Walled Gardens in Advertising: The Ultimate Strategy for 2025

Walled gardens dominate the digital advertising landscape. These closed ecosystems, run by tech giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon, offer incredible targeting capabilities. They hold vast amounts of valuable first-party user data. For marketers, this represents a massive opportunity to reach the right consumer at the right time. However, this power comes at a cost.

The "walls" around these gardens create significant challenges. This guide provides a comprehensive roadmap for navigating these complex environments. We will explore what walled gardens are, their pros and cons, and actionable strategies to overcome their limitations.  

Key Takeaways:

• Walled gardens defined: Closed digital ecosystems (like Google, Meta, Amazon) that control their own data, technology, and ad inventory, limiting data sharing with outsiders.
• The core trade-off: Advertisers gain access to rich first-party data and precise targeting but sacrifice data transparency and cross-platform measurement.
• Privacy is a catalyst: The deprecation of third-party cookies and regulations like GDPR are making walled gardens even more powerful, as they rely on their own logged-in user data.
• The solution is unification: Overcoming walled garden challenges requires a unified data strategy. Centralizing data from all platforms is essential for a complete view of the customer journey.

What Is a Walled Garden in Advertising?

A walled garden is a closed platform where the company that runs it controls all operations. This includes the technology, the data, and the ad inventory. 

Think of it as a private park. The owner sets the rules for who can enter, what they can do, and what information they can take with them when they leave.

This creates a self-contained environment. Advertisers can play inside, but they can't see the full picture of how their ads interact with the broader digital world.

How Walled Gardens Control Data and Access

The primary asset of a walled garden is its first-party data. This is information collected directly from users who are logged into the platform. This includes demographics, interests, purchase history, and behavior. The platform uses this data to offer highly effective targeted advertising. 

However, they keep the raw data for themselves. Advertisers get aggregated performance reports but cannot export user-level data for independent analysis. This control is the central feature of the walled garden model.

The Key Players: Google, Meta, Amazon, and Emerging Platforms

The most prominent walled gardens are often called the "triopoly."

• Google: Controls search (Google Search), video (YouTube), and a massive display network. Its garden is built on user intent and search history.
• Meta: Dominates social media with Facebook and Instagram. Its garden is powered by user profiles, social connections, and interests.
• Amazon: Leads in e-commerce and retail media. Its garden leverages unparalleled consumer purchase data.

Newer platforms like TikTok, Apple (with its App Store), and LinkedIn are also building powerful walled gardens within their respective niches.

The Evolution of Walled Gardens 

The concept of a walled garden is not new. It has evolved alongside the internet itself. 

The Rise of Social Media and Search Giants

In the 1990s, companies like America Online (AOL) and CompuServe were the original walled gardens. They provided users with a curated, all-in-one internet experience. These companies controlled the content and the advertising within their closed systems.

The rise of Google and later Facebook created a new type of walled garden. These platforms offered free services in exchange for user data. 

As billions of users joined, these companies built massive data moats. They used this data to create advertising platforms so effective that they became indispensable for marketers. This marked the beginning of the modern walled garden era.

The Modern Landscape: Retail Media and CTV

Today, the trend is accelerating. Retailers like Walmart and Target are launching their own retail media networks, turning their e-commerce sites into walled gardens. 

Similarly, Connected TV (CTV) platforms like Roku and Hulu operate as walled gardens. They control ad inventory and viewing data on their streaming services. This fragmentation presents new challenges for achieving a unified view of advertising performance.

The Primary Advantages for Advertisers

Despite their limitations, walled gardens are popular for good reason. They offer powerful benefits that are difficult to find on the open web.

Unrivaled Access to First-Party Data

The biggest advantage is the quality and scale of their data. 

Walled gardens have deterministic data on billions of logged-in users. This is not based on probabilistic models or third-party cookies. It's real information about real people. 

This allows for a level of accuracy in targeting that is unmatched. A strong first-party data strategy is key to modern marketing, and these platforms provide a direct way to leverage it.

Precision Targeting and Audience Segmentation

This rich data allows for incredibly granular targeting. Advertisers can build audiences based on thousands of attributes. These include demographics, life events, interests, past purchases, and online behaviors. 

You can target users who have visited your website (retargeting) or find new customers who look just like your best existing ones (lookalike audiences).

Simplified Campaign Management and Execution

Walled gardens provide self-serve ad platforms that are relatively easy to use. They offer integrated tools for everything from ad creation and audience building to budget management and reporting. 

