Speculation has been high this past week about Facebook launching an ad network in the near future and today we find that Facebook is rolling out another ad network that will allow advertisers to buy ads through Facebook that will expand the ad’s reach across the web. It’s called Atlas and it’s a platform that Facebook had purchased last year from Microsoft.
While Facebook stresses that these ads are not “Facebook ads,” they do utilize Facebook’s data to target and track effectiveness of ads. The only difference is these ads will be served on places other than Facebook like mobile apps.
Facebook is anonymizing user data so neither advertisers nor publishers will be able to know identities. In a blog post, head of Atlas Erik Johnson discussed the relaunch of the ad platform.
“We’ve rebuilt Atlas from the ground up to tackle today’s marketing challenges, like reaching people across devices and bridging the gap between online impressions and offline purchases.”
On the difficulty of capturing data across devices, Johnson talked about the inaccuracy of current methods.
“Cookies don’t work on mobile, are becoming less accurate in demographic targeting and can’t easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world,” said Johnson.
