Facebook adds to Atlas to eliminate advertising waste

Marketing pioneer John Wanamaker once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Despite the promises of the past two decades, digital still faces the same issue.

Facebook realised this by testing out a buying platform in Atlas last year. During that test, it plugged into a number of the usual exchanges and bought across several formats. There were two major discoveries:

1. It was able to deliver ads to real people with unprecedented accuracy, but came up against many bad ads and fraud (such as bots). While it was able to root out the bad actors and only buy quality ads, the volume of valueless inventory amazed it.2. Only two ad formats delivered significant value: native & video.

Based on those findings, it began to dig into the ads that came through LiveRail and, the same thing was discovered, it immediately shut off the low quality ads, removing over 75% of the volume coming from the exchange by turning off publishers circulating bad inventory into LiveRail.

Facebook realised it could not sell what Atlas and its people-based measurement told it was valueless. Unfortunately, those ads were almost certainly dumped into another low-quality exchange where all of them were most likely purchased.

“This eye-opening experiment left the company with a decision,” says Dave Jakubowski, head of AdTech, Facebook. “Do we bury quality (which is industry prevalent), or do we focus solely on building a product in our mission to help marketers deliver and measure true business value? We chose the latter. Value is the better and longer-term view. That decision allowed us to look closer at where business value comes from. In addition to native and video, we found that a growing percentage came from mobile. US digital ad spend tells the same story.

“However, many marketers still choose to deliver and measure their ad campaigns using desktop-first tools that are not built for a cross-device world and they have got the wasted spend to show for it.

“With Atlas, which is built for cross-everything ad serving and measurement, we can help marketers see where their ‘Wanamaker waste’ lives. Facebook has announced several product updates to help advertisers in that pursuit.”

Offline Actions

Without a clear understanding of how digital ads drive offline sales, marketers have struggled to understand the growth opportunities with digital media, as the majority of purchases still happen in-store.

Facebook has developed Offline Actions, a measurement tool that ties offline sales to online ad spend and ensures digital investments get the credit they deserve. Advertisers that measure their ads with Atlas can now upload their point-of-sale (POS) data and understand within minutes if their online ads are influencing offline purchases.

“We’re pleased to see conversions being matched in Atlas through Offline Actions. We are able to see the connections between what is happening online and in our stores, and there’s a clear correlation between digital advertising and store conversions,” says Matthew Ebbert, CRM and analytics manager, The Land of Nod

Path to conversion

Facebook is also working with advertisers on Path to Conversion (by device reporting) to provide insight into all the ways people, not cookies, see ads across multiple devices before making a conversion. Other path to conversion solutions rely on cookie-based reporting, but Atlas is based on real people, which allows advertisers to see the real path across desktop, tablet, and mobile prior to online conversion. Path to Conversion (by device reporting) is now available to all customers.

Video Ad Serving

It is announcing Video Ad Serving, which makes it easier to tell vivid brand stories to people and measure value across devices, all within the Atlas platform. The rapid growth of digital video, combined with evolving consumption habits across devices, makes this one of the most valuable formats in a marketer’s toolkit. Video Ad Serving will be broadly available by the end of March 2016.

“We think these announcements are a step forward: we know there is still more progress to be made in helping marketers extract the most value from digital. We are committed to helping them achieve their business goals and deliver the most relevant and effective ads to people,” concludes Jakubowski.