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.