Key Takeaways:
- Negative keywords aren’t new — they’re overdue. Google Ads has had them for 20 years; Walmart Connect is just catching up.
- Broad-match campaigns have quietly burned CPG budgets for years. Ads served against irrelevant queries while dashboards looked fine.
- This signals a shift toward “search parity” across retail media. Real search term reports, match-type control, and bid transparency are coming.
- Disciplined exclusions can cut wasted spend by 10-20%. That’s real budget freed up for higher-intent placements.
- Automation won’t solve this — it takes human judgment. Knowing which queries hurt your brand takes category expertise, not a toggle.
Retail media negative keywords are not a nice-to-have upgrade. They’re a signal that the industry has been burning CPG budgets on bad matches for years and is finally being held accountable for it. Walmart Connect’s move to support negative keyword exclusions in sponsored-products campaigns is overdue. But more than that, it forces a real question: if you are not actively managing search term waste, how much money have you already left on the shelf?
Why This Moment Actually Matters for CPG Brands
Retail media networks built their early pitch on reach and proximity to purchase. You’re close to the cart, so you win. That logic gave platforms cover to run loose, broad-match campaigns that served ads against irrelevant or even competing queries.
CPG brands paid for it. Literally.
Without negative keyword controls, a protein bar brand could show up for searches like “keto meal plan” or a baby food brand could bleed spend against “pet food.” The targeting looked fine in the dashboard. The economics told a different story.
Negative keywords are table stakes in search advertising. Google Ads has had them for two decades. That a major retail media network is rolling them out now tells you everything about how much the channel prioritized revenue over advertiser performance in its growth phase.
What Retail Media Maturity Actually Looks Like
Platforms mature when advertiser pressure forces accountability. That is what is happening here.
This is not just about Walmart. It’s about the broader shift across retail media networks toward search parity, meaning the controls, reporting, and optimization levers that paid search advertisers have expected for years are finally coming to retail media. Slowly. Platform by platform.
The brands that will win are the ones who treat this shift as a structural opportunity, not just a setting to toggle.
What Search Parity Means in Practice
Search parity is when a retail media network provides:
- Negative keyword controls to exclude irrelevant or wasteful queries
- Search term reports that show actual customer queries, not just matched keywords
- Match type granularity so you can control broad, phrase, and exact match independently
- Bid-level transparency that connects spend to actual sales outcomes, not just impressions
Most retail media networks today offer some of these. Very few offer all of them with the depth that Google or Microsoft Ads does. Walmart’s move is a step toward closing that gap.
The CPG Brand Playbook for Negative Keywords in Retail Media
Here is how we recommend approaching this at Junction 37.
Start with your search term data before you build any exclusion list. Pull the actual queries your sponsored-products campaigns have been serving against. You will almost certainly find patterns: off-brand categories, competitor adjacencies, and generic queries with no commercial intent that have been eating budget.
Segment your exclusions by campaign goal. A brand awareness campaign and a conversion-focused campaign should not share the same negative keyword list. They have different tolerance thresholds for broad match traffic.
Review monthly, not quarterly. Retail search behavior shifts with seasons, promotions, and shelf changes. A static negative keyword list becomes stale faster than most brands expect.
Don’t over-exclude. This is the mistake we see from teams that are new to this lever. Aggressive exclusion can tank reach and limit the algorithm’s ability to find converting queries it has not yet matched. Precision beats aggression.
The practical upside here is real. Even modest negative keyword discipline can reduce wasted spend by 10 to 20 percent on under-optimized sponsored-products campaigns. That is budget that can go back into higher-intent placements or fund incremental test-and-learn activity.
This Is a Human Judgment Call, Not an Automation Win
Automated campaign tools will not solve this for you. They’ll give you the controls, but they won’t tell you which queries undermine your brand positioning, which adjacencies are acceptable trade-offs, and which exclusions will starve your campaign of volume.
That is a judgment call. It requires someone who understands your brand, your category, and your consumer. It requires the kind of thinking that our team at Junction 37 brings to every retail media engagement.
For a deeper look at how we think about retail media as a full-funnel discipline and not just a sponsored-listings line item, read our breakdown here: Retail Media Strategy for CPG Brands: Beyond Sponsored Listings.
The Bottom Line
Retail media negative keywords are not exciting. They are not a headline feature. But they represent something important: the channel is being forced to grow up.
CPG brands that take this seriously now will build tighter, more efficient campaigns. The ones that treat it as a checkbox will keep funding the platform’s revenue at the expense of their own margins.
If you are managing sponsored-products spend on Walmart Connect or any retail media network and you want a clear-eyed audit of where your budget is going, let’s talk.
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FAQ: Retail Media Negative Keywords for CPG Brands
What are negative keywords in retail media?
Negative keywords are specific search terms you instruct a platform to exclude from triggering your ads. If a query matches a negative keyword, your ad will not serve against it. This prevents budget waste on irrelevant or low-intent searches.
Why did Walmart Connect not have negative keywords before?
Retail media networks in their growth phase prioritized inventory monetization over advertiser controls. Broad match drove higher spend volume and revenue for the platform. Advertiser demand for efficiency tools like negative keywords only becomes a competitive pressure once the market matures and brands have more network options to compare.
How much budget waste can negative keywords eliminate?
It depends on how loosely your campaigns have been running. In our experience managing sponsored-products campaigns for CPG brands, actively managed negative keyword lists can reduce wasted impressions and clicks by 10 to 20 percent or more on campaigns that have never had exclusion controls applied.
Should CPG brands use the same negative keyword list across all retail media networks?
No. Each network has different match-type behavior, category taxonomy, and consumer search patterns. Start with a shared foundation of obvious exclusions, then build network-specific lists based on actual search term data from each platform.
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Chris Pyne, Founder, Junction 37 – 30+ Years in Performance Media