Atlas, the ad platform Facebook purchased from Microsoft last year, relaunched Monday with a number of new features that will expand the social network's advertising capabilities beyond its own website, and give Google's ad network a run for its money.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook Atlas will allow advertisers to serve highly-targeted ads to web surfers based on the extensive demographic and behavioral data it's collected about them over the life of their account. Instead of getting those ads on just Facebook as they have in the past, however, users will see them across the web, on both desktop and mobile.
"Marketing nirvana," were the words one ad exec used to describe the new platform to
Ad Week, noting that Atlas could overcome a technological barrier that's made it hard to serve targeted ads on mobile.
Marketers have long used a tracking mechanism called a "cookie" to understand who has seen or interacted with their online ads, but they can often be unreliable — especially on mobile devices.
As the Journal reports, "Facebook says Atlas will fix that problem by linking users' ad interactions to their Facebook accounts, whether the ads appear on Facebook or on third-party sites. Atlas will essentially follow users across the Web."
Moreover, "Because it tracks 'people' instead of cookies, Facebook says Atlas can also help marketers track the relationship between their online ads and offline sales. A consumer who buys a pair of shoes in a store might volunteer her email address at the checkout. If the email address is linked to a Facebook account, Facebook could inform the retailer if, when and where the consumer saw its online ads."
Atlas noted in a blog post that Instagram is integrated into the network's reporting schema, and that an ad buying platform, presumably like AdWords by Google, will be coming soon.
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