This simplifies the media buying process. It allows even small businesses to run sophisticated digital advertising campaigns without a dedicated ad ops team.

Enhanced User Experience and Ad Relevance

Because the targeting is so precise, users are more likely to see ads that are relevant to their interests. This leads to a better user experience. Relevant ads are less intrusive and can even be helpful. 

This benefits both the consumer and the advertiser, leading to higher engagement rates and better campaign performance.

Perceived Data Security and Brand Safety

Advertising within a well-regulated environment offers a degree of brand safety. Walled gardens have strict content policies. This reduces the risk of ads appearing next to inappropriate or harmful content. 

Furthermore, their control over data can be seen as a security benefit. User data stays within the ecosystem, which can prevent leaks and misuse compared to the Wild West of some open web ad exchanges.

Significant Disadvantages and Challenges for Marketers

The benefits of walled gardens come with serious drawbacks. Marketers must understand these challenges to mitigate their impact.

The "Black Box" Problem: Lack of Data Transparency

This is the most significant challenge. Advertisers receive only aggregated, platform-curated performance metrics, with no access to raw impression-level or user-level data. The underlying decision systems (auction mechanics, bid adjustments, learning phases, and ranking algorithms) remain undisclosed.

This lack of transparency introduces several operational risks. It prevents independent verification of campaign performance and limits the ability to diagnose anomalies, validate attribution, or perform advanced modeling. 

Cross-Channel Measurement Blind Spots

Walled gardens can't easily track user activity outside their own ecosystem. This creates measurement silos. 

If a customer sees an ad on Instagram, searches for the product on Google, and then buys it from your website, who gets the credit? 

Each platform will try to claim the conversion for itself. This makes it nearly impossible to understand the true customer journey and properly attribute conversions. 

Effective cross-channel reporting becomes a manual, painful process without the right tools.

Rising Costs and Bidding Competition

The effectiveness of walled garden advertising has led to immense demand. Since inventory is finite, this high demand drives up costs. Advertisers are competing against each other in a closed auction. 

This can lead to inflated CPMs (cost per mille) and CPAs (cost per acquisition), squeezing marketing budgets and reducing overall profitability.

Limited Audience Reach Beyond the Ecosystem

While the user bases of platforms like Facebook and Google are massive, no single platform includes everyone. A strategy that relies too heavily on one walled garden will miss potential customers who are active elsewhere. 

This limits total addressable market reach and creates a risky dependency on a single channel.

Dependence on Platform-Specific Metrics

Each walled garden has its own set of performance metrics. Meta might prioritize "Engagements," while Google focuses on "Click-Through Rate." 

These platform-specific KPIs don't always align with core business goals like revenue or profit. Marketers can get caught up optimizing for platform metrics instead of focusing on what truly drives business growth. 

Walled Gardens vs. The Open Web: A Strategic Comparison

To make informed decisions, advertisers must understand the fundamental differences between walled gardens and the open web. 

The open web refers to the vast landscape of independent websites, blogs, and publishers that are not controlled by a single entity. They typically use programmatic advertising exchanges to sell their ad space. 

Key Examples of Walled Gardens in Action

Let's look at how the biggest walled gardens operate and what makes each unique. Each platform has its own strengths based on the type of data it collects.

Google's Search and Display Ecosystem (Google Ads, YouTube)

Google’s walled garden is built on high-intent behavioral data. When a user searches for “best running shoes”, they reveal explicit intent, making Google Search one of the most efficient channels for demand capture and bottom-funnel performance.

Key differentiators include:

• Intent-rich keyword data powering precise auction targeting
• YouTube’s behavioral signals, such as watch history and content categories
• Cross-site contextual reach through the Google Display Network (GDN)
• Strong attribution within the Google ecosystem, but limited visibility outside it

While Google offers unmatched scale and intent-driven targeting, measurement remains siloed. Cross-channel verification or external modeling is restricted because impression-level and query-level data never leave the ecosystem.

Meta's Social Empire (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp)

Meta’s power lies in its identity-based targeting. Users voluntarily provide demographic and interest signals through their profiles, connections, and engagement patterns. This allows Meta to predict behavior.

Meta’s advantages include:

• Rich user identity data tied to persistent profiles
• Engagement-based signals across feeds, reels, and stories
• Lookalike modeling powered by billions of interactions
• Strong upper- and mid-funnel performance for demand generation

Meta excels at shaping demand before it exists. However, its measurement tools, especially post-ATT, offer limited transparency into cross-device and off-platform outcomes. The garden is effective but closed.

