Chewy Ads Has Doubled Its Advertisers. Have You Updated Your Strategy?

Your Chewy ad spend is up. Your sales are flat. You're treating Chewy like Amazon.

That's your first mistake.

In just three years, Chewy Ads has evolved from a small experiment into a commerce media powerhouse. The number of advertisers and campaigns on the platform doubled from 2025 to 2026. One in every three clicks on an ad results in a sale. And advertisers generate at least $7 in lifetime value sales for every $1 invested.

The opportunity is massive. But most brands are approaching it with the wrong playbook.

Here's why your Amazon ad strategy is failing on Chewy and what you need to do instead.

The Chewy Difference: Loyalty Over Conversion

Chewy isn't a marketplace. It's a subscription platform disguised as one.

Autoship customer sales reached $2.83 billion in Q1 2026, rising 10.5% year over year and accounting for 84.4% of total net sales. Over 20 million active customers. 15 years of first-party purchase data. An ecosystem built entirely around recurring revenue.

When you advertise on Chewy, you aren't chasing a one-off transaction. You're acquiring a customer who, if things go right, will buy from you every single month for years.

The math is fundamentally different.

On Amazon, a conversion is a conversion. On Chewy, a conversion is the beginning of a relationship.

Chewy's head of ads, Frank Mulcahy, put it simply: "How do I talk about pet parents that are [shopping] in food who might not know about our therapeutic and health vertical? We can use all the signals Chewy has, with 15 years' worth of data, in an ad tech framework and be laser focused on what we're trying to deliver."

The Data Advantage You're Not Using

Most retail media networks hoard their data. Chewy does the opposite.

The Chewy Ads dashboards show users the LTV ROAS for each campaign, as well as how many customers have signed up for autoship orders. All users can also see iROAS, or incremental return on ad spending, which shows net new revenue.

This level of transparency is rare. And it's a direct reflection of how Chewy thinks about its advertising business: not as a revenue extraction machine, but as a partnership platform.

"We can use all the signals Chewy has, with 15 years' worth of data, in an ad tech framework," Mulcahy said. That's 15 years of knowing what pet parents buy, when they buy it, how often they reorder, and what else they might need.

Most brands aren't leveraging this. They're still running generic campaigns and measuring standard ROAS.

The Metrics That Actually Matter

On Chewy, standard ROAS is a vanity metric. Here's what actually matters:

LTV ROAS (Lifetime Value Return on Ad Spend)

This is Chewy's primary KPI. It measures the lifetime value generated by your advertising investments, not just the immediate sale. On average, advertisers generate at least $7 in LTV sales for every $1 invested.

iROAS (Incremental Return on Ad Spend)

This shows net new revenue. It answers the question: "Did this ad actually bring in new customers, or did it just cannibalize sales that would have happened anyway?"

Autoship Sign-ups

The Chewy Ads dashboards show how many customers have signed up for autoship orders. This is the metric that matters most. An autoship customer is a recurring revenue stream.

If you're not tracking these metrics, you're flying blind.

The Strategy Shift: From Conversion to Lifetime Value

In just three years, Chewy Ads revenue grew more than sixfold and advertiser participation expanded nearly twentyfold. The average advertiser investment increased more than fourfold as trust deepened and partnerships matured.

The brands driving that growth aren't running the same playbook they use on Amazon.

They're thinking in terms of customer lifetime value, not immediate return. They're using Chewy's data to target high-intent audiences. They're measuring iROAS and LTV ROAS, not just standard ROAS. And they're optimizing for autoship sign-ups, not just one-off conversions.

The early movers are locking in data, placement, and efficiency before the competition wakes up.