Facebook will unveil a new advertising platform next week named Atlas, which the company expects will allow it to challenge the dominance of Google in the online advertising industry.
Atlas, a redesigned Atlas Advertiser Suite which Facebook acquired from Microsoft last year, looks to improve the targeting and measuring of the advertisements that marketers release online.
The product will specifically aid marketers in measuring which Facebook users have seen or interacted with advertisements that will appear within Facebook and on third-party apps and websites. Atlas will also allow marketers to purchase advertisements that will target specific kinds of Facebook users all over the world.
When Facebook acquired the Atlas Advertiser Suite, it was already expected to help the social network in the development of its own comprehensive platform for marketers to buy, sell, improve and measure advertisements posted on the Internet. The platform aimed to provide marketers with the tools needed to target advertisements that would be based on the social habits of users, and to better analyze how social activities can influence the purchases made by consumers.
Facebook expects the Atlas platform to help the social network pose as a bigger threat to Google as the market leader for the digital advertisement market. Google is expected to acquire 31.45 percent of the revenue for the entire market for 2014, as estimated by eMarketer.
Facebook is expected to gain the highest increase in market share for digital advertisements this year among all the companies in the United States analyzed by eMarketer, but the social network will still be at a distant second at only an expected 7.8 percent of the market share.
Facebook's market share, however, translates into revenues of about $140 billion.
The social networking site's presence can already be found on a massive collection of websites through the Facebook Connect feature. Each time that a user likes or shares an item on a website, the data being monitored by Facebook is increased.
Facebook is looking to team up all that collected data with the information found within the social network to design a social ad network, which the company hopes will be even more effective than the AdSense service of Google.
Facebook released earlier in the month a tool that allows its users to provide the social network specific feedback on why they hide certain advertisements. The tool will supposedly allow Facebook to deliver advertisements to users according to their interests.
