Corvidae and Walled Gardens
What is a walled garden?
A walled garden is an organization which keeps its technology, information, and user data to itself, with no intention of sharing it.
It’s a closed ecosystem, operated by people within the ecosystem, without the involvement of an outside organization.
In AdTech, the exchange of user data via cookie syncing between parties is necessary in order to show relevant ads and maximize revenue.
However, a walled garden makes the job tricky for this exchange. Facebook and Amazon are examples of companies who like to keep their walls as high as possible when it comes to data sharing.
As part of the attribution process, walled garden data is collected at the lowest granularity possible from whichever platform is being ingested.
The true value of the activity behind these walled gardens is calculated looking across time series of the data, alongside the visit-level data we collect through our pixel, and the weight of value given to impressions and clicks is adjusted/refined.
How does Corvidae access walled gardens data?
Corvidae can unlock the true value of the activity behind these walled gardens by utilising the clickstream data collected from our pixel and the aggregated data we get from walled garden platforms to derive a revenue value per interaction we know occurred through these platforms.
As an example, Facebook will not tell you who has created a single ad impression, only the total number of ad impressions which occurred over time.
Consider the other data which Corvidae has at its disposal:
- All click data of anyone coming on to your site from any platform
- Including click data from Facebook – if a customer clicks on your ad in Facebook and comes through to your website where our pixel is set to fire, they’re now outside of the walled garden
- All impression data from non-walled garden platforms
- This is generally Programmatic Display and Native ads
Corvidae rebuilds and then attributes revenue based on these individual events.
This means, for each Corvidae customer, there is a known value for each click from Facebook and each impression on other platforms.
This can be averaged based on:
- the marketing channel
- the ad type/creative
- the time and location data
to build a picture of how to derive value from ad impressions behind a walled garden.
Corvidae now understands the relative value of Facebook clicks and non-Facebook impressions alongside all other possible interactions a customer can have with you through your marketing efforts.
By knowing this, a completely uniquely derived weighting is calculated for the impressions we know happened within the walled garden platform to give a true valuation of the revenue generated by the impressions.
Combining this weighted view of the walled garden impressions with our unique Visit Level Attribution (VLA) outcome to better show the comparative efficacy of this activity and allow optimisation of spend at the campaign or individual ad level.
Although no one can say that an individual definitely created an ad impression in these platforms whilst these walled gardens exist, by combining our unique walled garden weighting calculation with our Visit Level Attribution process allows the true value of the activity behind these walled gardens to be calculated across this time series of the data, and the weight of value given to impressions and clicks is then adjusted/refined.
This should give an excellent opportunity for agencies managing walled gardens spend to demonstrate value by optimising across this now de-siloed data with normal campaign optimisation strategies.
