How Incrementality Measurement Changes What Your Walmart Investment Is Actually Worth
Most Walmart suppliers evaluate their media investment using ROAS. It is a useful metric for in-flight optimization, but it has a limitation that becomes important at the annual planning level: ROAS counts all sales attributed to an ad, including sales from customers who were going to buy anyway. A customer who had already decided, who had purchased before and was simply reordering, or who searched your exact brand name and would have found you regardless. Incrementality measurement separates those sales from the ones your advertising actually caused, and the difference between the two numbers changes how you think about where to invest.
At CES 2026, Chris Tyau and Jon Gibs walked through what Walmart Connect’s measurement tools can now show suppliers about what is actually driving incremental growth. According to a January 2024 survey by the Association of National Advertisers, 71% of advertisers now consider incrementality the most important KPI for retail media investments. Tyau and Gibs laid out the specific tools and methodology Walmart Connect has built to deliver on that shift, and what the results look like when you apply them.
This article draws on a CES 2026 Content Studio conversation between Tyau, Director of Product Marketing at Walmart Connect, and Gibs, Group Director of Media Insights at Walmart Connect, supplemented by Association of National Advertisers survey data, Bain & Company research on advertiser trust in retail media metrics, and Walmart Connect’s published CES 2026 materials where noted.
What incrementality measurement reveals about your current investment
Gibs framed the core question early in the conversation: am I actually driving behavior, am I changing behavior, or am I just capturing things that are already happening? That distinction, between ad-driven sales and organic demand, is the foundation of the incrementality argument. A campaign can show a strong ROAS, strong click-through, and good conversion rate while the customers being reached were already coming. The money was spent confirming a purchase that was already decided.
Research published by Bain & Company found that only 6% of advertisers fully trust retailers’ reported media metrics. That low confidence is part of what has driven the industry toward incrementality as a more rigorous standard, one built on isolating what advertising actually caused rather than what happened during a campaign window.
Tyau connected the measurement question to the full customer journey. We have to think about awareness at the top of the funnel, he said. It is really priming demand. Search is capturing it. And in-store media is reinforcing it. The real picture, he argued, emerges not from any of those individual points but from how they interact, measured with first-party transaction data that ties the initial reach of a shopper all the way to the end of their shopping journey. Being able to do that at the scale of a number one retailer, Tyau said, means you are not just talking about online sales. You are talking about all of those purchases that still happen in a store.
Gibs built on the same point. Walmart’s position at the point of sale, both online and in stores, allows a view of the customer that is unusual for the rest of the market. It lets you understand whether a purchase would have happened organically, whether a customer’s behavior changed after being exposed to different ads, and how individual moments connect to broader patterns across tactics.
Why this matters for suppliers: Most supplier reporting at Walmart evaluates each media format in isolation: search ROAS, display ROAS, in-store lift. What Tyau and Gibs are arguing is that the investment picture changes when you measure how those formats work together, using first-party data that connects the full journey from awareness through purchase. Suppliers whose Walmart reporting is built around individual campaign ROAS are seeing a partial picture. Cross-channel incrementality measurement shows a fuller one.
What Walmart’s measurement tools actually show
The figures Gibs shared at CES were specific enough to serve as benchmarks. When Walmart Connect measured campaigns using cross-channel methodology with partners like Circana rather than within-platform-only attribution, Gibs said the results showed roughly double the level of impact. Incremental ROAS was nearly triple what the platform-only view showed. Dollar-per-million-impression efficiency, a metric that accounts for reach as well as return, was about four times higher when measured against the full omnichannel customer journey.
Those multipliers show what becomes visible when measurement accounts for the full journey. If your current Walmart reporting shows a platform-only ROAS of 3.0, to use a hypothetical, the figures Gibs shared suggest the true business impact may be substantially larger. That changes the investment case, because media that appears to be performing adequately in a single-channel view may actually be driving more value when you account for what is happening in stores and across other channels.
Walmart Connect’s CES 2026 recap put more precise numbers on the same finding: 2.8 times stronger incremental ROAS and 2.0 times higher sales lift than Circana digital media benchmarks, across qualifying campaigns in key categories.
Gibs also addressed a question that comes up in supplier planning conversations: at what point does Walmart Connect spending hit diminishing returns? He was candid. We are yet to see a point of diminishing returns in the experimentation we have done. He qualified it immediately: that does not mean they will not see it eventually. But based on the complexity on a category-by-category basis and the existing spend levels and competitiveness in those categories, it is difficult to see where that point will be right now.
