Introducing negative keywords for Sponsored Products

Advertisers want more control over where their ads appear so they can focus their spend and drive more meaningful results. That’s why Walmart Connect is introducing negative keywords for Sponsored Products.

Negative keywords allow advertisers to exclude specific search terms so that their ads don’t show when a customer search query matches an excluded term. This offers a higher level of control, allowing the blocking of low-performing or misaligned terms without unintentionally filtering out related high-value traffic.

How it works

Negative keywords are now available for Sponsored Products manual campaigns and automatic campaigns using fixed bidding, with two match types: negative exact-match and negative phrase-match.

• Negative exact-match keywords block ads from showing only when a customer search term exactly matches the negated keyword.
  Example: "dog food" negates "dog food"

• Negative phrase-match keywords block ads from showing when a customer search term contains the full negated keyword phrase in the same order. Unlike exact-match, additional words can appear before or after the phrase, as long as the phrase remains intact.
  Example: "running shoes" negates "white running shoes" or "running shoes for kids"

Advertisers can apply negative keywords when creating a new campaign or apply to ad groups in existing campaigns.

Why it matters

Negative keywords gives advertisers another way to manage how their Sponsored Products campaigns show up across Walmart’s shopping journey and refine campaign delivery by excluding search terms that are not aligned to campaign goals. This added control can help improve budget efficiency, reduce less relevant traffic and support campaign optimization across Sponsored Products campaigns.

Designed for advertisers and partners of all sizes 

For Marketplace advertisers, negative keywords can help make limited budgets work harder by reducing spend on irrelevant traffic.

For Walmart suppliers, negative keywords can help support more advanced campaign management across larger brand and product portfolios, including campaigns where multiple products or brands may compete for the same search terms, or branded traffic considerations.

Negative keywords are now available in the Walmart Connect Ad Center and through partner technology providers including Pacvue, Skai, Quartile, Teikametrics and DataCaciques. Through these partners, negative keywords provide another scalable optimization tool to help advertisers improve targeting precision, manage spend and strengthen Sponsored Products performance.

Ready to get started? 

Read this best practices to help you get started or connect with your Walmart Connect representative to discuss how this capability can help refine your Sponsored Products strategy and improve campaign efficiency.