Facebook announces re-launch of ad platform Atlas

Social-networking giant Facebook has announced the re-launch of Atlas, the ad platform, which allows companies and marketers to see how effective their ads were on different websites, Zee News reported.

The service was basically aimed at allowing advertisers to target ads across multiple devices and track them across the web.

The social network had acquired Atlas, an advertising technology from Microsoft for an estimated cost of $100 million in 2013.

Considering that mobile advertising was a fast-growth market, it is believed that Atlas would take on Google, which currently reigned as the leader in internet advertising.

Both Facebook and Google had unveiled new ad products, with Facebook's Atlas, a ''people-based,'' cross-device ad platform, shifting away from the use of cookies to target users. It relied instead on Facebook users being logged in on their smartphones.

Google, on its part, said it would roll out four new ad display types that made ads even more visible on mobile.

Yahoo, so far, had been silent on new advertising initiatives. The company, however, hosted a discussion earlier today called ''The Science and Design of Successful Advertising'' featuring the company's senior director of advanced creative, Graham Harris, and its principal research scientist, Eric Bax.

The discussion centred on leveraging data to create beautiful and personal ads and during the conversation Bax noted there was some public perception that targeted ads are somehow creepy, his research showed, consumers wanted to be identified and wanted advertisers to know what brands they liked.

While a number of Yahoo's products, including its mobile apps, had focused on creating more personal experiences, its mobile ads were not quite there yet there according to commentators.

Earlier this year, Venture Beat reported that the company fell from the position of the third-largest digital ad network to the fourth - though not for lack of trying.

In February Yahoo launched Gemini, a platform that allowed advertisers to serve up ads in mobile search results. However, by July in its most recent earnings report showed it was still was not breaking through on mobile earnings, even though mobile ad revenues had seen growth for Facebook and Google.