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According to a report from 22 October 2026, Walmart Connect is increasingly pitching advertisers directly on brand lift studies, in some cases without the usual route through the media agency. Several agencies confirmed to Digiday that they had received corresponding inquiries. Walmart itself did not comment on this new sales activity to the outlet. The key question for advertisers is what such a measurement method can actually prove.
Brand lift is not the same as incremental sales
Brand lift measures, for example, changes in brand awareness, ad recall or purchase intent. Sales lift attempts to identify additional purchases compared with a suitable control group. Incremental ROAS (iROAS) sets the additional revenue in relation to the advertising budget. A positive brand lift result alone is therefore not proof of additional sales.
This matters especially for retail media: a purchase that happens after an ad exposure might also have happened without the advertising. Only a proper comparison with a control group allows conclusions about the causal contribution. A tracking dashboard alone is not enough for that.
Walmart also relies on other measurement methods
An official Walmart Connect release from January 2026 names Search Incrementality as a generally available solution for Sponsored Search. In it, Walmart describes a single test case with up to nine percent sales lift and 10,06 US dollars iROAS. These are provider claims – neither a general benchmark nor results from the brand lift studies now reported.
The retailer increasingly links retail media with CTV, social and influencer campaigns. The expansion of Walmart Connect explains why the platform now also competes for brand budgets.
Questions marketing teams should ask
Before buying a study, the measurement goal, sample, control group design, runtime, minimum budget and access to raw data matter. Digiday reports that in individual cases results only arrive up to nine weeks after a campaign ends. That makes quick budget decisions harder. Equally important is the independence of the evaluation: a network should not have to assess its own impact alone, without a traceable method.
A more detailed explanation can be found in our overview of full-funnel and incrementality and our analysis of brand budgets in retail media.
Conclusion: Lift studies can make advertising easier to evaluate. However, agencies in Germany should first decide whether they want to measure brand perception or incremental sales. That distinction determines the value of the result.
Sources: Digiday, 22.10.2026; Walmart Connect, CES measurement solutions, 14.01.2026.
Illustrative image: Jakub Żerdzicki / Unsplash, not a Walmart study interface.