What is a walled garden?

A walled garden is a controlled digital environment where the service provider maintains complete authority over the ecosystem, including its information, features, and permissions. In the digital marketing landscape, walled gardens include platforms such as Google, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Amazon, and TikTok, which accumulate and maintain extensive first-party user data.

Marketing professionals can leverage this data for precision advertising but must operate exclusively within the platform’s boundaries. Essential elements of walled gardens include:

• Restricted access: Marketing teams cannot extract or fully utilise the user information gathered by the platform.
• Self-contained ecosystem: These networks handle everything from campaign targeting to performance metrics internally.
• Dependence on first-party data: They utilise their own data collection rather than external sources (like third-party cookies).
• Limited transparency: Advertisers receive minimal insight into data processing or advertisement optimisation methods.

Though walled gardens provide sophisticated targeting capabilities, their closed structure may create advertiser reliance and restrict multi-platform campaign execution.