Facebook is buying Microsoft’s Atlas Advertiser Suite, an ad analysis platform, in a move that should increase its advertising revenue and give marketers better information about their campaigns across the social network, on both desktop and mobile. The terms of the deal are not being disclosed.
The acquisition comes as Facebook faces growing pressure to raise its ad revenue as more users shift to mobile devices while advertisers remain largely focused on the desktop.
The deal’s rationale is based on the fact that businesses and advertising agencies are struggling to gauge the success of their campaigns across channels, Facebook said, and are often left in the dark on how their different marketing efforts strengthen or complement each other.
Facebook is betting that Atlas’ measurement tools will help to solve that problem. It plans to scale up Atlas’ back-end measurement systems, it said.
"Our belief is that measuring various touch points in the marketing funnel will help advertisers to see a more complete view of the effectiveness of their campaigns," said Facebook product marketing director Brian Boland, in the blog post.
The deal was announced just one day after Facebook said it would also be expanding its custom audiences tool to provide businesses with more data to help target their ads to users on the site.
The custom audiences expansion allows for more partnering between individual businesses and the Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom and BlueKai marketing agencies; now Nielsen and Datalogix will also be combined with the Atlas platform, Facebook said.
Many marketers on Facebook today already use Atlas, and existing Atlas clients will not see any change in the services they receive, the company said.
Microsoft gained Atlas in 2007 as part of its acquisition of eQuantive, a global digital marketing company, for roughly $6 billion.
Some industry watchers are framing Facebook’s Atlas buy as the social network’s attempt to compete with advertising on Google, which uses DoubleClick for managing marketing campaigns, though Facebook did not comment on the matter.
IDG News Service
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