The most widely cited public Walmart Connect benchmarks put quarterly ACoS in the low-to-mid teens, but the right target for your brand is your own break-even ACoS, not a platform average. Published figures are useful as a sanity check on where the marketplace sits. They are a poor stand-in for a target. This guide gives you the benchmark numbers we can source, explains what they do and don’t cover, and shows how to turn them into a Walmart ACoS goal that protects profit.
TL;DR
- Pacvue’s U.S. report for Q4 2023 put Walmart Connect ACoS at 16.43% and ROAS at $6.08, with quarterly ACoS ranging from 13.54% to 16.43% across 2023.
- Benchmarks shift by quarter, ad type and category. Peak season usually pushes ACoS up because competition and bids rise.
- Your target should come from break-even ROAS, which Walmart Connect itself recommends applying to every item in a campaign.
- ACoS is one lens. Attribution window, new-to-brand customers and incrementality change what a given ACoS actually means.
- Compare any benchmark only against the same period, ad type and attribution setting.
What Walmart ACoS measures
ACoS is advertising cost of sales: ad spend divided by the sales attributed to those ads. It is the inverse of ROAS. A 16.43% ACoS and a $6.08 ROAS describe the same result from two angles, since $1 divided by $6.08 is roughly 16.4 cents of spend per dollar of sales.
Two details matter before you compare any numbers.
What counts as a sale. Walmart Connect’s closed-loop measurement uses Walmart first-party transaction data to connect ad exposure with purchases, and attribution can include purchases on Walmart.com, the Walmart app, and Walmart stores, depending on the campaign and report. If your ACoS includes in-store sales, it will look better than a dashboard counting only online orders.
Which ROAS formula is in use. For campaigns that include complete-view attribution, Walmart Connect ROAS is calculated as total attributed sales plus advertised complete-view sales plus other complete-view sales, divided by ad spend. That is more generous than click-only attribution. Two brands can run identical campaigns and report different ACoS purely because of which attribution setting they pulled.
If you want a refresher on the underlying ratio, this return on ad spend guide walks through how ROAS connects to profitability for online stores.
Published Walmart ACoS benchmarks
Public, sourced Walmart ACoS data is thinner than Amazon’s. Most of it comes from ad-technology vendors who publish quarterly reports based on the accounts they manage. Here is what we can stand behind.
Quarterly ACoS from Pacvue’s 2023 report
Pacvue’s U.S. retail media report for Q4 2023 lists Walmart Connect ACoS of 16.43% and ROAS of $6.08 for Q4 2023. Its quarterly breakdown for that year:
- Q1 2023: 14.10% ACoS
- Q2 2023: 13.54% ACoS
- Q3 2023: 13.63% ACoS
- Q4 2023: 16.43% ACoS
The pattern is the useful part. ACoS stayed flat through the first three quarters, then rose roughly three points in the holiday quarter. That is what you would expect when more advertisers compete for the same shoppers and bids climb.
The figures are a few years old. Treat them as a reference for the shape of a Walmart year, not as a number to hit today. Walmart’s ad auction, advertiser mix and product mix have all changed since then, and newer vendor reports, including the ones published each quarter, are the place to check current levels.
Why third-party “typical” ranges differ
You will see other ranges quoted across the web, often presenting Walmart ACoS as lower than Amazon’s. Directionally that agrees with the Pacvue data, but ranges without a stated period, category or ad type are hard to use. When a number comes with no methodology, assume it blends everything together.
How ACoS varies by ad type, category and season
A single account-wide ACoS hides the differences that drive decisions.
Ad type
Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Videos serve different jobs. Pacvue’s Cyber 5 2025 report notes that Walmart Connect Sponsored Brands ROAS grew 16.3% year over year on Cyber Monday and 35.3% on Black Friday, ahead of Sponsored Products. In practice, brand-led formats can return more per dollar during peak shopping events than many teams assume, so don’t judge them by the same ACoS ceiling as a bottom-funnel keyword campaign without looking at the data.
Category
Category changes both conversion rates and margin. A grocery or household item with a low price point and frequent repurchase behaves differently from a high-ticket electronics item. We do not have a reliable public Walmart ACoS table by category, and we would rather say so than hand you invented numbers. The practical answer is to benchmark against your own history by category, then against vendor reports for your category when you can get them.
