Amit Chowdhry Contributor
9/29/2014 @ 8:35PM
Facebook already uses your personal information to show you contextual ads on your News Feed, but now they are able to utilize the same data on behalf of third-party apps and websites. When Microsoft MSFT -0.68% acquired aQuantive for $6.3 billion in 2007, it also gained ownership of Atlas. Last year, Microsoft sold Atlas to Facebook for a rumored $100 million. Today Facebook announced that it relaunched Atlas, which will enable marketers to target ads across multiple devices.
Forbes | Facebook Relaunches Atlas For Marketers To Serve Targeted Ads Across Multiple Devices
How Facebook Knows When Its Ads Influence Your Offline Purchases
AUTHOR: CADE METZ.
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 12.11.14.
TIME OF PUBLICATION: 6:30 AM.
IT HAS HAPPENED to you, and it has probably happened more than once. But you may not have realized why. And you may not have known you were helping to change online advertising and, well, advertising in general.
Chances are, you’ve bought a hat or a scarf or a Christmas ornament at a department store or a boutique retailer or a roadside stand, and after you swiped your credit card, the clerk or the little card reader on the counter or the card-reading iPad asked for your phone number or your email address.
Yes, the merchant probably wanted to contact you about other stuff you might want to buy—or give others a way of doing the same thing. But that information—your phone number or your email—also provides a way for internet giants like Facebook to show advertisers that ads they post online can lead to purchases in real-world stores.
Wired | How Facebook Knows When Its Ads Influence Your Offline Purchases
Why Facebook’s Atlas is a rich feast for B2B advertisers
After purchasing Microsoft’s Atlas in 2013, Facebook completely overhauled the mobile ad serving platform. Atlas re-launched this September with the power of merging Facebook’s user data with the ability to deliver ads to consumers anywhere they can be reached on the web.
Facebook’s taking a big step – opening its buffet of user data to a hungry crowd of marketers and advertisers itching to get targeted messages in mobile.
eMarketer reports mobile is the fastest growing segment of the United States’ ad spend, and it is predicted to continue growing at a crazed pace. Mobile is expected expand from 9.8 percent of the total US media ad spend in 2014 to 26.4 percent in 2018. There is plenty of room for B2B marketing to grow in mobile content. According to the Content Marketing Institute, just 38 percent of B2B marketers currently utilize mobile content in their marketing strategies.
The percentage of B2B marketers using mobile content could drastically increase as marketers gain the ability to send targeted messaging to phones whether users are logged on or off Facebook.
Facebook touts that Atlas avoids the mobile-ad cookie issue by “using people, not proxies to help advertisers succeed.”
Previously, Facebook has ranked low in terms of B2B effectiveness – with 70 percent of B2B users believing it’s less effective than other platforms. Now, marketers might take a new look at the social media brand in terms of its efficacy in moving B2B consumers down the marketing funnel to become buyers.
According to Forbes, B2B and B2C online lead generation and cultivation are beginning to coincide as programmatic and big data analysis becomes more commonly implemented. B2B sales’ research is mirroring B2C in pulling data from consumer site conversions to fine-tune and initiate contact. This pulled data is then utilized to customize landing pages, messaging and promotions tailored to a segmented audience.
MultiView | Why Facebook’s Atlas is a rich feast for B2B advertisers
Facebook Combines Atlas, Audience Network, And LiveRail Into An AdTech Voltron
Facebook’s plot for ad domination is coming to fruition. Today at Facebook headquarters, its ad execs explained how two years of seemingly isolated launches and acquisitions are melding into a powerful way to show ads across the Internet and track the purchases they inspire both online and offline.
Here’s how the pieces come together:
Facebook brings its 1.35 billion users and massive engagement with the News Feed where it shows its ads. Because its huge user base stays logged in across web and mobile, it has a unified understanding of people’s identities in a way most platforms don’t. Facebook’s wealth of personal data means it can target ads more accurately. For instance, it says it can target gender with 90 percent accuracy compared to the online ad industry average of 50 percent.
Tracking online purchases inspired by its ad clicks is easy, but what’s more difficult is understanding offline purchase behavior.
TechCrunch | Facebook Combines Atlas, Audience Network, And LiveRail Into An AdTech Voltron
Havas Media Group announces global partnership with Facebook’s Atlas
21 January 2015
The partnership will see Havas Media Group offering Atlas to clients across Latam (Q2), Middle East (Q3) and APAC (Q4). Havas Media Group becomes the first company to announce a partnership with this scale and geographical focus.
Dominique Delport, Global Managing Director Havas Media Group comments: “Havas Media Group has spent the last 15 years investing in market leading data driven solutions through Artemis its proprietary data platform. This partnership, coupled with our clients’ data, will enable us to find out how people are interacting with brands and then purchasing products as they travel across devices. We have been working with the Atlas team now since June 2014 and are delighted that we have partnered with a platform that can take our analysis beyond previously limiting cookie based offers. It will allow us to filter, clean and manage data with unprecedented granularity. This relationship with Atlas, including our participation as a member of the Atlas Product Council, will enable us to offer best in class, tech neutral solutions for our clients”.
Havas Media | Havas Media Group announces global partnership with Facebook’s Atlas
Verizon may have just put together a Facebook Atlas slayer
People-based marketing across device and across channels (with pinpointing deterministic accuracy) is a critical new superpower that — so far — only Facebook has up and running.
Facebook derives its superhero strength from consumer logins, which it gains access to because consumers actually log in from multiple devices. When a user logs into Facebook from more than one device, Facebook’s Atlas, a powerful ad platform, can map one anonymized ID to the next device using the login data as the universal identifier. (Google could do this, but for whatever reason, it hasn’t actually built it yet.)
Interestingly, with great foresight, AOL’s Tim Armstrong had been focused on acquiring a superpower solution of his own and has done a bang-up job. That’s certainly the lion’s share of what attracted Verizon as a suitor. However, like everyone, AOL has been struggling to connect the dots. Connecting the dots more often than not means mapping a de-identified email address to an ID (your email address does not change cross-channel or cross-device), and that had been AOL’s Achilles heel. AOL had identifiers smattered across its properties (AOL, TechCrunch, Engadget, etc.) and had to piece them together. Conversely, market leader Facebook had all the logins in one place. Clearly, Facebook was in the driver’s seat.
VentureBeat’s | Verizon may have just put together a Facebook Atlas slayer
Instagram to Open Its Photo Feed to Ads
JUNE 2, 2015
Instagram is cranking up its money machine, and that means a lot more ads in your photo feed.
A mock-up of an ad from the Tieks brand on Instagram.Facebook, which bought Instagram in 2012, has kept the mobile photo-sharing service mostly free of advertising, allowing only a handful of big brands to put a few carefully drafted commercial messages on the service.
But on Tuesday, the company announced plans to open the Instagram feed to all advertisers, from the local tattoo parlor to global food makers, later this year. Marketers will be able to target ads to the service’s 300 million users by interest, age, gender and other factors, just as they can on Facebook.
Instagram will also begin testing a type of ad that allows viewers to click on a link to buy a product or install an app that is advertised.
The New York Times | Instagram to Open Its Photo Feed to Ads