Amazon's Retail Media Network

Amazon operates a walled garden built on first-party commerce data, giving it a unique advantage in capturing purchase intent at the moment of decision.

Amazon’s strengths include:

• SKU-level browsing, cart, and purchase data
• In-platform conversions that tie exposure directly to sales
• Closed-loop attribution within the Amazon environment
• Highly competitive ad auctions driven by proximity to purchase

For CPG and retail brands, Amazon is indispensable. But visibility outside Amazon’s own retail environment is extremely limited, and advertisers cannot access the granular signals that drive algorithmic decisions.

Emerging Players: TikTok, Apple, and LinkedIn

Several platforms are building new, powerful walled gardens with distinct data moats:

TikTok

• Dominates short-form video engagement
• Uses a highly optimized recommendation algorithm to infer interests
• Offers cultural relevance, rapid reach, and creative-driven discovery

TikTok’s strength is behavioral inference, not identity or intent.

Apple

• Leverages control over the iOS ecosystem
• Uses privacy policies like ATT to limit third-party tracking
• Strengthens its own ad network by restricting competitor data flows

Apple’s garden is built on platform control and privacy compliance rather than advertising scale.

LinkedIn

• Owns the world’s most complete professional identity graph
• Enables precise B2B targeting based on title, seniority, industry, and skills
• Supports account-based marketing strategies with high intent-to-engage signals

LinkedIn is the dominant walled garden for enterprise and B2B advertising, offering unmatched professional context but limited off-platform attribution.

The Impact of Privacy Shifts on Walled Gardens

The digital advertising world is undergoing a seismic shift driven by privacy concerns. These changes are making walled gardens even more powerful.

The Death of the Third-Party Cookie

Third-party cookies have long served as the backbone of open-web advertising, enabling cross-site tracking, audience targeting, and independent measurement. With Safari and Firefox already blocking them, and Google Chrome moving toward full deprecation, the open web is losing its main mechanism for identity and attribution. Independent ad tech loses precision, scale, and the ability to compete on measurement quality.

Walled gardens, however, are insulated from this collapse. Their targeting and optimization engines rely on first-party data from logged-in users, app interactions, and on-platform behavior. They do not depend on third-party cookies to maintain identity or attribution. 

As a result, while the open ecosystem becomes increasingly blind, platforms like Google, Meta, Amazon, and TikTok retain full visibility within their own environments.

How Regulations like GDPR and CCPA Strengthen Gardens

Privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA impose strict controls on data collection, consent management, retention policies, and the use of personal information. 

Walled gardens meet these requirements with relative ease. Their authenticated user bases allow them to capture consent reliably, govern data centrally, and implement policy changes without disrupting operations. 

In contrast, many publishers and independent ad tech companies struggle to maintain compliance, often withdrawing features or reducing data access to mitigate risk. The regulatory burden narrows the competitive landscape and consolidates influence among a handful of platforms that can navigate the complexity successfully.

The Growing Importance of First-Party Data Strategies

As third-party identifiers disappear, first-party data becomes the most reliable and durable asset for marketers. Brands are investing heavily in CRM systems, loyalty programs, and consent-driven data capture to build their own customer understanding. Yet even with strong first-party datasets, advertisers still need environments where this data can be activated at scale.

Walled gardens provide that bridge. Features like customer list matching allow brands to use their own data to target audiences within the garden’s closed ecosystem. This creates a reinforcing loop: advertisers build first-party data to gain independence, but the most effective activation still occurs within the large platforms. 

Over time, this deepens reliance on walled gardens as the primary channels capable of connecting brand-owned data with meaningful reach and measurable outcomes.

Strategic Approaches to Overcome Walled Garden Challenges

Marketers are not powerless. By adopting smart strategies, you can mitigate the risks associated with walled gardens and build a more resilient advertising program.

Diversifying Your Media Mix

The most important rule is to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. Relying on a single platform for all your traffic is a huge risk. If that platform's algorithm changes or costs skyrocket, your entire business could be in jeopardy. 

Allocate your budget across multiple walled gardens and the open web. This diversification provides more stable performance and a richer pool of data to analyze.

Adopting a Unified Measurement Framework

You cannot rely on the self-reported numbers from each platform. You need a single source of truth. 

Improvado provides a unified measurement framework. Instead of stitching together exports manually or building fragile pipelines, Improvado automates the end-to-end data infrastructure.

