Walled Garden

What is a Walled Garden?

A walled garden represents a closed-loop environment in mobile marketing, where the operator owns applications, content and media, but access to any applications or content that have not been approved the operator are restricted. In digital advertising, walled gardens are usually described as platforms that fully own consumer data and do not allow advertisers any access to or export of user data in its ecosystem.

The largest walled gardens in the mobile marketing ecosystem are large tech companies such as Apple, Google, and Meta. Each walled garden has strict ownership of consumer data, advertising capabilities, and measurement methodologies within its platform, which gives app marketers both the opportunity and challenge of marketing in a walled garden- environment.

Walled Garden Marketing: Strategic Approaches

Developing walled garden marketing uses targeted strategies that maximize strengths and operate under boundaries of closed ecosystems. When developing walled garden marketing campaigns, app marketers will have to adjust to platform-specific guidelines, targeting options, and measurement considerations.

Successful walled garden marketing is a combination of using:

• Creative Assets that Are Platform Specific: Each walled garden monitors their own specifications and best practices for creative assets. App marketers will have to customize their imagery and messaging for each platform.

• First-Party Data: Because walled gardens restrict the sharing of data across platforms, marketers will also have to best use first-party data for audience targeting and optimizations within the ecosystem.

• Cross-Platform Attribution: Implementing technology solutions that have the capability to measure user journeys spanning multiple walled gardens and all open environments.

• Platform Specific KPIs: Establishing appropriate metrics for each platform, based on the reporting specifications of each walled garden.

Walled garden marketing continues to evolve, and in many respects, establishes the way brands consider how to acquire users and engage with them in the mobile app ecosystem.

Walled Garden Advertising: Opportunities and Limitations

Walled garden advertising is a type of advertising that enables great targeting through sophisticated user data, but has major restrictions to transparency and cross-platform measurement. Because of the sheer size of the audiences controlled by the major walled gardens, they can be critical sources for nearly all app marketing campaigns.

Some key elements of walled garden advertising are:

• Self-Attributing: Walled gardens are almost always self-attributing networks (SANs), meaning that users do their own attribution and not rely on a third-party attribution vendor.

• Poor Portability: User level data will typically not be exportable from the walled garden to another platform (or for analyzing a holistic campaign).

• Black-Box Reporting: Advertisers largely take it for granted that they lack a basic understanding of how conversions are reported or how audiences are targeted.

Targeting Based on Demographic, Behavioral, and Interest-based Segmentation: Advertisers can have relatively sophisticated targeting solutions through walled garden advertising despite their other restrictions.

As privacy constraints and platform policies change, walled garden advertising becomes more complicated and requires hyper-specialized app marketers.

Walled Garden Meaning in Different Contexts

The meaning of walled garden can vary slightly based on the context of the discussion: 

• For example, in Mobile Marketing a walled garden are the closed ecosystem’s of app stores (Apple App Store, Google Play) where the platform owner and their huge staff of developers and marketers have controlled every distribution, monetization and overall user experience aspect. 

• In Advertising Technology a walled garden would be every platform that restricts a user’s ability to share data and the requirement that advertisers use the proprietary tools of the platform to manage campaigns and measure success. 

• In Media a walled garden might be represented by platforms that require a subscription or require users to log in to access exclusive content. 

• In Telecommunications, operators can control the types of services or applications that could be accessed on their networks and represent a more traditional walled garden meaning. 

Understanding the meaning of the walled garden in each of the contexts above will help app marketers to create a relevant approach in order to navigate closed ecosystems where necessary.

Walled Garden Ideas for App Marketing Success

New walled garden ideas can support app marketers looking to enhance performance in closed ecosystems. Innovative walled garden marketers are constructing platform specific user acquisition strategies, providing tailored, unique executions in each walled garden ecosystem by leveraging their audience characteristics and advertising capabilities. They are creating custom audience strategies which use the unique data signals available in each ecosystem to build more nuanced audience targeting strategies. Constructing new creative testing frameworks that can address the different specs, testing and audience behavior across walled garden platforms is another strategy. 

As privacy takes hold, creating privacy-first measurement solutions which work within the reams of constraints, while concurrently supporting the collection of actionable data insights, is becoming even more paramount. A new wave of sophisticated marketers are also leveraging hybrid attribution models which include data from multiple sources to create a more comprehensive measurement offering across walled gardens.

