Facebook has announced the acquisition of Microsoft’s Atlas ad server on its blog today. Atlas is a leader in campaign management and measurement for marketers and agencies. This is a key buy for Facebook, it will rank the social network as a higher contender in the ad space world, letting them take on internet search giant Google as its most profitable business.
While the price of the acquisition was not announced, Ad Age speculated that it would cost between $30 and $50 million. Microsoft acquired ad suite in the same deal when it acquired aQuantive, Inc. in 2007 for $66.50 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $6 billion.
“Our belief is that measuring various touch points in the marketing funnel will help advertisers to see a more complete view of the effectiveness of their campaigns,” said Brian Boland, Facebook’s Director of Product Marketing, in a blog post.
Although Peter Kafka at All Things D explained that “Integrating and overhauling Atlas, which has essentially been abandoned by Microsoft for years, will take many months, and the whole thing may not be done for another year.”
Boland agrees that the merger will take time.
He wrote, “We plan to improve Atlas’ capabilities by investing in scaling its back-end measurement systems and enhancing its current suite of advertiser tools on desktop and mobile. We will also work to improve the user interface and functionality with the goal of making Atlas the most effective, intuitive, and powerful ad serving, management and measurement platform in the industry. Ultimately, Atlas’s powerful platform, combined with Nielsen and Datalogix, will help advertisers close the loop and compare their Facebook campaigns to the rest of their ad spend across the web on desktop and mobile”
Atlas is based in Seattle and the team will continue to work there.
Boland writes ”Atlas is based in Seattle and the team will continue to operate from there. Our Seattle engineering office already drives important parts of our ad system, and we plan to substantially invest in and build out our Seattle engineering and product teams. We look forward to further building out the Atlas platform to help marketers better understand how well their campaigns perform, and to help them optimize their campaigns.”
Source: Business Insider
