Image: Facebook
Brian Boland thinks Google gets too much credit for its ads.
That should come as no surprise. Boland is the vice president of ad products at Facebook, one of Google’s chief advertising competitors. But he may have a point.
People are bombarded by ads—on television, on Facebook, on Billboards, on news sites, in the subway. The best ads stick in consumers’ heads until later, when they search for whatever it was that was advertised and decide to purchase it. Typically, that search happens on Google, which is one reason why search based advertising is a money minting machine for Google. But if Google is getting credit for being the final step in the purchase process, Boland says, so should the website or social network (wink, wink) that served up the ad in the first place.
“It’d be like if you owned a fast food restaurant and gave all your advertising credit to the drive-in window. That’s how it happens today,” Boland said on stage at Business Insider’s Ignition conference on Wednesday. “Search has a great place in that role, but it’s definitely not what should get all the credit, for that last click.”
All of which explains why earlier this year, Facebook announced the relaunch of Atlas, the ad serving platform it acquired from Microsoft in 2013. The goal of Atlas is to help publishers across the web prove the effectiveness of their ads in influencing purchase decisions both on and offline. And while Boland wouldn’t admit it outright, that in turn, could help convince advertisers to shift some of their budgets away from Google, and toward other websites—including Facebook. As Boland put it: “Rising tides raise all boats.”
‘It’d be like if you owned a fast food restaurant and gave all your advertising credit to the drive-in window.’
Part of the trick is that Atlas is connected to Facebook. That means it can serve people ads across devices and understand that—even though Suzie Q. Jones might be using a phone, a tablet, and a laptop—she’s still the same person. On all three devices, she’s logged into the same Facebook account. Traditional behavioral tracking technology, using what are called “cookies,” would identify each device as a different person. That leads to redundancies in advertising, and for Boland, it makes ads less effective because they “get to be annoying.”
What’s more, Boland explained, Atlas can best Google by showing what percentage of people who saw an ad actually made a purchase offline, which is pretty much the Holy Grail for advertisers. To do that, Atlas collects offline purchase information from advertisers and compares that list to its own data on who saw the ad online. The system uses things like users’ email addresses and names to determine if there are any matches between the two groups. Then, Atlas can tell the advertiser what percentage of people who saw the ad also made a purchase, without naming any individual users.
“If we make it easier for marketers to understand if their business is growing from digital, they’ll invest more in digital,” Boland said.
It’s also, well, kinda creepy that Facebook is matching you up with your offline purchases. But this is the way the world is moving. Google is the net’s advertising powerhouse, but recently, it’s ad business growth has slowed. If Atlas is indeed able to serve smarter ads across devices, and link those ads to offline purchases, Facebook may soon give Google a run for its money.
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