Facebook (News - Alert) announced yesterday that it has agreed to acquire the Atlas Advertiser Suite from Microsoft. This acquisition is part of Facebook's attempt to build a more effective marketing system around its social network.
As the company explained on its blog, many marketers already use Atlas to advertise on Facebook, and Atlas has been an approved partner for measurement since June. As such, Facebook believes this acquisition will benefit both itself and Atlas' agency and marketer clients, while assuring that current Atlas clients shouldn't notice any change in service.
In fact, Facebook plans to further build on and invest in the Atlas platform, improving its abilities by scaling back its back-end measurement systems and enhancing its current suite of advertiser tools on desktop and mobile platforms. Other plans include improving Atlas' user interface and functionality in order to make it the "most effective, intuitive and powerful ad serving, management and measurement platform in the industry."
Furthermore, when combined with Nielsen and Datalogix, Atlas will help advertisers to "close the loop" and compare their Facebook campaigns to all others across the Web, whether desktop or mobile.
However, some are not as positive about this acquisition as Facebook, pointing out the fact that Microsoft's acquisition of Atlas led it to post its first quarterly net loss ever as it had to write the $6.2 billion purchase off in 2012.
Still, though, Facebook pointed out that the marketing environment of today is different than five and a half years ago when Microsoft (News - Alert) first purchased Atlas, while the pairing of Facebook and Atlas does certainly make a lot more sense than Atlas and Microsoft.
This acquisition is just a part of Facebook's campaign to strengthen its revenue streams while searching for new ones. Indeed, the company has been releasing new features and services consistently for the past year or so, such as a new messenger app that emulates Snapchat's self-destructible messaging service.