Facebook launches new Atlas ad platform

The platform will help improve cross-device capabilities, and will not rely on cookies

People complain all the time about all the data that Facebook has on them, and I can't help but find that equal parts annoying and amusing. You're giving that information, willingly, and for free. Of course Facebook is going to use it to make money! Please, please, please stop going on about it. 

Having all of that information is why the Facebook mobile ad network, introduced earlier this year, was inevitable. The company had been experimenting with the idea since at least 2012. And that is why the relaunch of Atlas, the ad network it bought last year from Microsoft, was also a foregone conclusion.

The new Atlas, which as revealed in a blog post on Sunday, will allow marketers to target users on websites outside of Facebook's network, meaning on websites and other properties, including apps, that the company does not own, but they will be able to do so using data from Facebook. 

The most interesting thing here is not what Atlas will now be doing, as this is something that Facebook has long wanted to do and that advertisers have long been clamoring for, but rather how it is going to do it. Namely, without using cookies.

Cookies, of course, are what advertisers have used for decades to track users from website to website in order to know what to sell the,. They are pieces of data that are stored in a Web browser, and which are then sent back to the server in order for websites, like Facebook, to see what the person has been looking at. 

The problem is, though, that cookies are out dated, and they do not work on mobile apps.

"People spend more time on more devices than ever before. This shift in consumer behavior has had a profound impact on a consumer’s path to purchase, both online and in stores. And today’s technology for ad serving and measurement – cookies – are flawed when used alone," Erik Johnson, Head of Atlas, wrote in the post.

"Cookies don’t work on mobile, 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."

So, instead, Atlas says it has come up with a new way to track users, called "People-based marketing," which features "an entirely new code base," with built-in targeting and measuring that apparently make be more accurate and make sure that the right ad gets to the right user at the right time. 

Details on how exactly this will work are light, but a Wall Street Journal report from last week described it as such: a marketer will be able to see where a customer bought something, perhaps on a desktop, but to know that they originally saw the ad for it on their mobile device. That way, the marketer knows where to target that user and is not wasting dollars on the wrong platform.

"By doing this, marketers can easily solve the cross-device problem through targeting, serving and measuring across devices. And, Atlas can now connect online campaigns to actual offline sales, ultimately proving the real impact that digital campaigns have in driving incremental reach and new sales," said Johnson.

The new Atlas already has its first client: Omnicom who clients include Pepsi and Intel, which who are among the first testing the new platform.

Atlas is also announcing new partners to "bring people-based measurement to more channels and platforms with seamless integrations." One of the new partners, not surprisingly, is the Facebook-owned Instagram.

Advertising is, of course, crucial to Facebook's continued success. In the second quarter of 2014, the company saw revenue of $2.91 billion. Of that, advertising revenue accounted for $2.68 billion.

(Image source: techcrunch.com)