Major Mobile Marketing Walled Gardens

Apple

Apple’s ecosystem contains one of the most well-known walled gardens in mobile marketing. The ecosystem includes:

• App Store: Apple’s tightly controlled app distribution mechanism 

• Apple Search Ads: App Store’s exclusive advertising search platform

• SKAdNetwork: Apple’s privacy-based attribution framework

• Apple privacy Framework: Including App Tracking Transparency (ATT) that requires you to ask users for permission to track them 

The walled garden surrounding Apple has become more restrictive since iOS 14.5 and has forced app marketers to rethink user acquisition and measurement on iOS.

Google

Google has multiple interconnect walled gardens:

• Google Play Store: The primary app distribution platform for Android
• Google Ads: Search and display ads, and advertising on YouTube
• Android Privacy Sandbox: Google’s developing privacy framework for Android
• Firebase: Google’s needs of app development and: analytics offerings

 While Google’s ecosystem is slightly more open than Apple’s walled garden, it still maintains a high level of control over the data and measurement capabilities.

Meta (Facebook & Instagram).

Meta’s walled garden consists of:

• Facebook Ads Manager: The central advertising platform for Meta-owned properties
• Advanced Matching: Meta’s tool for tying together app events to user profiles
• Aggregated Event Measurement: Meta’s post-ATT measurement system
• Meta Audience Network: Mobile in-app advertisement network leveraged by Meta user data.

Meta’s walled garden marketing capabilities have been impacted in a big way by Apple’s privacy modifications, leading advertisers to adapt the way they do marketing.

Amazon

Amazon’s ever-growing walled garden consists of:

• Amazon Appstore: an alternate distribution platform for Android apps
• Amazon Advertising: including sponsored products and display ads
• Amazon Marketing Cloud: a data clean room dedicated to marketing analytics
• AWS Mobile Services: backend infrastructure for mobile apps

Amazon’s walled garden is only getting larger as the company expands its advertising and mobile footprint.

Navigating Walled Garden Challenges

Data Limitations

Walled garden advertising limits the portability of data, presenting many competitive challenges for marketers to develop campaigns across various platforms. In most cases it is nearly impossible to measure customer behavior consistently across multiple platforms, thus making cross platform measurement extremely difficult. Marketers will have a limited view into the audience composition and audience behavior, inhibiting the ability to create a complete picture of the audience. Benchmarking the performance of your advertising can also become problematic due to contextual differences between the various walled gardens and the challenge of not being able to benchmark with similar metrics across those walled gardens. It is also difficult to conduct incrementality testing as marketers are challenged with understanding the true incremental effects of each campaign across the separate gardens. 

As the industry continues to evolve, app marketers need to understand how to operate within these data limitations while still optimizing campaign performance.

Privacy Regulations

The interplay of privacy regulations and walled gardens adds increased levels of complexity for marketers to face. GDPR, CCPA and other laws treat data processing and the privacy principles surrounding consent from consumers in a formalized way, to create a baseline privacy framework that influences all digital marketing channels. Each platform has formal policies that may even provide stricter privacy protections to consumers than privacy laws, which requires marketers to adapt to that ecosystem and its interpretation of the privacy principles. Consent management is further complicated by unique approaches to consent management within each walled garden. It also requires ever changing approaches to consent management.

The industry continues to witness marketplace demands for greater data minimization principles and markers are under more pressure to limit the nature of data collected and utilized, to what is only necessary at the granular level for specific marketing functions.

Effective walled garden advertising requires prudently tracking and responding to changes in privacy regulations and platform policies.

Attribution Challenges

App marketers want a holistic understanding of campaign performance, they face difficulties doing so when taking into account measurement across walled gardens. Each walled garden employs self attribution systems to individually determine its attribution windows and methods for measuring conversions, which ultimately creates discrepancies in how conversions are attributed across platforms. On top of this complication, platforms take different approaches to view through attribution. Some defined a large amount of credit to an ad impression and others abandonment offers just click to convert. Additionally, probabilistic attribution methods, which were once the answer to cross-platform measurement, are being constrained by platforms adding their own rules and policies focused on user privacy (especially since the media privacy landscape has seen an evolution in how user consenters can be implemented to track conversions). 

Therefore, the industry as a whole has started to transition away from user-level attribution toward aggregated reporting frameworks. So it’s important that app marketers adjust the way in which they measure, to make sense of these attribution challenges.

Walled Garden Marketing Best Practices

Platform-Specific Optimization

Every walled garden will have different optimization strategies based on the attributes specific to the platform. Creative adjustment is key, as marketers must optimize their visual and messaging assets for each platform according to their rules and their consumer’s expectations. Bidding strategies must be customized with care, and the approach should be created for the auction dynamics and levels of competition on that platform. Audience targeting capabilities will differ substantially between walled gardens, and marketers must be skilled in the unique targeting parameters available in each ecosystem, customizing all work accordingly. Again, campaign structure must also be set up according to the best practices of the platform, and not standardized and less optimized across paying media channels and platforms, because what works in one walled garden does not necessarily work in another.

