The Microsoft's Atlas Advertiser Suite was brought by Facebook on Thursday. Microsoft's Atlas Advertiser Suite is an online ad business and management service that used to be owned by Microsoft, but lately there where a lot of rumors about the fact that the two companies want to make a deal.
The price at which Facebook acquired the Microsoft Ads business is rumored to be around 100 million dollars.
Facebook is saying that this move will bring benefits to both users and advertisers:
"Today's marketing environment is much more complex than it was just a few short years ago. Marketers and agencies struggle to understand how their efforts across different channels complement and strengthen each other. Consequently, they are forced to adopt siloed marketing strategies for each channel, leading to poor and inconsistent end-user experiences."
The company said it looked to Atlas to help marketers and agencies get a full view of campaign performance, noting the service's capabilities for this type of analysis and measurement.
"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," Facebook said. "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.Microsoft also issued a statement about why the company made the sale, noting that the "the timing was right" and the agreement allows it to focus more on evolving its vision for digital advertising.
Atlas, alongside 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," the company added.
"We feel that Facebook will afford the Atlas business and employees the greatest opportunity for continued growth," Microsoft said. "Moreover, in no way does this announcement change or diminish our commitment to online advertising, in either display or search."Microsoft also said that a lot has changed since it acquired aQuantive (and by extension, Atlas) five years ago, adding that — at the time — it was in a race to build an ad technology platform and tools where other parties could conduct business.
"That vision of a singular ad technology and tools platform, however, became more challenging given significant changes in the industry ecosystem, technology platforms and content consumption (the 'appification' of the web)," Microsoft said. "We needed to sharpen our focus and concentrate on identifying, building and executing on the things that are core to our vision for the future as our entire company transitions to a devices and services model."