Facebook announced that it has agreed to buy advertising technology from Microsoft designed to measure the effectiveness of ads on its website; terms of this deal with Facebook were not disclosed. The Atlas Advertiser Suite should help benefit Facebook in its fight against Google for online display advertising revenue.

“Although the statement announcing the deal focused on Atlas’ 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,” said Forrester analyst Nate Elliott. “The question now is how quickly and successfully Facebook can integrate its data with Atlas’ tools, and whether they can avoid a privacy backlash as they do so. History suggests they’ll struggle on both counts.”

Atlas was originally brought on by Microsoft with its $6.3 billion acquisition of digital ad agency aQuantive in 2007. Microsoft wrote off $6.2 billion of the aQuantive deal’s value last year.

Separately, Facebook announced that it is partnering with several outside ad networks to help advertisers with better reach and targeting on the social net.

Source: Reuters.com