Facebook Debuts New Ads That Follow You Around on the Web

What may be great thing for advertisers may be not-so- great for users, especially those who are concerned with privacy and advertising. Starting today, Facebook will collaborate with new ad-serving platform, Atlas, to serve ads to you on non-Facebook sites using information Facebook knows about you, taking their advertising to the rest of the Internet.

Atlas is formally a Microsoft company and was bought by Facebook last year. Though underused for the past year, Facebook is looking to use Atlas to deliver more value to its ad partners. Atlas allows marketers to reach users across multiple devices, platforms, and publishers. The idea is to take Facebook’s treasure trove of user data and use it to deliver targeted “people-based marketing” for advertisers, especially on mobile devices. Eric Johnson, head of Atlas, wrote in a blog post that “Cookies don’t work on mobile and are becoming more inaccurate in demographic targeting and can’t easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world.”

These insights will provide marketers with a way to track effectiveness of their ad campaigns all over the web and across platforms, which is something that is currently very difficult to track for most marketers. Facebook claims that the ads will not be labeled as “Facebook ads,” but they will be “super targeted” ads that will provide more value utilizing Facebook’s data. It’s important for everyone to know that Atlas is not an ad network, but a platform that will allow marketers to create, buy, measure ads and optimize those campaigns for multiple devices. Omnicom Group, one of world’s largest advertising companies is the first to sign up for Atlas.

While this may have increased the concern for privacy and personal information sharing, Facebook is claiming that the data will remain anonymous to advertisers and publishers. Facebook’s new ad initiative will provide advertisers with a new way to reach target audiences and will be an alternative to Google ads.

To read more about Facebook’s new advertising offerings, read the full blog post from Atlas Solutions.