Facebook already uses your personal information (such as Friends, Likes, Shares, whether you buy Facebook account or not, etc.) to show you advertisements on your News Feed. Now, however, Facebook has recently re-launched Atlas. Atlas will enable marketers and companies to target ads across multiple devices. We would like to thank Atlas Solutions and Forbes for their informative articles on Facebook Atlas.
Atlas History
Last year, Facebook purchased Atlas from Microsoft for a cool $100 million (rumored price). Microsoft sold Atlas because they wanted to invest their resources in other places. Microsoft wanted to focus more on digital content and customer experiences. Facebook has been building up and refining Atlas up until its recent re-launch.
Why Atlas is Different
Facebook previously just used cookies to track websites that people visited for ad targeting purposes. For example, if you looked at the price of a car on a car website, then you would likely see deals for cars on your Facebook News Feed.
There are many disadvantages to cookies, however. Cookies don’t work on mobile, overstate reach and underestimate frequency, are becoming less accurate in demographic targeting, and can’t easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world according to Atlas Solutions.
Atlas helps marketers reach real people across multiple devices, platforms, and publishers to target, deliver, optimize and measure advertising results without having to rely on the use of cookies.
Partnership
Global advertising company Omnicom is Facebook’s first major Atlas partner. Omnicom’s clients Pepsi and Intel will be two of the largest brands to test out the Atlas platform right away. Advertisers can monitor campaign performance using Atlas on Instagram as well.
Features and Uses
Atlas has many more features than just tracking users across devices and targeted ad campaigns. Atlas can determine if a product was purchased on a desktop after viewing an ad on a mobile device.
Atlas can also follow relationships between online advertising and offline sales, according to The Wall Street Journal. If a consumer purchases a product and discloses their e-mail address at the time of check-out, then Facebook could let the store know if and when that person viewed its ad on the web.
These features help marketers greatly. Marketers can better determine what their ROI is on marketing efforts and they can better understand consumers purchasing behaviors.
Future
Initially, Atlas will only be used for ad-serving and tracking. Facebook has plans to set up Atlas as an ad purchasing platform in the future. Facebook said that its “people-based marketing” tools will anonymously track individuals across their devices so your identity is protected.
According to eMarketer, the Internet advertising market is expected to hit over $140 billion this year. Google is the leader with a 32% market share of the total online ad spending as of last year while Facebook trailed behind in second place at 5.8%. Facebook is expected to grow to 7.8% this year.
Facebook is launching Atlas in hopes to gain traction against Google and become much more attractive to marketers. Facebook Atlas has many advantages over Google however, only time will tell if Atlas will greatly improve Facebook’s market share.
