Walled gardens in the marketing ecosystem are extremely common. These closed environments make up 69% of digital display advertising, according to eMarketer.
Walled gardens like Google, Meta and Amazon make up over half of all revenue generated from digital advertising using walled gardens, and their dominance in the space remains.
While they're commonplace for brands big and small, some see these ecosystems as a "necessary evil." Why? Because even though these environments give brands access to billions of people, they lack transparency. Brands using walled gardens to run ad campaigns often get a limited view into their results, and aren't given granular measurement on the people and audiences their ads reached.
But marketers who feel stuck behind walled gardens can use martech to combat some of these problems. With the right data clean room that has the right data to support it, marketers can achieve better measurement and understand their customers on a deeper level.
The challenges of a walled garden
Walled gardens give brands the chance to reach a lot of prospects in the face of data deprecation. These networks not only have access to a huge amount of consumers, they have deep insights about these consumers, and can use audience targeting to reach a brand's desired customers. But, those audience segments can be vague.
That's because without identity, it's hard to know whether a customer who falls into an ideal prospect category is actually in-market. If a walled garden relies on weak identifiers—like email addresses—it can't see more holistic signals that indicate a person will be receptive to an ad.
This dovetails into a walled garden's measurement limitations.
Measurement is difficult within walled gardens because of the disparate nature of reporting and identity across environments. Each walled garden differs in what measurement it offers, meaning metrics can vary across each platform and can be hard to compare. And it's extremely hard to track and understand users across these platforms.
Without comparable results and clear identity, its hard for marketers to assess data needed to make critical decisions. Omnichannel visibility and collaboration require the full view of a customer's interactions. Within a walled garden, you're limited to a per-platform snapshot and campaign-by-campaign performance.
How clean rooms can help
Thankfully, as this issue has come to the forefront for marketers, solutions have as well. Data clean rooms are a relatively new(er) martech category built to solve for this issue specifically.
As the category has progressed, today's clean rooms enable multi-channel and multi-touch attribution at scale across channels and platforms, including the walled gardens. These attribution models show the true impact of each channel and identify inefficiencies so you can invest in the right places moving forward.
Using a clean room with identity provides access to better audiences and assists with new customer acquisition. With precise audience segmentation, this audience insights tool can find real people who are in-market more accurately, resulting in more relevant and personalized ads, better conversion rates and higher-performing media activations.
Building a better clean room with Epsilon
Epsilon’s clean room solution provides identity resolution for accurate targeting and better customer insights. With our person-based CORE ID at the center, you can enrich the quality and breadth of your first-party data with robust profile data and prospect universe of over 250 million customers. Ultimately, this drives more predictive analysis, better activation and more accurate measurement.
Then, native activation gives you the power to launch campaigns directly from the clean room. This feature puts your media activation in front of the right customers at the right time, leading to better ROAS and increased LTV of all customers.
Marketers don’t have to fight against walled gardens, or be stuck in them. With Epsilon Clean Room, you can work within the confines of the big media companies without negatively impacting your results.
Ready to get started? Learn more about Epsilon Clean Room.