Facebook said yesterday that they have agreed to buy the ATLAS digital advertising service from Microsoft. Facebook are driving forward to tackle rivals Google in online advertising. Neither company has detailed the terms of the deal.

Facebook want to strengthen their money making platform, targeting their one billion users with advertising from companies like Coca Cola.

The Atlas system uses proprietary data to track online purchases and shows how online ads may have influenced those purchases. If a Facebook user buys a computer processor for example they can show the marketing people that the same person saw an ad for processors on previous days via three websites.

The Wall Street Journal add “Facebook is striving to prove ads on its service are valuable to marketers, and the Atlas data can help the company show how ads marketers buy from Facebook boost sales or aid in other marketing goals.

“This is about building out the next generation of advertising tools,” said Brian Boland, Facebook's director of monetization product marketing, in an interview. He said the Atlas deal wasn't motivated by what many marketers believe is Facebook's ambition to become a major middleman for digital ads, as Google is, across a swath of websites.

For Microsoft, the sale is continued fallout from its $6 billion purchase in 2007 of digital-marketing firm aQuantive Inc., of which Atlas was a part. Microsoft hoped the deal would push it into the top rung of digital-advertising companies.”

Kitguru says: A good move for Facebook?

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