Walled garden

A walled garden refers to a closed ecosystem: a platform that only provides limited access to external apps, websites, or other external services. Examples of walled gardens include social media platforms like Facebook, search engines like Google, or eCommerce platforms like Amazon. Walled gardens are designed to keep users on-platform, which provides the company more control over the user experience and maximizes revenue from customers and users, as well as advertisers that want access to the users and data. 

As Advertify highlights:

Walled gardens make up the vast majority of digital advertising opportunities within the publishing landscape. In fact, last year, Google, Meta, and Amazon took home 74% market share of all digital ad spend — and that number is expected to be even higher in Europe because of GDPR.

Walled gardens can be beneficial for users and platform owners, although they can pose challenges for marketers and advertisers without the right tools.

In order to understand how marketers work with walled gardens, let’s review why they make up the majority of the digital advertising landscape. In particular, a few advantages of walled gardens on the platform side include:

• User retention: Walled gardens are built to increase user retention and engagement by offering a seamless, end-to-end experience. 
• Data collection: Walled gardens also collect a huge amount of data on users, which helps the platform further optimize the user experience and drive revenue.
• Monetization: With all this data on users, walled gardens are also designed to drive revenue and monetization by offering partial access to user data to be used in ad targeting, promoted content, and other revenue-generating activities.

Conversely, on the marketing side walled gardens are can pose challenges, such as:

• Limited access: Given that walled gardens only offer restricted access to marketers can make it difficult to track the effectiveness of their ad campaigns across multiple platforms.
• Limited data: Walled gardens also typically offer limited data and analytics for marketers, as they often restrict access to user information and engagement metrics. 
• Limited control: Walled gardens also limit the control that marketers have over their targeting and campaigns and typically have certain rules and guidelines related to ad content, targeting, placement, and so on.

While there are challenges advertising on walled gardens, the major ones are simply too big and too ubiquitous to ignore, so marketers generally accept the challenges of working with major players. However, in order to make the most of their marketing efforts on walled gardens like social platforms and search engines, many marketers turn to third-party tools to augment the ad performance data from the walled gardens.

As a leader in marketing analytics, Singular helps marketers navigate the challenges of advertising on walled gardens. Singular is an official attribution partner of every major walled garden and platform, enabling special access to approved data in privacy-safe ways that marketers can use to measure effectiveness and optimize campaign performance.

This also allows you to save time collecting data from each walled garden, since Singular collects all your marketing data. Singular then standardizes and normalizes it and presents it in one pane of glass. 

In summary, Singular provides marketers with unrivaled ROI insights into the walled gardens they use for advertising in order to understand marketing efforts.