Successful walled garden marketing requires expertise about the platform, not a general approach.

First-Party Data Activation

With third-party data constraints, it is increasingly relying on first-party data for walled garden marketing approaches. Many advanced marketers are leveraging customer data platforms (CDPs) to bring together their first-party data collection and activation across channels. App event optimization has become a key focus, with teams investing heavily on the collection and analysis of in-app events, the valuable insights of performance. Value-based optimization methods are increasing in popularity as marketers focus on targeting users based on expected lifetime value rather than basic conversions. Additionally, audience segmentation capabilities are continuing to increase in sophistication enabling highly focused segments for more on point messaging to each user group cohort. 

For app marketers, developing first-party data strategies will be very important within their walled garden marketing strategies.

Measurement Evolution

Measurement frameworks first developed prior to the walled garden era are being adapted with novel strategies which need to weigh privacy demands and address marketer effectiveness. The revival of media mix modeling is happening as marketers shift back to the use of aggregate methodologies to measure channel effectiveness. Incrementality testing in the form of controlled experiments is becoming a requirement to assess the true impact of campaigns vs. platform reported metrics. Data clean rooms are developing to provide a secure environment for privacy compliant analysis and model building without directly accessing user level data. Conversion modeling with the use of statistical models will aid measurement where opt-out & cross platform data restrictions will limit determination. Compensation where a definitive measurement is unavailable.

Innovative approaches to measurement solutions that will weigh privacy requirements and mark ter effectiveness will be the future of walled garden advertising.

The Future of Walled Gardens in Mobile Marketing

Emerging Walled Gardens

New platforms are quickly building walled gardens and adding more complexity to the marketing landscape. TikTok is rapidly building a closed ecosystem with unique advertising capabilities playing to its contextual content experience and audience engagement. Connected TV platforms like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and the ever-growing streaming industry are creating closed content and advertising environments which are disrupting traditional television advertising models. Gaming platforms such as Unity, Epic Games, and console ecosystems are building a range of advertising solutions that will reach these highly engaged audiences. Retail media networks from companies such as Walmart, Target, and Instacart are building an influential advertising platform using proprietary shopper data and connecting online behavior to understand offline purchases. 

App marketers will need to look at the opportunities in new walled gardens while managing increasing complexity of advertising campaigns.

Industry Responses

The digital marketing ecosystem is actively responding to walled garden challenges, with a variety of initiatives across the industry. Industry consortiums are developing working groups that will delineate cross-platform standards to allow for greater consistency in measurement and targeting across different environments. There is much investment being made into alternative identifiers as businesses are determining how to create privacy-compliant identity solutions that do not utilize traditional tracking mechanisms. Independent measurement providers are enhancing their offerings of third party verification that comply with platform constraints as well as provide useful insights. At the same time, open-source initiatives are increasing in scope as more organizations see the usefulness in collaborating to address common hindrances in the digital advertising ecosystem. 

These responses hope to balance the benefits of walled garden marketing with transparency and effectiveness.

Privacy-First Innovation

The future of mobile marketing in walled gardens is to embrace approaches that respect users’ data privacy while creating effective marketing messages. An emerging technology trend is on-device processing whereby sensitive data is processed on the device itself to prevent the transmission of the raw data to a central server. Platforms will use techniques such as differential privacy that will inevitably make it mathematically impossible to identify the individual while providing the marketer moment-to-moment aggregate understanding of the physical world. Federated Learning will also provide developers with intermediate, but improving, models without having to aggregate user data that could potentially breach the user’s privacy. The idea of using consumer data for stated principles will begin to evolve into best practices with platforms and marketers being able to limit data collection for only the purposes that are clearly stated and provide users with specific, direct value.

These will be foundational to how walled garden advertising will evolve in the coming years.

Conclusion

Walled garden marketing is challenging, but it will always be an important marketing strategy for app marketers looking to reach scaleable and valuable audiences. In order to be successful you need expertise, platform-specific strategies, and be willing to adapt to changing privacy criteria and platform policies.

App marketers able to craft complex strategies around walled garden advertising (a good balance of platform optimization, measurement innovation, and privacy compliance) will capture more competitive advantages in the multi-faceted mobile marketing landscape.

The more the ecosystem evolves, the more important it is to follow changes and updates to walled gardens and their related best practices for app marketing success.

from Apptrove https://apptrove.com/what-is-a-walled-garden-apptrove/
via Apptrove