What is a Walled Garden?
A walled garden is a closed environment in mobile marketing in which the operator owns the applications, content and media and doesn’t allow any other applications or content that he does not approve. In digital advertising, walled gardens are generally referred to as platforms that retain full ownership of user data and do not allow advertisers access to user data or to export user data out of their ecosystem. The largest walled gardens in the mobile marketing ecosystem are large tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon & Meta. Each walled garden has strict ownership of user data, advertising abilities, and measurement approach on its platform, where chances and challenges are presented to app marketers when advertising within a walled garden.
Walled Garden Marketing: Strategic Approaches
Walled garden marketing is a specialized marketing effort that takes advantage of a closed ecosystem and has its permutations. App marketers are dependent upon adhering to platform or vendor-dictated demands, capabilities for targeting, and limitations for measurement when determining their unique walled garden marketing effort.
Well-executed walled garden marketing typically includes:
- Creative Assets Unique to Each Platform: Walled gardens are, in fact, unique and have specifications and best practices for creative assets. App marketers need to optimize their assets and copy for each platform.
- First-Party Data Usage: Given that marketers are limited for sharing data from walled gardens, maximizing the usefulness of first-party data for usage targeting and optimizing the available data for each unique ecosystem is paramount.
- Cross-Platform Attribution: Implementing solution(s) that attribute users across multiple walled gardens and open environments as applicable.
- Appropriate KPIs by Platform: Developing appropriate KPIs that are reasonable and rely on the reporting features from each walled garden.
The advancement of walled garden marketing continues to evolve, and ultimately the ways in which brands will consider their approach to user acquisition and engagement strategies within the mobile app ecosystem.
Walled Garden Advertising: Opportunities and Limitations
Walled garden advertising effectively gives premium targeting capabilities because of the first-party user data, but poses serious drawbacks in terms of data access and cross-device transparency. The major walled gardens have large audiences and thus the primary means for most app marketing campaigns despite the limitations above.
Some of the elements of walled garden advertising include:
- Self-Attribution: Most closed gardens are self-attributing networks (SANs), implying that the networks handle the attribution process without any assistance from third-party attribute providers.
- Limited Data Portability: The data gathered at user level cannot be migrated out of the walled garden for the purpose of usage in other platforms or for integrated campaign evaluation.
- Black Box Measurement: Advertisers often get little insights into the actual process of converting the reports and targeting the audience.
- Advanced Targeting Options: That said, walled garden advertising, in many cases, uses a precise targeting method using demographic, behavioral, and interest-based audiences.
However, since privacy regulation and platform policies change constantly, walled garden advertising is challenging and complex, which may need professionals from the app marketers.
Walled Garden Meaning in Different Contexts
Depending on the context in which it is discussed, the meaning of the walled garden has slightly different implications:
- Mobile Marketing: A walled garden context refers to the closed ecosystems where app stores (Apple App Store, Google Play, etc.) allow the platform owner to control everything related to distribution, monetization, and user experience.
- Advertising Technology: The walled garden meaning here refers to platforms that don’t share data, and that require advertisers to use their proprietary tools for campaign management and measurement.
- Media: Subscription content platforms or platforms that require logins and provide exclusive content can be interpreted as another kind of walled garden.
- Telecommunications: Some network operators have walled-garden characteristics of restricting which services or applications can be accessed on their network.
By understanding the walled garden meaning in each context, app marketers can develop strategies for working within those closed ecosystems.
Major Mobile Marketing Walled Gardens
Apple
Apple’s ecosystem is one of the most well-known walled gardens in mobile marketing; it includes:
- App Store
- Apple Search Ads
- SKAdNetwork
- Apple Privacy Framework, which includes App Tracking Transparency (ATT), that makes marketers ask for consent from the user to perform tracking.
Apple’s walled garden has become even more walled after the release of iOS 14.5, which has required app marketers to fundamentally change their way of thinking about how to acquire users and measure outcomes on iOS.
Google has a few linked walled gardens, for example:
- Google Play Store
- Google Ads includes search, display, and YouTube ads
- Android Privacy Sandbox, which is Google’s incoming privacy framework for Android
- Firebase, Google’s mobile development platform with analytics.
Google’s walled garden does offer more opportunity than Apple’s walled garden, but Google still maintains a considerable amount of control over the attribution and overall data collection.
