Facebook has recently announced its new ad platform Atlas, a platform that aims to enable personalised marketing for advertisers, tracking users across the internet and across devices. Atlas aims to target ads more accurately so that a better service is provided to users.

There has been a dramatic increase of mobile internet use in recent years due to better smartphones. Atlas hopes to capitalise on this shift to mobile and tablet use by targeting advertising on these devices.

The usual system used by sites to track users is ‘cookies’. However, cookies aren’t very accurate or reliable and barely function at all on mobiles and tablets. It is estimated that 40% of ads that target age and gender are currently not reaching the right people. So, a new system is needed to track users that will replace cookies. Atlas hopes to be this new system, and hopes to become the model for the industry for tracking individuals around the web. This system hopes to be more accurate than cookies, more reliable and usable on different devices.

This new platform will help Facebook to compete with Google’s ad platform AdSense. Facebook will be able to use information it gets from its members such as their basic information (age, gender, location) and information from their activity and ‘likes’ on Facebook (such as companies they show an interest in, their hobbies and interests, businesses they frequent and so on). This combined information of identity and disclosed data will make Facebook’s ad platform very popular with advertisers. This will give them an advantage over Google, as Google only have access to basic information on internet users.

Google is well aware of their down-falling, as their recent launch of google+ aimed to give them the information they needed for person-based advertising. However, Google+ was met with disinterest on the most part, and has very little of the user base that Facebook has access to.

As shown by recent news, Facebook’s use of this personal information to provide targeted advertising may cause privacy concerns among their users. The popularity of ad-free social network Ello in recent weeks has been caused, at least in part, by users feeling their privacy is being invaded by advertisers. They worry about their information being sold to advertisers by Facebook.

However, information is given to advertisers anonymously. Facebook only gives their advertisers information on your demographics, and not personal information. For example, the advertisers may know that you are a female between 18 and 25 who lives in the North East and who likes Coca Cola. They will not know your name or any other identifying information about you, only Facebook will have that information. It must be considered that this use of information not only benefits the advertiser, but benefits the user too. With targeted advertising, you are more likely to see adverts for things you are interested in. This benefits the advertiser as they have a higher success rate for their ads and therefore more revenue, and it benefits the user as they are less likely to be shown ads they are not interested in.

Facebook’s new ad platform is taking a huge step forward in targeted advertising by using Facebook member’s information to target ads and by tracking users effectively across the internet and across devices. Perhaps with this move, Facebook will take the lead over Google as the most successful ad platform in the market