My 24 Hours Income Team Impact: Facebook’s Atlas to Wind Down Ad-Serving Business, Focus on Measurement

Friday, November 18, 2016

Facebook’s Atlas to Wind Down Ad-Serving Business, Focus on Measurement

Facebook announced Friday that its Atlas advertising platform will phase out its ad-serving activities to focus on measurement.

The social network acquired the ad-serving business that was then known as Atlas Solutions from Microsoft in February 2013.

Facebook then introduced a completely revamped Atlas, focused on “people-based marketing,” at Advertising Week in September 2014.

Head of client measurement Erik Johnson provided more details on the plans for Atlas in a blog post:

More than 300 of the world’s top advertisers have run measurement campaigns with Atlas in the past 18 months. Partners such as Airbnb and State Farm continue to see great results and generate significant business value from the insights in their Atlas-measured campaigns.

As we expand our work with clients in measurement, we’ve decided to sharpen our focus with Atlas. Beginning today, we’ll start winding down the ad-serving portion of Atlas. We believe Atlas will have a greater impact and create more value for advertisers by focusing on measurement; especially as people continue to shift to mobile and more ads are served by publishers themselves instead of third parties.

We understand the impact this will have for some clients, and we’re committed to making the transition as smooth as possible. We will provide support over the next few months to our current ad-serving customers as they transition off the Atlas platform’s ad-serving capabilities.

In keeping with our commitment to helping advertisers understand the true impact of their ads both on and off Facebook, we’re continuing to build out our measurement infrastructure. We recently combined our Atlas and Marketing Sciences teams to form a central measurement group that oversees in-house tools such as conversion lift and mobile polling, alongside third-party solutions from more than 20 trusted partners like Nielsen, Oracle Data Cloud, Visual IQ, Neustar MarketShare, Moat, Integral Ad Science, comScore, Kantar and others. We are also focused on creating increasingly better integrations between Atlas and Facebook’s measurement platforms.