Atlas Rising: What the Relaunching of Facebook’s Ad Platform Means for Everyone

In case you missed it, Facebook has relaunched its advertising platform, Atlas. In case you really missed it, Facebook had a cool name for its advertising platform.

The new version of Atlas brings with it a ton of opportunities for marketers and will change how Facebook is leveraged.

For Marketers: Cross-Device Targeting

The first update will allow marketers to target their ads cross-device, ensuring ads can be targeted to user’s device.

An example would be one like this: A user sees an ad on their smartphone and completes their purchase through their laptop top, or vice versa. Then marketers would be able to monitor the effectiveness of these ads and modify their strategy accordingly.

See, a gap has always existed in effectively and efficiently tracking a user’s flow from mobile to desktop, or really anytime a user moves from one digital scape to another. Atlas is promising to bridge that gap and give marketers all the information they could ever want.

For Marketers: Offline Tracking

Speaking of gaps in tracking abilities, one of the trickier measurables to…well…measure…has been how online impressions accurately affect offline purchases. Correlations can be concluded, but direct figures with definitive statistics have always existed in a bit of a foggy area within social analytics.

Atlas, once again, promises to make this connection for marketers.

But, Facebook hasn’t gone into great detail about how any of this this will occur. Which makes perfect sense, because the social network has no need to show its hand on this matter.

For Facebook: Helping Themselves While Helping Marketers

Don’t think for a second here that Facebook is simply creating a tool for the betterment of marketers and the users they are attempting to reach.

The plight of any social network that has gone public is displaying that it can do one thing: Make money.

However, impressions and interactions don’t always directly correlate to money. With Atlas, Facebook is not only helping marketers solidify their data for more insightful business decisions, they are helping themselves.

With Atlas, Facebook is hoping to show the direct impact posts, advertisements and social engagement on their network has for businesses.

For Users: Targeted to Death

Already, you can’t look for shoes online without having the same pair appear in an ad within your newsfeed.

Users can expect this to occur at a higher frequency and even more intense level of personalization across the web. Atlas, or at least the idea of it, will become the standard to which all of the big social networks will follow.

Users interacting with brands or products through social networks can expect their timelines to fill up with more content on these brands and products. But not just your desktop timeline, it will be on your smartphone and tablet and anywhere else in the digital scape.

Conclusion

The true test of Atlas is not going to be whether it shows the numbers Facebook needs to keep investors pleased. The true test will be how users’ interactions are impacted and (if negatively) how much they will tolerate Atlas’ capabilities.