Meta (Facebook & Instagram)
Meta’s walled garden consists of:
- Facebook Ads Manager: The main platform for advertising across Meta’s properties
- Advanced Matching: Meta’s way to connect app events back to user PII
- Aggregated Event Measurement: Meta’s post-ATT measurement
- Meta Audience Network: In-app advertising network using Meta user data
Meta’s walled garden marketing functionality has been significantly disrupted due to the privacy changes from Apple, and advertisers will likely have to fundamentally change their marketing behavior.
Amazon
Amazon’s walled garden is growing and contains:
- Amazon Appstore: Android app distribution alternative
- Amazon Advertising: Including sponsored products and display ads
- Amazon Marketing Cloud: Data clean room for marketing
- AWS Mobile Services: Backend infrastructure for mobile apps
Amazon’s walled garden only continues to get larger as it expands its advertising business and grows its mobile footprint.
Navigating Walled Garden Challenges
Data Limitations
Walled garden advertising restricts data portability, creating numerous challenges for marketers. These closed ecosystems limit the movement and sharing of user data between platforms, making it difficult to build a holistic view of marketing performance.
Limited Data Portability: Walled garden advertising restricts the movement and sharing of user data, creating significant challenges for marketers.
Difficult Cross-Platform Measurement: Marketers struggle to track users seamlessly across multiple platforms, making it hard to measure overall campaign performance.
Restricted Audience Insights: Limited visibility into audience composition and behavior hampers the development of detailed and actionable audience profiles.
Inconsistent Performance Benchmarking: Different platforms use varying metrics, making it difficult to compare campaign results across walled gardens.
Challenging Incrementality Testing: Determining the true incremental impact of campaigns is tough due to the isolated nature of data within each ecosystem.
Privacy Regulations
Privacy Laws Add Complexity: Regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and others mandate explicit consent for data processing, creating a baseline that impacts all digital marketing efforts.
Stricter Platform Policies: Walled gardens often enforce guidelines that go beyond legal requirements, requiring marketers to adapt to each platform’s unique privacy standards.
Challenging Consent Management: Consent mechanisms differ across platforms, making it necessary for marketers to create tailored strategies for each walled garden.
Emphasis on Data Minimization: There’s a growing industry push to collect and use only the data essential for specific marketing functions, adding further constraints.
Need for Constant Adaptation: Marketers must stay updated with evolving privacy regulations and platform-specific policies to succeed in walled garden advertising.
Attribution Challenges
Inconsistent Attribution Methods: Each walled garden sets its own attribution windows and uses self-attribution systems, leading to fragmented and inconsistent conversion tracking.
Varied View-Through Attribution: Platforms differ in how they credit ad impressions—some emphasize impression-based attribution, while others prioritize click-based conversions.
Decline of Probabilistic Attribution: Privacy-focused platform policies are limiting the use of probabilistic attribution, which once helped measure conversions across platforms.
Shift to Aggregated Reporting: The industry is moving away from user-level attribution toward aggregated data, changing how campaign effectiveness is measured.
Need for Evolved Measurement Strategies: App marketers must update their analytics approaches to navigate the attribution limitations of walled gardens.
Walled Garden Marketing Best Practices
Platform-Specific Optimization
Effective walled garden marketing demands platform-specific strategies. Marketers must adapt creatives, bidding tactics, audience targeting, and campaign structures to align with each platform’s unique features, user behavior, and best practices, making a one-size-fits-all approach ineffective.
First-Party Data Activation
In the face of third-party data restrictions, first-party data is key to successful walled garden marketing. Marketers are increasingly using CDPs to centralize data, focusing on app event optimization and value-based targeting. Advanced audience segmentation allows for precise, personalized messaging, making first-party data strategies essential for performance.
Measurement Evolution
Innovative measurement solutions are key to navigating the walled garden era. Marketers are embracing media mix modeling, incrementality testing, and data clean rooms to measure performance while respecting privacy. Conversion modeling is also gaining importance, helping fill gaps left by limited user-level data and cross-platform restrictions.
Conclusion: Thriving in a Walled Garden World
Walled garden marketing, although not without its drawbacks, is, without a doubt, still important to app marketers that are looking to access really valuable audiences at scale. To be successful, app marketers need to have experience, develop platform-specific strategie,s and be able to adapt to the changing privacy landscape, along with platform-specific policies.
App marketers that develop sophisticated solutions for walled garden advertising while accounting for platform optimization, measurement and innovation, and privacy will emerge as clear leaders during these complicated times in mobile marketing.
As the ecosystem changes more every day, it remains imperative for app marketers to keep up with what’s changing, the walled gardens, how walled garden marketing includes app marketing and the best practices within walled gardens, for their app marketing success.