Unlocking Growth Beyond Walled Gardens: Mastering Native Search Ads on the Open Web

Performance marketers have traditionally relied on Google and Meta to drive their performance media strategies, sprinkled with a little bit of Bing. There’s a reason many refer to these channels as legacy buys. 

However, as competition intensifies and costs continue to rise, brands are thirsty for an alternative channel to reach their audience efficiently and unlock new avenues of growth. But outside of paid search and social, this task has felt impossible.

Enter the Open Web — a vast, diverse ecosystem of publishers, content creators, and platforms that extends beyond walled gardens. While the Open Web presents an enormous opportunity, running paid ads across it comes with unique challenges. Let’s break down some of the key obstacles and explore how advertisers can navigate them effectively.

5 Obstacles to Running Ads on the Open Web — And How to Solve for Them

1. Only Trees, No Forest

The Open Web houses thousands of publishers offering ad inventory. Some deliver great performance but have the reach of my personal Instagram page (meaning none). Others promise scale but perform about as well as my last marathon time (abysmal). 

We've all been there—buying 100,000 clicks that amounted to absolutely nothing. On top of that, these channels and networks operate in silos, and even the largest brands don’t have the bandwidth to test, manage, and optimize partnerships across all the best publishers. They also lack the leverage to secure premium placements.

The adMarketplace Solution: 

As a two-sided marketplace, adMarketplace has deep relationships with top-tier publishers — including some of the internet’s leading browsers, shopping apps, and editorial sites. We bring the best of the Open Web into a brand’s performance marketing stack as a seamless, unified channel.

2. Fragmentation & Lack of Unified Data

Of the thousands of publishers and different ad networks on the Open Web, each have different formats, data policies, and measurement capabilities. 

Unlike closed ecosystems like Google or Meta, where advertisers can track performance within a single dashboard, the Open Web requires multiple integrations and third-party solutions to consolidate insights. This fragmentation can make it tough to measure success and optimize in real time. 

The adMarketplace Solution: 

We pride ourselves on delivering transparent measurement and performance insights to all of our advertisers. Our proprietary analytics provide visibility into ad placements, user engagement, and conversion paths, empowering advertisers to optimize their campaigns with confidence and an eye toward achieving greater performance.

3. Viewability & Ad Fraud Concerns

Ensuring that ads are being seen by real users (and not bots) remains a persistent challenge. Fraudulent impressions, invalid traffic, and poor ad placements can erode campaign performance, leading to wasted ad spend.

The adMarketplace Solution: 

While viewability metrics and fraud detection tools exist, brands need trusted partnerships with premium publishers to maximize transparency and efficiency.

With diverse supply that’s continually growing, advertisers in our network have the ability to pick and choose where they want their ads across a large variety of publishers. This empowers brands to advertise only on the channels they deem brand safe and that contain engaged audiences they want to reach.

4. Attribution & Incrementality Measurement

Attribution is one of the biggest hurdles for advertisers on the Open Web. Unlike search or social platforms, where last-click attribution is easier to track, Open Web ads often surface across multiple touchpoints before leading to a conversion. 

Understanding incrementality—how much value a campaign truly drives beyond organic performance—requires robust measurement frameworks, which many advertisers struggle to implement effectively.

The adMarketplace Solution: 

With our incrementality-driven approach to campaign optimization, our platform prioritizes new customer acquisition. Our exclusive media reaches consumers at key moments of intent across the entire search journey, allowing brands to expand their reach and grow market share without excessive reliance on retargeting.

5. Rising Costs & Lack of Control

As competition increases across digital channels, brands are facing rising CPMs and CPCs without clear visibility into performance drivers. Many advertisers find that a significant portion of their budget goes toward retargeting existing customers rather than acquiring net-new users. 

Without granular control over where ads appear and how budgets are allocated, optimizing for true ROI becomes challenging.

The adMarketplace Solution: 

We strive to bring cost efficiency back to your performance marketing campaigns. By leveraging insights and intent-driven optimization tactics, advertisers on our network can outperform their competition and win the search more often.

How to Succeed on the Open Web with Native Search Media

At adMarketplace, we believe that the Open Web should be a competitive advantage—not a blind spot—for performance advertisers. Our platform is uniquely positioned to address these challenges and help brands unlock scalable, high-intent traffic outside of traditional search and social.

Our native search ads match the look, feel, and function of the navigation and content experience of all of our publisher partners on the Open Web. They shorten the path to purchase for consumers while creating a more intuitive and transparent ecosystem for advertisers — delivering enhanced ad relevance, increased user engagement, and greater ad efficiency at scale.

As brands look beyond walled gardens for scalable growth, the Open Web offers an unparalleled opportunity—if navigated correctly. With adMarketplace’s native search media, advertisers can turn Open Web complexity into a competitive advantage and drive measurable results. To learn more, contact us today.