Facebook has a new advertising platform, and it allows the social network to collect even more information about its users even when they're offline to sell to advertisers.
The new platform, called Atlas, is a revamped version of the older Atlas Advertising Suite Facebook bought from Microsoft last year. It was announced to coincide with Advertising Week in New York City.
It's no secret that Facebook has long been using its treasure trove of user information to deliver ads on Facebook itself, but Atlas will help the social network provide more ads to users through what Facebook calls "people-based marketing," or relying on cookies and demographic information to serve up more ads.
"We've rebuilt Atlas from the ground up to tackle today's marketing challenges," says Atlas head Erik Johnson. "[L]ike reaching people across devices and bridging the gap between online impressions and offline purchases."
Here is how Atlas works. When a user logs in to Facebook or uses his Facebook credentials to log in to other websites, the network installs cookies to track the user's activities on the website. But cookies alone are not effective, and they don't work on mobile, which is increasingly becoming the preferred way people go online. This is why Atlas combines cookies with demographic information to help advertisers target their audience. For example, if a gardening retail store wants to target women aged 35 to 50 years old, who live in South Central Texas and like to plant damask roses, Facebook will dig up its massive information database and serve the ads to its users who fit that demographic.
"Atlas delivers people-based marketing, helping marketers reach real people across devices, platforms and publishers," says Johnson. "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," he adds.
Last year, Facebook introduced a new feature that allows advertisers to make the connection between who sees their ads on Facebook and who buys from their physical stores after seeing those ads. This feature, called Custom Audiences, involves having advertisers upload hashed data about their buyers, such as email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers, and Facebook will compare this information with its own hashed data in its databases and provide data on the purchase behavior of users who saw the ads.
"These reports provide advertisers with overall information about sales lift from their Custom Audiences ad campaigns, but do not provide information such as purchasing profiles or data on individual customers," said Facebook at that time.
Facebook has already recruited Omnicom, an advertising agency with clients such as Intel and Pepsi, as the first partner to run ads on Atlas. Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Digital at Omnicom, says Facebook's new platform will help "put the right message in front of the person at the right time on the right device." Atlas will also run on Instagram to help advertisers track their campaigns on the Facebook-owned image sharing service.
Facebook isn't the only company that tracks its users' activities. Google, which owns around a third of the entire advertising business on the Internet, monitors its users' search and email activities to provide "relevant" ads.
