The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook is nearing the launch of a new advertising platform for marketers to more effectively connect with their target audiences across multiple devices.
Facebook’s new advertising platform is said to be an overhauled version of the Atlas Advertiser Suite, an ad-serving platform that was purchased from Microsoft last year. The new version will be renamed just ‘Atlas’ and is expected to be a great help for marketers when it comes to targeting and measuring the effectiveness of their online advertisements.
Atlas will reportedly be able to help Facebook marketers understand which of their ads are being viewed, interacted with, and which ads ultimately influenced a purchasing decision.
Atlas will work by collating data from Facebook, as well third-party applications and services that serve Facebook ads. Atlas will come with an automated ad-buying tool called a “bidder,” which allows other marketers to buy targeted advertising space offered by Facebook.
The one-stop-shop aspect of Atlas has the potential to a larger audience of marketers who are looking to take advantage of reaching the millions of daily active users on Facebook. This also positions Facebook as a greater challenge to both Google in the online advertising space.
Once Atlas launches, it’s expected that marketers will have access to more information than they ever had previously. Currently marketers have to rely on cookies to track ad engagements and impressions.With Atlas, Facebook aims to connect those ad engagements with specific Facebook accounts and then anonymously track users across multiple devices.
The benefit of that would be, for example, a marketer may learn that a purchase was made on a desktop PC, but the ad that led to the purchase was initially viewed on an iPad.
An unnamed executive who knows of Facebook’s plans for Atlas was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying:
The biggest impact of this will be in mobile. People spend more time on mobile than on desktop, but marketers don’t spend there because cookies don’t work. This could finally enable us to spend more money in mobile.
It’s expected that Facebook will reveal the Atlas platform at the Advertising Week conference in New York later this month.