Walmart Connect has also published results from its Search Incrementality product, now in General Availability. According to Walmart Connect’s CES 2026 materials, a General Merchandise case study showed sales lift of up to 9.0% and incremental ROAS of up to $10.06 during the testing period, based on Walmart first-party data from February through March 2025. Tyau explained the methodology: the test links ad exposure to outcomes and isolates the variable of whether a shopper was exposed to the Walmart Connect search ad, using randomized control testing to measure the incremental value of the investment.
Why this matters for suppliers: The multipliers Gibs cited are not adjustments to make performance look better. They are what becomes visible when measurement stops being limited to a single platform. A supplier whose internal reporting shows a 3x ROAS on Walmart Connect search may be systematically undervaluing their investment if the reporting does not account for the in-store and off-platform sales that the same advertising is driving. The diminishing returns point matters too: Gibs is saying that in the experimentation they have run so far, spending more at Walmart has continued to produce incremental results. For suppliers debating whether to increase their investment, the data suggests the ceiling has not been reached in most categories.
How to operationalize incrementality into your planning
Gibs was direct about the operational challenge. Measurement clarity requires taking all of the different signals, from search incrementality to display sales lift to cross-channel studies with Circana to marketing mix modeling, and assembling them into a coherent decision-making framework. Most suppliers have built reporting structures around ROAS for years, with internal stakeholders and finance teams who are fluent in that metric. Incorporating incrementality means expanding what gets reported and how performance is described to leadership.
The practical entry point Gibs recommended was a learning agenda. His team works with advertisers to understand their marketing goals and KPIs for the year, then identifies the points where they can actually drive incrementality. The first step is running a search incrementality study and treating it as a learning exercise, using the gap between what the ROAS report showed and what the incrementality study revealed as calibration data for future investment decisions. From there, the conversation expands to broader incrementality products and cross-channel measurement with partners like Circana. Tyau added that marketing mix modeling tools, including Walmart’s WHAM product, extend the time horizon further, helping suppliers plan media investment across longer cycles instead of optimizing campaign by campaign.
Tyau’s full-funnel framing points toward a different kind of internal budget conversation. A brand that can show how awareness primes demand, search captures it, and in-store media reinforces it is making a different case than one that can only show a within-platform return for each format on its own. The ability to demonstrate incremental sales generation across ad formats, Tyau said, is what allows a supplier to move from treating Walmart media as a bottom-of-funnel capture tool to understanding it as a place that also creates demand at the top of the funnel, building what he called a flywheel of building new demand, creating new demand, and then capturing that when customers enter an active buying experience.
Why this matters for suppliers: The learning agenda approach Gibs outlined is worth understanding as a specific process, not just a concept. It starts with a search incrementality study that establishes a baseline. That baseline becomes calibration data for the rest of the year’s investment decisions. The supplier then builds outward to display, offsite, and cross-channel measurement. This is a sequential process, not a one-time study. Suppliers who treat incrementality as an annual audit rather than an ongoing learning program will miss the compounding value of building measurement capabilities over time.
Why the conversation does not end at efficiency
Later in the conversation, Gibs raised a distinction that he said is easily overlooked but needs to be underscored. The difference between efficiency and effectiveness.
Efficiency is whether you are driving sales more efficiently per dollar spent. Effectiveness is whether you are driving additional top-line sales. An advertiser chasing only efficient incrementality, Gibs said, risks leaving incremental sales, incremental opportunities, and new buyers on the table, pushed to the side because the team has been chasing the lowest common denominator of efficiency.
Tyau extended the point to customer lifetime value. Different metrics like CLV and other ways to look at the extended value of media matter, he said, because what they ultimately want to do is build higher loyalty for buyers and increase the share the supplier has in market. Those two things together build into the kind of value that becomes more important than tomorrow’s incrementality number alone.
Tyau then pushed the conversation into territory that platform-side speakers rarely enter. His point was that advertising does not exist in a vacuum. It carries an opportunity cost. A supplier that hits an efficiency metric they are happy with and stops advertising does not make the shoppers disappear. Those shoppers do not stop shopping because you have stopped advertising. It becomes an immediate opportunity for competitors to reach those shoppers. The real conversation, Tyau said, is not just about how efficiently you can drive incrementality. It goes into this broader question of offense and defense, and how you not just gain incremental share but also defend your share.
Why this matters for suppliers: The efficiency-versus-effectiveness distinction has direct implications for how Walmart Connect budgets get set internally. A supplier whose KPIs are built entirely around efficient iROAS will optimize toward lower spend on proven performers and cut investment in formats that are building demand at the top of the funnel. Gibs is warning against exactly that. And Tyau’s offense-and-defense framing reframes the Walmart media investment entirely: pulling back on media that is working does not save money if competitors fill the gap with the same shoppers.
Gibs closed the conversation with a summary that captures what both speakers were working toward. We want to get to a place where performance stops being guesswork, he said. We want to get to a place where it becomes something that a supplier can engineer.
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