After months of rumours, Facebook has announced it has agreed to acquire the Atlas Advertiser Suite from Microsoft. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Microsoft acquired Atlas Solutions through its $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive, in 2007. It has been noted that by purchasing Atlas, Facebook could begin to service ads on third-party Web sites and expand its ad network.
In a statement announcing the acquisition, Facebook says: "Today's marketing environment is much more complex than it was just a few short years ago. Marketers and agencies struggle to understand how their efforts across different channels complement and strengthen each other. Consequently, they are forced to adopt siloed marketing strategies for each channel, leading to poor and inconsistent end-user experiences.
"This challenge also provides an opportunity. If marketers and agencies can get a holistic view of campaign performance, they will be able to do a much better job of making sure the right messages get in front of the right people at the right time."
According to Facebook, Atlas's measurement capabilities will give marketers a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of their advertising.
"Many marketers that advertise on Facebook today use Atlas, and Atlas has been an approved partner for measurement since June. Today's agreement brings us closer together in a way that benefits both Facebook and Atlas' agency and marketer clients. Atlas clients should not see any change to the service they receive today, and we will continue to innovate and invest in the Atlas platform," says Facebook.
The social network says it intends to invest in scaling Atlas's back-end measurement systems and enhance its current suite of desktop and mobile advertiser tools. Facebook says the Atlas team will continue to operate from its Seattle offices.
Ultimate goal?
Facebook has long been trying to prove the effectiveness of its ads, and pushing the notion that the "click is king" mentality in online advertising has lost relevance for most brands. The social network has also been bolstering its conversion tracking tools with the expansion of its own ad tracking program with new features such as "View Tags".
These essentially give advertisers the ability to drop cookies on users who are shown their ads on Facebook, and allow the advertiser to check if that user bought something at a later stage and pinpoint exactly which ad that user saw.
Another conversion tracking tool Facebook has made openly available allows advertisers to cross-check the Facebook User IDs of people who visit their sites, with the user IDs of Facebook users who were shown a particular ad. This process is done anonymously (and is encrypted), and aims to provide a better indication of how successful a particular ad campaign may have been.
While Facebook's director of monetisation product marketing has said the purchase of Atlas is not about creating a broader ad network beyond Facebook itself, Reuters reports that analysts believe that is nevertheless Facebook's ultimate goal.
Forrester analyst Nate Elliot says: "Although the statement announcing the deal focused on Atlas's measurement tools rather than its ad targeting technology, we expect that Atlas will soon be using Facebook's data to target sponsorships, in-stream ads, and other rich ad formats across the entire Web, and that's big news.
"The question now is how quickly and successfully Facebook can integrate its data with Atlas's tools, and whether they can avoid a privacy backlash as they do so. History suggests they'll struggle on both counts."