Season
Expect ACoS to climb in Q4 and around major events. Plan two targets: one for baseline weeks and a wider one for peak periods where you are deliberately buying share. Write the peak-period rationale down so nobody mistakes it for waste in a January review.
Campaign intent
A branded-keyword campaign should run far below your account average. A conquesting or category-discovery campaign will run above it. Blend them and the average tells you nothing. Report ACoS by intent bucket: brand, category, competitor and auto.
Set your own ACoS target: break-even first
A benchmark tells you what the market did. Break-even tells you what you can afford. Walmart Connect’s own guidance is to use ROAS as a guide, identify break-even ROAS, and apply it to every item in a campaign, and to establish efficiency against that break-even before expanding to total sales volume.
The break-even formula
Break-even ACoS equals your contribution margin per unit before ad spend, divided by selling price. Contribution margin means price minus cost of goods, Walmart referral fees, fulfillment and shipping, and returns allowance. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by break-even ACoS.
A worked example (illustrative numbers)
Say a product sells for $40. After cost of goods, fees, fulfillment and expected returns, you keep $14 before advertising.
- Break-even ACoS = $14 ÷ $40 = 35%.
- Break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ 0.35, or about 2.86.
- At the 2023 Q4 benchmark of 16.43%, you would keep about $7.43 per sale after ads. That leaves room to invest.
Now a second product, also $40, where you keep only $6 before ads. Break-even ACoS is 15%. Running that item at a benchmark-level 16.43% loses money on every ad-attributed sale. The platform average would have told you it was fine.
Choose a target above or below break-even on purpose
There are three common stances:
- Profit mode. Target ACoS well below break-even. Use for mature products with strong organic rank.
- Break-even mode. Target ACoS at break-even. Use when ads are earning rank and review velocity you value beyond the sale.
- Investment mode. Target ACoS above break-even for a defined window, with an exit date and a measure of what you expect to gain, such as organic rank or new customers.
Whichever you pick, set it per item or per tightly grouped item set. Account-level targets let strong products subsidize weak ones without anyone noticing.
Look beyond ACoS
ACoS answers one question: how much did I spend per attributed dollar? It cannot tell you whether those sales would have happened anyway, or whether you acquired a customer you will keep.
Walmart Connect’s own view is that campaign evaluation should extend beyond a single efficiency ratio: attribution, incrementality, brand impact and campaign insights each show a different slice of performance. Three checks we add to every ACoS review:
- New-to-brand share. Walmart Connect reports brand-new customer percentages for Sponsored Search ads. A campaign with a mediocre ACoS and a high new-customer share may be doing more for your business than a very efficient campaign that mostly harvests existing fans.
- Branded versus non-branded split. Branded terms inflate blended ACoS performance. Strip them out to see how discovery actually performs.
- Total sales trend. If ACoS falls because you cut spend and total sales fell with it, you did not improve efficiency. You shrank.
For a deeper look at how first-party shopper signals feed these decisions, see our guide to Walmart Luminate insights for suppliers.
Ways to lower Walmart ACoS without losing growth
Cutting bids across the board is the blunt option. These moves usually work better.
1. Fix the listing before the bid
Conversion rate is the biggest lever on ACoS. If a click converts 20% better, ACoS drops by about the same proportion with no bid change. Audit titles, images, rich media and price competitiveness first. Our Walmart rich media guide and Walmart Marketplace listing best practices cover the content side.
2. Use the auction model to your advantage
Walmart Connect moved to a second-price bidding model, which is meant to help advertisers avoid paying their maximum bid to win an auction. That makes it safer to bid with confidence on terms you value, then watch the actual cost per click rather than the bid.
3. Separate campaigns by intent
Split brand, category, competitor and auto campaigns so each has its own budget and target. Mixing them hides which one drives or drains profit.
4. Prune with margin in mind
Do not pause a keyword just because its ACoS is high. Compare it to that item’s break-even and its role. A high-ACoS term that drives new customers for a high-lifetime-value product may deserve to stay.
5. Add negative keywords on a schedule
Review search term reports weekly in peak season and every two weeks otherwise. Add irrelevant queries as negatives so spend stops leaking.
