Evolving Walmart Connect’s identity graph to power stronger signals

With more than ~150 million U.S. customers shopping with Walmart each week¹, across stores and digital touchpoints, Walmart maintains a robust, real-time understanding of what customers need, want and value. As a customer-centric retailer, we turn that understanding into seamless, meaningful experiences across every interaction.

This depth of insight extends beyond experience into how advertising is planned, activated, and measured. Walmart’s high-fidelity, first-party identity graph is built on real customer behavior, enabling us to connect signals across our ecosystem and translate them into more accurate targeting, more consistent measurement, and more impactful business outcomes for advertisers.

In today’s privacy-first media landscape, a foundation built on first-party data is more critical than ever. Advertisers are under increasing pressure to prove ROAS, move beyond proxy metrics and tie investment directly to sales impact. At the same time, fragmentation across channels has made it harder to get a complete view of performance, increasing the need for unified, end-to-end measurement.

To meet this moment, we are on a journey to advance our identity, targeting, and measurement foundation — anchored in Walmart’s first-party, omnichannel data. This evolution delivers a more accurate view of how our customers discover, engage, and purchase across the shopper journey.

• Advancing our identity graph: We are evolving from our existing identity framework to Walmart's more advanced, proprietary identity graph that connects in-store transactions, online activity and media engagement into a single, unified view across the shopper journey. In the future, this foundation will extend into connected TV environments through our integration with VIZIO.
  
  
• Targeting enhancements: Building on that foundation, we’re advancing our targeting capabilities. Display behavioral targeting is shifting to Walmart’s identity graph upgrade, and we’re introducing individual-level targeting for Onsite Display — enabling a more precise understanding of customers and confidence that investments across both Brand and Performance solutions are reaching the right audiences at the right time to drive results. Over time, this approach will extend to Walmart DSP and Social.
  
  
• Integrated attribution: Finally, we’re bringing these capabilities together through a new unified attribution model across Sponsored Search, Onsite Display and Walmart DSP. Together, these changes are designed to produce higher-quality signals and a clearer view of how media drives sales across the full customer journey.

Walmart’s closed-loop, omnichannel data provides a distinct advantage by directly linking media exposure to Walmart’s first-party data. This enables advertisers to leverage more accurate signals to drive greater precision and consistent cross-channel measurement. Advertisers can build more dynamic audiences, improve targeting accuracy, and gain clear, closed-loop visibility into performance across the funnel, while our customers benefit from simpler, more relevant experiences across every touchpoint.

Source: ¹Walmart annual report papers, March 14, 2025.