Joshua Dreller
Sr. Director, Content Marketing @ Skai
Last week, we explored the first five benefits of walled garden media:
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg…
The Skai 5: Five Benefits of Walled Garden Media, Part 2
In our Skai 5 series, we discuss digital advertising tips, tricks, and trends to keep you one step ahead of consumers, market trends, and your competition. For this portion of the series, we highlighted five more benefits of walled garden media.
1. Unparalleled Advertising Control
While self-service advertising exists outside the walled gardens, this level of 24/7 control is a hallmark of this type of advertising. Any marketer, from the largest corporations to the smallest mom-and-pop shops, can create a walled garden media account and publish ads within minutes.
And, this level of fine control is not just about launching ads; practitioners can optimize minute settings to drive incremental gains on their programs.
2. Robust Vendor Ecosystems
Walled garden publishers invest heavily in their native ad platforms to help marketers spend efficiently. But wisely, they’ve also invested in rich partner programs to encourage vendor ecosystems to flourish.
Meta, for example, has hundreds of partner companies to help marketers manage, create, measure, and scale their Meta campaigns beyond the native platform functionality. These third-party advertising technologies — such as Skai — only exist because of how big brands invest in walled gardens. Marketers are willing to spend a little more with vendors to help ensure success — especially in niche areas where it doesn’t often make sense for the publishers to develop themselves.
3. Performance-based Ad Costs
Google wasn’t the first to offer the pay-per-click ad-buying model, but it widely popularized it, and every walled garden publisher since has copied the model. With performance-based costs, marketers know upfront that they will only pay for results, not just ad impressions, as many other online and offline advertising is sold.
Over the years, performance-based buying has evolved beyond just clicks, and now one of the benefits of walled garden media is that advertisers can choose to pay for sales, leads, and conversions.
4. Native Algorithmic Optimization
Behind the scenes, walled garden publisher ad systems are working on behalf of each of their advertisers to improve ad matching. Consider that every time an ad gets served, it could be chosen from a bank of millions of ads — properly matching advertisers to ad inventory is a critical contributing factor to campaign success.
The publisher algorithms can leverage rich datasets — that could never be shared with marketers due to privacy constraints — to detect unseen correlations between audience characteristics and clicks/conversions to help them find the needle in the haystack, e.g., the brand/ad with the highest forecasted response rate.
New Skai report: Why walled gardens are a marketer’s best bet. 
The majority of U.S. digital advertising dollars are spent with walled garden publishers such as Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple.
To better understand how marketers consider and use walled garden advertising now and in the future, Skai surveyed 117 U.S. marketing professionals. Questions included current and future spending trends, perceived strengths and weaknesses, and considerations for strategic decision-making.
5. Not Reliant on Cookies
The logged-in user base of walled garden publishers was already a market advantage in the first two decades of digital advertising. As we enter the era of privacy, many technologies that help advertisers outside of walled gardens that use third-party cookies will become less effective moving forward. As the industry struggles to find a new unified ID, the walled gardens already have inherently future-proof cookieless solutions.
Skai: Media that matters. Marketing that works.
Consumers have spoken: they prefer being marketed to on walled garden channels like retailer websites, search engines, social media, and app stores. And marketers have spoken: they need accountability for every dollar spent. That’s why we focus on the most effective ad channels for both sides of the equation — and bring them together for you.
Skai is the only omnichannel marketing platform for performance advertising. We’re helping marketers connect the walled gardens across retail media, paid search, paid social, and app marketing, making true omnichannel performance marketing a reality. Client results include:
- 461% increase in Amazon Ads ROAS and 57% increase in page traffic for Bondi Sands
- 280% increase in installs for DraftKings
- 10% increase in new account openings for Royal Bank of Canada
- 756% increase in conversions for New York Magazine
- 600% increase in Facebook leads for Inova