6. Build a repeatable workflow
Consistency beats heroic fixes. Our step-by-step Walmart advertising workflow lays out a weekly cadence for bids, budgets and search term reviews.
Perspective: why we treat benchmarks as a ceiling check, not a goal
We manage advertising across Amazon, Walmart and Shopify for mid-market and enterprise brands, and the same mistake shows up in nearly every audit: a team adopts a market ACoS as its target, then optimizes toward it. Sometimes that means overspending on thin-margin products. More often it means underspending on products that could carry a much higher ACoS and still be very profitable.
Our approach is profit first. We start with the P&L by SKU, work out break-even ROAS, and set targets by product role: profit driver, rank builder or launch. Then we compare to benchmarks only to check we are not far outside what the marketplace is doing. When we are, we ask why before we change anything.
The second thing we push is unified reporting. Walmart ACoS looks different when you put it next to Amazon, DSP and your own site in the same view, because shoppers move between them. That is the reason we built the iDerive analytics platform: so a brand lead can see efficiency and incrementality across channels in business language, not a dozen exports.
— Dan Katona
Work with Nectar on Walmart advertising
If your Walmart ACoS is drifting and you can’t tell whether it is the bids, the listings or the targets, we can help. Our team runs Walmart Connect advertising as part of fully managed marketplace programs, with in-house creative and SKU-level profit targets behind every campaign.
Brands that sell on more than one marketplace can also see how we handle Walmart marketplace management and cross-channel ad spend together.
A simple quarterly benchmarking routine
Use this routine each quarter:
- Pull your numbers. ACoS, ROAS, conversion rate and new-customer share by ad type and by intent bucket, using one attribution setting throughout.
- Recompute break-even. Update margins for any change in cost of goods, fees or shipping.
- Check against a vendor report. Find the latest published Walmart Connect report and compare the same quarter and ad type. Note the gap but don’t chase it.
- Mark outliers. Any item above break-even for over a month needs a decision: fix the listing, change the bid, or accept it as an investment with an end date.
- Plan the peak. Set a wider Q4 target, pre-approve it, and review it weekly during the season.
If you also run display or off-site media, extend the same logic to our Walmart DSP strategy, where ACoS is less meaningful and incrementality matters more.
FAQ
What is a good ACoS on Walmart?
A good ACoS is one below your break-even ACoS for the product, calculated from its margin after costs. For market context, Pacvue’s 2023 data showed Walmart Connect quarterly ACoS between roughly 13.5% and 16.4%. Use that range as a reference, not a goal.
Is Walmart ACoS lower than Amazon ACoS?
In the vendor reports we have seen, Walmart’s reported ACoS tends to sit below commonly quoted Amazon ranges. Differences in competition, attribution and category mix make direct comparisons unreliable, so compare each marketplace to its own break-even instead.
Does Walmart report ACoS or ROAS?
Walmart Connect reporting centers on ROAS, and ACoS is simply its inverse. Divide 1 by ROAS to get ACoS as a decimal, so a ROAS of 5 equals a 20% ACoS. Check which attribution setting your report uses, since complete-view attribution raises ROAS.
Why does my Walmart ACoS spike in Q4?
More advertisers compete during the holidays, which raises costs, and shoppers often compare more before buying. Pacvue’s 2023 quarterly data showed ACoS rising from 13.63% in Q3 to 16.43% in Q4. Set a separate peak-season target so the increase is planned rather than a surprise.
Should I optimize for ACoS or total sales?
Start with efficiency: Walmart Connect advises establishing performance against break-even ROAS before widening the focus to total sales volume. Once products are profitable, you can raise budgets and accept a higher ACoS where growth, rank or new customers justify it.
Sources
- Omnichannel Ad Measurement & Closed-Loop Insights, Walmart Connect
- Walmart Connect tips and best practices, Adverity documentation
- Q4 2023 CPC Report: Retail Media Benchmarks, Pacvue
- Cyber 5 2025 Benchmark Report, Pacvue
- Campaign Optimization, Walmart Connect
- Walmart Connect advertising guide, Walmart Marketplace
- Amazon, Walmart, Instacart continue to compete as agencies add more commerce media ad dollars, Digiday
- Return on ad spend guide for online stores
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