Atlas is a relaunched ad network, originally purchased by Facebook from Microsoft last year and released last night, allowing marketers to track Facebook users that have seen, interacted with or acted upon ads on the social network, as well as third party sites and applications.
The company claims that the tool will help marketers track effectiveness of their ads around the web, while allowing them to purchase ads on sites other than Facebook, as well as on apps, while using Facebook targeting data.
These aren’t the same as “Facebook ads,” however, even though they are using the social network’s data. The social network is using this latter detail as its own marketing secret since it promises advertisers that using Atlas will be more effective than other big ad platforms.
Granted Facebook still has a long way to catch up with Google’s reported ad revenue that totaled $14.36 billion during Q2 2014 whereas Facebook only reached $2.68 billion in the same period.
The success of Facebook’s mobile ads have given CEO Mark Zuckerberg reason to smile over the past 12 months after they went from representing 30 percent of the company’s ad revenues in Q1 2013 to 59 percent in Q1 2014.
1.5 million advertising customers are currently serviced by Facebook and with its ad business showing strong numbers it is catching up, yet it will be an almighty effort if it ever even gets within touching distance of the search giant’s numbers.