By: Jonathan Lewis, Product Marketing Manager |

While advertising is a sophisticated industry driven by skill and nuance, every individual marketer has the same essential goals:

• Reaching consumers wherever they are with the right marketing messages to drive conversions (purchases, registrations, app installs, video views or any other conversion event);
• Measuring where consumers shop — offline, online and across devices — to understand ROI and improve marketing effectiveness.

But today’s advertising reality makes accomplishing these goals more difficult than ever. People today are cross-device, cross-browser, cross-publisher, cross-app, cross-everything. We’ve experienced this phenomenon first-hand at Facebook, as the vast majority of people served an ad on our platform — more than 950 million — use Facebook across two or more devices (e.g., sign in from a desktop computer and one or more mobile device) over a 90-day period.

Marketers can’t solve the cross-everything challenge with cookie-based ads alone, since they often lead to inaccurate targeting and unreliable attribution. But which cross-device marketing solutions work best? What characteristics are needed to truly solve the daunting problems marketers face today?

Metrics That Matter

At Atlas, we believe that a cross-device solution only works if it can enable better targeting and attribution. The value of a marketing solution should be evaluated based on its ability to capture the following:

Unique Reach: The unique number of people an ad campaign can reach across devices.

Frequency:  The number of times people see ad impressions across devices.

Incremental Impressions: Additional ad impressions an advertiser can serve on one device, based on information from a previous interaction (e.g., tying an impression to a prior website visit or prior impression).

Incremental Conversions: Additional conversion events an advertiser can map to ad impressions served on a different browser or device.

On-Target %:  Percentage of incremental impressions or conversions an advertiser can accurately serve or measure, as compared to a benchmark/standard.

These measurement categories can be used to gauge the efficacy of any cross-device solution at delivering insights that matter to marketers’ goals.

Source Data is Crucial

To achieve these metrics consistently on every campaign, marketers need a solution that is built on accurate, authentic insights from a large population of real people. In fact, the success of any cross-device solution — regardless of whether it is extended through predictive means — largely depends on the strength of its source data.

Atlas’ ad serving and measurement solutions are connected to real people through the accuracy, persistence, scale of Facebook data. Thus, Atlas can deliver unprecedented accuracy in targeting and measurement at scale, while also meeting consumer expectations on privacy and control:

Accuracy: More than 1.49 billion people log in to Facebook on a monthly basis. When Atlas uses data from Facebook to deliver ads across devices, advertisers can be sure the people being targeted are actually who they’re supposed to be, because they are signed in and have been authenticated by Facebook.

Persistence: More than one billion people have logged into Facebook on a single day, providing Atlas with stable, high-fidelity information that connects impressions to conversions over the full consideration cycle of a brand or product.

Scale: Facebook’s cross-device coverage spans more than 950 million people over a 90 day period, allowing Atlas to not only serve ads but also inform the entire customer journey — from the first impression served on day one to the final purchase on day 90.

Privacy:  Atlas upholds Facebook’s rigid consumer privacy standards and uses data from Facebook in a way that empowers people to control their advertising experience.

Real People, Real Results

Atlas’ ability to track people vs. cookies has shown that on average, cookies deliver:

• 58% overstatement of reach
• 141% understatement of frequency

Many top brands have leveraged Atlas’s cross-everything capabilities to drive business impact, including:

• Live Nation: Discovered a 66% increase in mobile sales attribution and identified mobile as a top-performing channel. With cookie-based reporting alone, this channel would’ve reported zero sales instead.
• Tommy Hilfiger: Discovered 13% of in-store sales were influenced by online ads. People reached on both desktop and mobile converted at more than twice the rate of those reached on just one device.

Atlas can help you turn challenge into opportunity by enabling true, cross-everything ad measurement and delivery. Our data and robust, cross-device audience information deliver key metrics that matter, rooted in the accuracy, persistence, scale and privacy of Facebook. We can help advertisers excel in today’s cross-everything reality by creating relevant advertising opportunities and strengthening ROI. Are you ready to rise to the challenge?