Your Chewy ad spend is up. Your sales are flat. You're treating Chewy like Amazon. That's your first mistake.
Chewy Ads has doubled the number of advertisers and campaigns on the platform from 2025 to 2026. One in every three clicks on an ad results in a sale. The company's 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, and 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 well, 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.
Chewy Max: The New AI-Powered Targeting Tool
In March 2026, Chewy debuted Chewy Max, which has more AI-powered targeting tools. This includes the ability to target for lifetime value return on ad spend.
Chewy Max, along with Chewy Marketing Cloud and Incremental Return on Ad Spend, was introduced to help brands better optimize, measure, and scale their media investments on Chewy.
What this means for brands:
The old "spray and pray" method of advertising is dead on Chewy. The platform now gives you the tools to target specific audiences with high intent to purchase. Want to reach pet parents who buy premium food but might not know about your therapeutic health products? You can do that. Want to target customers who are likely to subscribe, not just buy once? You can do that too.
The brands winning on Chewy aren't just running ads. They're using these tools to build targeted, data-driven campaigns that acquire high-LTV customers.
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.
How Artha Helps Brands Navigate the Chewy Ecosystem
Adapting to Chewy's unique advertising landscape requires cross-marketplace intelligence. Artha provides the unified view brands need to make data-driven decisions:
- Unified dashboard: See Chewy, Amazon, Walmart, and 100+ marketplaces in one view. No more fragmented reporting. No more debating whose numbers are right.
- Lighthouse: Digital shelf monitoring across warehouses and dark stores provides intelligence to track inventory, days on hand, and stock-to-sales ratios at a glance. Know exactly what's available before you commit ad spend.
- PricePulse: Real-time competitor pricing alerts across every marketplace. Know the moment a competitor drops their price on Chewy or any other channel.
- Echo: Natural language queries like "Which Chewy campaigns are driving the highest LTV per dollar spent?" Get answers in seconds, not hours.
When you can see performance across marketplaces, fulfillment models, and customer segments in one place, you stop guessing and start optimizing.
Get your free audit at www.artha360.com
Get Free Audit