Improvado delivers the foundational capabilities required to evaluate walled gardens alongside the rest of your marketing mix:

• Automated data ingestion from 500+ ad, analytics, and revenue sources: Ensures your measurement system includes every relevant signal, not just platform-reported metrics.
• Metric normalization and naming governance: Standardizes CAC, ROAS, CTR, revenue, impressions, and custom KPIs across platforms so comparisons are accurate.
• Cross-channel data stitching: Links campaign, audience, and spend data to downstream conversions and revenue outcomes.
• Centralized attribution modeling: Enables first-touch, multi-touch, or custom attribution frameworks that operate consistently across all channels, including walled gardens.
• Unified dashboards and BI enablement: Feeds trusted, standardized data into Looker, Tableau, Power BI, or Improvado’s AI Agent for deeper analysis.

With a unified measurement framework powered by Improvado, you can finally see how walled garden performance fits into the broader ecosystem. 

Leveraging Clean Rooms for Deeper Insights

Data clean rooms are a relatively new technology that allows for privacy-safe data collaboration. They are secure environments where an advertiser can match their first-party data with the platform's data without either side exposing raw user information. 

This allows for more advanced analysis, such as measuring audience overlap between platforms or understanding the incremental impact of campaigns.

Focusing on Creative Optimization

In a world where targeting variables become more limited, creative becomes a more important lever for performance. Invest in developing high-quality, platform-native creative. Test different ad formats, messaging, and visuals relentlessly. 

Strong creative can overcome mediocre targeting, while poor creative will fail even with the best audience settings.

The Future of Walled Gardens: Trends to Watch

Walled gardens are not losing influence. If anything, structural shifts in technology, privacy, and consumer behavior are expanding their control over the digital advertising landscape. 

The Rise of Connected TV (CTV) Gardens

Connected TV is rapidly becoming one of the fastest-growing advertising channels as audiences migrate away from traditional linear television. Major players like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Ads, and others are building their own closed ecosystems. They control premium video inventory, authentication data, device-level identifiers, and detailed viewing behavior.

The challenge for marketers is measurement. Each CTV platform uses proprietary reporting, limited impression-level visibility, and unique identity frameworks. As these CTV gardens scale, cross-platform frequency management, attribution, and incrementality measurement will become significantly more complex.

AI's Role in Targeting and Optimization

Artificial intelligence already powers the core mechanics of walled garden ad delivery. Their algorithms handle bidding, audience selection, creative optimization, and real-time decisioning at a depth impossible for humans to replicate. 

As AI systems advance, platforms are moving toward fully automated campaign types – Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ being early examples.

These products abstract away targeting and optimization controls, creating even deeper opacity. Advertiser influence diminishes, and success becomes dependent on the quality, completeness, and structure of the data fed into the algorithm. In other words, better data becomes the primary lever of performance.

The Push for Interoperability and Standardization

Rising frustration with black-box platforms has led advertisers, agencies, and industry groups to push for more standardized measurement and improved data portability. Technologies like data clean rooms offer a controlled way to analyze audience overlap, deduplicate reach, and model attribution without exposing user-level data.

Yet progress is uneven. Walled gardens have limited incentive to expose more data or adopt shared standards, as their competitive advantage lies in controlling the full advertising and measurement stack. Interoperability may improve over time, but structural openness will remain constrained.

Calculating True Marketing ROI

As walled gardens proliferate and cross-channel visibility decreases, calculating true marketing ROI becomes far more challenging. Platform-reported ROAS is insufficient, often inflated, and blind to incrementality. To understand real impact, advertisers must move toward advanced measurement frameworks.

Techniques like marketing mix modeling (MMM), causal inference, geo-experiments, and holdout testing allow marketers to estimate incremental lift independent of platform bias. These models help reveal how walled gardens contribute to the total marketing portfolio, not just their own optimized environments. In the future, sophisticated measurement will determine which investments truly drive growth.

Conclusion 

Walled garden advertising is now unavoidable, and its influence will only increase. These platforms offer scale and precision, but their closed nature makes cross-channel measurement difficult. A unified view is essential to understand real performance, validate platform-reported metrics, and allocate budget intelligently.

Improvado provides the data foundation to do exactly that. It integrates data from 500+ marketing and revenue sources, standardizes metrics, and creates a single source of truth outside the platforms themselves. This allows teams to compare channels objectively, measure true ROI, and build accurate attribution models.

If you want clearer insight into walled garden performance and a unified view of your marketing efforts, request a demo of Improvado.

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We now rely fully on Improvado for multiple dashboards that we use for day-to-day marketing operations and strategy, as well as for presentations to executive leadership.

Waleed Noury

Lead Analytics Engineer at Activision