What does Facebook’s relaunch of Atlas mean for advertisers?
In a hyper-connected world, today’s cookie-based system can’t keep up, writes Mindshare UK‘s Tom Hawkins. How does Facebook’s Atlas look to solve this problem?
Facebook’s Atlas, the ad serving and tracking platform, may very well kick-start the advertising industry into moving towards a truly people centred approach to advertising.
We all know effective advertising is about delivering the right message to the right person, at the right time. The current cookie-based method of targeting ads to users, whilst definitely being the best guess we have at the moment, is flawed, as it’s a system deeply rooted in the early days of online.
I remember the clunky old laptop that my dad had as his main computer back in the mid-90s. Due to the price, and lack of affordable mobile handsets, that was the only internet connected device he had. By extension, advertisers could be pretty sure that the cookie they dropped on him was connected to my Dad, and him only. Hence, they could be sure their ad targeting was fairly tight.
However, fast forward to 2014, and my dad has a MacBook, a Nexus 7 and an iPhone 6 – at least two of which he switches between on an almost daily basis. That’s just the device ownership of a 62 year old doctor whose internet use is moderate, not someone who’s used to consuming a huge amount of their media online, or mobile first.
In a hyper-connected world, where a user might have three or four internet enabled devices that they use on a regular basis, today’s cookie-based system simply can’t keep up.
Atlas looks to solve this problem by assigning each user a Facebook ID. This ID would then stay with the user as they browse around the web, on mobile and within apps, as long as they were signed into Facebook, which a huge amount of users are, either through the app or through plugins on third party sites. Atlas is now able to track this user as they moved across devices, stitching their journey together into a more coherent whole, rather than fragmenting and losing its thread as cookies now do.
If a user saw a page post ad for a gig whilst browsing Facebook on their mobile, but then went on to buy tickets on their desktop, an advertiser could now track that end to end and assign credit to the ad seen on mobile.
With mobile usage exploding, investment in the channel hasn’t quite caught up, precisely because of the difficulties in attributing success to it. By gaining a fuller picture of the cross device customer journey, advertisers will be able to better allocate budget across all their channels, as well as craft experiences for users that fit in better with their research and purchase habits.
Offline tracking ability
Another huge feature of Atlas is the ability to not just track a user’s actions across device, but to also tie them back to an offline purchase. This would work if a user submitted an identifier such as an email address at the time of purchase. Facebook would then match this back to the data that they hold and link it to the user ID (all anonymously).
Again, being able to look at true end to end tracking would allow advertisers to really understand the mix of creative and online channels that contributes to someone carrying out a desired action.
Facebook or Google; who to back?
It’s not just Facebook who have suddenly cottoned onto this of course. Google, the obvious other heavy hitter in this space, introduced their estimated cross device conversion reporting at the tail end of last year. This too uses a persistent ID, assigned to a user logged into their multitude of properties, such as Gmail and YouTube, to track a user as they move between devices.
We don’t know exactly the size of the signed in populations Facebook and Google have so it’s difficult to make comparisons as to what might work better. However, one clear advantage that Facebook could have over Google is the wealth of behavioural data they have gathered through their social network.
Though Google do have the ability to target by age and gender, and other demographic data such as marital status, they would be hard pressed to compete with the treasure trove of social signals that Facebook has built up. These signals give some tremendously powerful options with which to target users with tailor-made ads, something which I’m sure Google and their adserving product DoubleClick would love to have.
What’s next?
Whilst we’re not going to see cookies go away overnight, advertisers who start to get on top of using people based tracking to serve up ads truly relevant to the consumers are going to the first to reap the rewards.
Not only will tracking a user across device allow advertisers to allocate their budget more wisely across digital channels, it will also allow them to use deep behavioural targeting data and specifically crafted messaging to better align their campaigns with real human behaviour.
Tom Hawkins is account director of PPC at Mindshare UK