On Monday, Facebook relaunched Atlas, an advertising system it bought last year from Microsoft Corp. and rebuilt to help marketers and agencies show better-targeted ads on websites other than Facebook. Atlas also helps marketers track how campaigns perform, particularly across multiple devices.
Atlas is aiming squarely at Google's DoubleClick, the dominant ad-serving, management and tracking tool for advertisers and agencies. Google will take 32% of the $120 billion global digital ad market this year, according to estimates from eMarketer. Facebook is second with an estimated 8% share this year, eMarketer says. But that lead was built at a time when most people surfed the Web, clicked on ads and bought stuff online using desktop computers.
Now more people are switching between desktop computers, smartphones and tablets, creating openings for others, like Facebook. The world-wide mobile ad market, where Facebook is gaining ground on Google, is projected to grow 92% this year to $36 billion. EMarketer projects that Facebook will grab 20% of this market this year, up from about 17% last year, while Google's share will slip to 45% from 46%.
Atlas is an "ad server," helping companies decide where to place ads online. An advertiser pays Atlas to show ads to a certain number of people within targeted demographic groups—such as college-educated women between the ages of 31 and 47. Atlas also strikes deals with website operators, who notify Atlas when there are spots for ads, known as "inventory." Atlas places ads in those spots and collects a fee from advertisers.
Facebook says Atlas is more accurate than Google's DoubleClick services because Facebook knows the real identities of users who are logged in to the social network as they tap the Internet on different devices. That means the performance of ads served through Atlas can be tracked better across the Internet, whether users are using smartphones, tablets or personal computers.
Facebook says it can better control how often users see an ad, regardless of the device. Advertisers now complain that some people see the same ad repeatedly, while others in the intended audience never see it.
Rob Griffin who is "global head of digital at Havas Media Group said that what Facebook is doing with Atlas is really killer.
In contrast, DoubleClick doesn't use people's real identities from when they are logged into Google services such as Gmail and its own social network Google Plus. Instead, on the Web DoubleClick relies on third-party cookies, which are pieces of computer code that are dropped into users' Web browsers to collect anonymous data on their online activities.
But cookies generally can't follow a user from a laptop to a smartphone, making it hard for DoubleClick to tell whether the person who saw an ad on the laptop is the same person who clicked on the same ad later on the phone. Indeed, when users switch to mobile devices, DoubleClick uses other required tracking technology such as Apple's Identifier for Advertisers, or IDFA, and a similar one for Android devices to track ads. It has no way of linking Web cookies with these mobile identification tools but is working on ways fix that.
Facebook's Atlas service also uses cookies, but it also has a user's real identity.
The arrival of Atlas is good news for advertisers and ad agencies because they have been worried for years about Google's growing dominance of online advertising, according to Matt Ackley, chief marketing officer at digital ad company Marin Software. But whether Atlas is capable of stealing the large share from Google we will know soon.
Source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/facebook-aims-to-shrink-googles-lead-in-digital-ads-1412182918
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