Walled garden advertising: high-value audiences in closed platforms
A walled garden is a platform that keeps its inventory, audience data and measurement inside its own system. These platforms hold very large logged-in audiences, and advertising on them follows their rules and their tools.
Closed platforms
- Search & video
- Social
- Commerce
The market in India
In India, closed platforms account for much of mobile time, so plans usually start there and use the open web and other channels for incremental reach.
Published case snapshots for Indian brands include Tastes2Plates, Mahindra KUV100 and Muthoot Finance. See Case Snapshots.
Formats and placements
Where this channel reaches audiences.
Search and video platforms
Closed ecosystems built around search, maps and video.
Social platforms
Feeds, stories and messaging within social networks.
Commerce platforms
Marketplaces that sell advertising against shopper data.
When to use it
Use walled gardens for scale, precise logged-in targeting and formats that exist nowhere else.
The trade-off is limited transparency: each platform measures itself, so results are hard to compare.
How Vertoz executes
- Platform mix by objective
- First-party audience use within platform rules
- Normalizing signals across platforms
- Balancing closed platforms with the open web
Measurement
What gets measured depends on the objective. These are the signals normally used for this channel.
Typical measures
- Platform-reported results for the objective
- Deduplicated reach, where measurable
- Independent conversion data from your systems
- Incremental contribution
Industries that use this channel
More channels
Frequently asked questions
Why are they called walled gardens?
Because inventory, data and measurement stay inside the platform and cannot be freely combined with other sources.
Can results be compared across platforms?
Not directly. Vertoz uses signal normalization and your own conversion data to compare them. See AI-Powered Optimization.
Are search, social and retail media walled gardens?
Many of them are. Those pages describe the formats; this page describes the shared characteristics of closed platforms.
Who do I contact in India?
Vertoz is headquartered in the Mumbai region, with offices in Delhi NCR. The Mumbai office can be reached on +91 22 6142 6030, and all addresses are on the contact page.
Ready to put your media to work?
Create your advertiser account on the IngeniousPlex platform, or talk to the team first about what you are trying to achieve.