Set thresholds calibrated specifically to Walmart Connect performance during peak event hours, using your own historical Walmart Connect data as the baseline rather than borrowing thresholds from other programs. The first hour of the event window will surge unpredictably, and the team needs alerts tuned to that reality.

Automated Alerts. Build alerts for budget caps reached, ROAS slipping below floor, share of voice erosion on priority keywords, and Sponsored Brands creative falling off. Alerts let your team focus on judgment calls instead of dashboard babysitting.

Daily Budget Ceilings. For your Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns most likely to see unexpected demand surges, set hard ceilings to protect against overspend.

Pre-build the Walmart DSP audiences you’ll need on Day 2

Audiences are the most underused workhorse of the post-event window. Build them now so you can activate them within 48 hours of event close.

Through Walmart DSP and the Walmart Connect Tag, build audiences for consumers who purchased multiple products from your brand during the event, became new-to-brand customers, or added items to cart without converting. These are your highest-intent retargeting pools for the rest of Q3.

Sanity-check your competitive position before the floodgates open

Use Skai Competitive Insights to check share of voice on your top 20 Walmart Connect keywords now, then again three days before the event. Look for two patterns: keywords where a competitor has already started building share ahead of the event, and keywords where competitors aren’t yet participating. The first warns you where to defend. The second shows you where Walmart Connect’s category targeting can quietly pay off during the event window.

Phase 2: monitor, pivot, and protect during the event itself

The operating mode shifts the moment the event opens. The goal now is monitoring, pivoting, and protecting. The building phase is over.

Turn off the AI optimization layers Skai recommends managing manually

Skai best practice during high-traffic events is to manage Walmart Connect bids and budgets outside of Skai AI optimization to account for the unpredictable traffic. Specifically: pause AI Dayparting. Pause Portfolios. Pause Budget Navigator.

These layers are tuned for typical Walmart Connect traffic patterns. The summer event isn’t typical. Manual control during the event prevents the system from over-correcting against signals that look like noise but are actually the event itself.

You’ll turn them back on the day after.

Run a working cadence that doesn’t break by Day 2

Every hour. Check Pacing Monitor for under-pacing Walmart Connect campaigns. Adjust by widening targeting, raising the bid range, or removing frequency caps on Walmart DSP.

Every two to three hours. Check the top 20 Walmart products driving 80% of your revenue. Adjust bids on the main offending keywords.

Twice daily. Check competitor activity on your priority keywords through Skai Competitive Insights. Reallocate budget to category targeting where competitors aren’t showing up. Pay specific attention to Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Videos placements, where competitive density tends to spike during high-traffic windows.

Once daily. Run Celeste for a Walmart Connect summary you can share with your team and stakeholders. Try: Give me a high-level summary of my Walmart Connect performance from the past 24 hours. What key highlights would you recommend we dig into further?

Let Automated Actions handle the high-frequency work

You can’t manually check every Walmart Connect campaign every hour. Set Automated Actions to optimize on an hourly basis against your event goals, whether that’s sales, traffic, share of voice, ROAS, or whatever else you’ve prioritized. This frees the team to focus on the decisions that genuinely need human judgment: volatile moments, sudden creative underperformance, an inventory issue on a hero SKU.

For total overspend protection, set percent thresholds on Portfolios and Budget Navigator plans to pause campaigns automatically when the threshold is met.

Watch for the moments that need a human

Some moments during the Walmart event will not be handled well by any automated system. A creative element underperforming for reasons that aren’t obvious in the data. A competitor going aggressive on a Sponsored Brands keyword you weren’t tracking. An inventory hold on a featured product. The whole reason for offloading the routine work to automation is to ensure your team has the bandwidth to catch these moments. Someone should be actively looking for them.

Phase 3: lock in the learnings and start the next event

The day after Walmart Deals ends is one of the most strategically important days of your year, and almost every team underestimates it.

Re-activate the AI optimization layers

The morning after the event ends, turn Portfolios, Budget Navigator, and AI Dayparting back on. Normal Walmart Connect traffic patterns will resume, and the AI optimization layers will once again be working with signal they can trust.

Run Walmart Connect Keyword Harvesting on Day 2

During the event, your Walmart Connect search term reports will have captured queries you’ve never seen before. Run Keyword Harvesting to identify new high-performing queries and add them to your campaigns. Proven Walmart intent at a price you didn’t have to bid up.

Activate the retargeting audiences you pre-built

The Walmart DSP audiences you built in Phase 1 are now stocked with real event-window behavior. Activate retargeting campaigns against your new-to-brand consumers, multi-product purchasers, and add-to-cart-but-didn’t-purchase consumers. The 30 days after the Walmart event is one of the highest-intent retargeting windows of your Walmart Connect year.

Run the analysis while the event is still hot

Use Celeste to generate post-event Walmart Connect analysis the same week, while context is fresh.

Compare this week’s total Walmart sales from campaigns to last year’s summer event. Put this into a quick reporting summary I can share with the rest of the team.

How many of my Walmart Connect ad sales this week were New to Brand?

Can you analyze Walmart Connect trends week over week and provide a list of key insights, what caused them, and what we can do to further optimize based on these results?

Walmart Connect’s omnichannel measurement, with in-store and online ROAS in the same view, is one of its real edges over other retail media networks. Don’t leave that data unanalyzed. The learnings directly inform your Q4 Walmart Connect plan.

Conclusion: Winning Walmart Deals 2026

Walmart Connect’s momentum into 2026 makes Walmart Deals one of the highest-leverage commerce media moments of the year. The brands committing to full format coverage and intentional event-day strategy will own categories where the wins compound across the rest of the year. A three-phase playbook (pre, during, post) is how you make sure your team is reading dashboards on Day 1 instead of building them.

There’s still time to make every phase tighter than it was last year. Walking through how each of these workflows looks against your specific Walmart Connect accounts is the fastest way to see where the lift is hiding and where Skai’s Walmart Connect-specific features can work hardest for you.

Skai’s Retail Media solutions enable marketers to plan, activate, and measure campaigns across 200+ retailers, including Walmart, Target, and Instacart, as part of a broader commerce media strategy. With deep Walmart Connect integrations across Sponsored Search, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Videos, and Walmart DSP, plus AI-powered pacing, product intelligence, and keyword tools, Skai helps teams meet consumers across the journey and tie spend to in-store and online sales with confidence.

Want to see how Skai supports each phase of your Walmart Connect plan? Schedule a quick demo.

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