Facebook launches Atlas: Is Google's internet ad empire on verge of a shake-up?

It’s no secret that Facebook has been eyeing to eat up Google’s share in the internet advertising space. And, the social networking giant’s latest announcement makes it even clearer as how Facebook is going after the Google-owned internet advertising empire.

In an ever-growing battle to own the Internet, Facebook has now finally launched long-awaited Google Ad Sense competitor, Atlas. Facebook, which bought Atlas from Microsoft for reportedly $100 million last year, is re-launching the Atlas ad platform.

“Today, we are announcing the launch of Atlas.We’ve rebuilt Atlas from the ground up to tackle today’s marketing challenges, like reaching people across devices and bridging the gap between online impressions and offline purchases,” Erik Johnson, Head of Atlas said in a blogpost .

Atlas deliverspeople-based marketing, helping marketers reach real people across devices, platforms and publishers. By doing this, marketers can easily solve the cross-device problem through targeting, serving and measuring across devices. And, Atlas can now connect online campaigns to actual offline sales, ultimately proving the real impact that digital campaigns have in driving incremental reach and new sales.

Atlas has been rebuilt on an entirely new code base, with a user interface designed for today’s busy media planners and traffickers. Targeting and measurement capabilities are built-in, and cross-device marketing is easy with new ways of evaluating media performance centered on people for reporting and measurement. “This valuable data can lead to better optimisation decisions to make your media budget even more effective,” according to the blogpost.

Atlas provides power to target, measure and optimise campaign results with more impact than ever before. “Built with today’s -and tomorrow’s -multi-device, online/offline, relationship-driven advertising in mind, the all-new Atlas delivers next-generation transparency and performance advertisers simply can’t get anywhere else.”

Facebook also said Omnicom is the first holding company to sign an agency-wide ad serving and measurement partnership with Atlas.Together, Omnicomand Atlaswill jointly develop integrations to enable more automated capabilities for Omnicom’s clients, includingPepsi and Intel-who are among the first testing the new platform.

The company is also inviting a key group of partners that cross search, social, creative management and publishers.“These partners will bring people-based measurement to more channels and platforms with seamless integrations.” For example, Instagram - as a publisher - is now enabled with Atlas to both measure and verify ad impressions. And for Atlas advertisers who are already running campaigns through Instagram, Instagram ads will be included in Atlas reporting.