The definition of a walled garden, according to adpushup, is an organization that keeps its technology, information, and user data to itself, with no intention of sharing it.
In simpler words, a walled garden is a closed ecosystem operated by people within the ecosystem without an outside organization’s involvement. In the marketing and ad tech world – think of Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. Everything outside of the walled gardens is called the Open Internet (OI).
Every marketer you know is running advertising within a walled garden, but is that the most beneficial way to run advertising? Not necessarily.
Believe it or not, there are many disadvantages to running solely in walled gardens… the budgets are siloed, the attribution is different in every platform, and you have to accept/abide by every platform’s terms. Not to mention, it’s hard to join the data from one walled garden to another and make sense of it.
Think of it this way… it’s in each walled garden’s best interest to take attribution on all of your orders or leads because they want you to keep spending money on that platform. It’s essentially a conflict of interest because you are paying them to run advertising for you, then they are showing you the metrics associated with the campaigns. Why wouldn’t they try to “show favor” to their platform?
Other disadvantages to running in walled gardens include –
- You are not able to manage your reach and frequency in one place. You run the risk of not hitting users enough or hitting them with way too many ads.
- They all have different machine learning algorithms that use different algorithmic recipes. Different recipes could mean inconsistent and different results, such as potentially using AI to segment your audience TOO much or going after the wrong customers.
- Each walled garden may have their own analytics systems that favor their behavior and performance in a self-serving way.
- You may be relying on the walled garden analytics and only focusing on “last click” conversion drivers. When doing this, you completely disregard the importance of TV, radio, display, and other upper funnel tactics, which are essential for business growth.
Running in walled gardens is not going to go away. The purpose of this blog post is to help you understand that, as a marketer, you need to look at the walled garden data objectively and make decisions for yourself. Invest in a multi-touch attribution tool to look at the data objectively instead of assuming the walled garden shows you the full truth of what’s going on in your advertising, marketing, and branding.
And consider running ads on the Open Internet (OI) with Above the Fold, supporting companies like TheTradeDesk, which are huge advocates for the OI.