Facebook is going head-to-head with search engine giant Google with its new advertising service, which gives the world's largest social network a new way of making money.
Facebook's Atlas moves the network's advertising reach beyond its own site, and extends targeted advertising across all platforms to include mobile, so advertisers can reach an audience regardless of whether they migrate to a different device.
Atlas head Erik Johnson says the service, which has been built from the ground up, is designed to "tackle today's marketing challenges, like reaching people across devices and bridging the gap between online impressions and offline purchases".
Cross-platform
The solution offers people-based marketing in a bid to get around the challenge of cookies not working on mobile, Johnson says. He notes cookies are also becoming less accurate in demographic targeting and cannot easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world.
Johnson adds Atlas can connect online campaigns to actual offline sales, "ultimately proving the real impact that digital campaigns have in driving incremental reach and new sales". Atlas has a user interface designed for "today's busy media planners and traffickers" and has built in targeting and measurement capabilities, he explains.
Atlas has already signed up Omnicom, a US ad agency with more than 5 000 clients including Pepsi and Intel, says Johnson, adding Atlas will also partner with companies in areas such as search, social, creative management and publishing, including Instagram. "These partners will bring people-based measurement to more channels and platforms with seamless integrations."
Eating Google's lunch
Swift Consulting CEO and tech blogger Liron Segev says Atlas takes Facebook outside of pure social media and turns it into a competitor with Google, which has a "practical monopoly" over online ads.
Facebook, which has 1.32 billion monthly users, turned over $5.4 billion in the first half of the year - a gain of just more than $2 billion year-on-year - the bulk of which came from advertising. Mobile ads were the biggest single contributor to its second quarter revenue, at 62%. By comparison, Google turned over almost $16 billion in the second quarter alone, $14.4 billion of which came from advertising.
Segev adds Facebook's move blurs the lines between the two giants as Google has also moved into social media. He says when a company is at the top of a sector, it is a lot harder to keep offering exciting things to users, so they need to "make sure they have everything the other big players have," which creates additional revenue streams in case their core base is eaten away.
Facebook, having signed up one of the world's largest agencies, is "starting off with a bang," says Segev. He says if its platform works, it will pull in more agencies and start eating Google's "lunch". "I see this as the world of Google versus the world of Facebook."
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