Facebook Is About To Launch A Huge Play In 'Big Data' Analytics (FB)
Facebook Is About To Launch A Huge Play In 'Big Data' Analytics (FB):
from Silicon Alley Insider
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took Wall Street analysts' questions about his Q1 2013 earnings last week, there was one theme he kept returning to: Facebook's new Big Data capabilities.
Most people think Facebook is a straightforward advertising play: It has a massive audience of 1 billion users, and advertisers can buy ads targeting slices of that audience. What could be simpler?
But in the earnings release, three of the six highlights of the quarter were about "Big Data," the trendy notion that the future of marketing lies in super-deep, super-complex data analytics rather than the raw power to deliver lots of eyeballs.
Measurement, measurement, measurement
Here are Facebook's Big Data moves in Q1:
- Launched new advertising products such as Lookalike Audiences, Managed Custom Audiences, and Partner Categories, which help marketers improve their targeting capabilities on Facebook.
- Partnered with Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai to enable marketers to incorporate off Facebook purchasing data in order to deliver more relevant ads to users.
- Enhanced ability to measure advertiser ROI on digital media across the internet through our acquisition of the Atlas Advertising Suite.
- Epsilon has data on 300 million company loyalty card members worldwide, and a databank on 250 million consumers in the U.S.
- Acxiom has "a comprehensive national database covering more than 126 million households and 190 million individuals."
- Datalogix says, "Our database contains more than $1 trillion in offline purchase-based data and we’re able to covert this data, and any CRM data, into an online universe."
- Bluekai is a data management platform — marketers bring their own data to those companies, and Bluekai will crunch it and turn it into a strategy for making marketing more effective.
All this is now paired with Facebook's own data — profiles of 1 billion-plus users who are all happily documenting the minutiae of their lives, and their shopping, on Facebook.
Second only to Google
It's dramatic stuff, in terms of its scale. But Zuckerberg hinted that Facebook is still in the baby steps phase of its big data plan, because the last part of the plan — Atlas — isn't even fully plugged in yet.
Atlas is a gigantic internet ad server, previously owned by Microsoft. It's like the plumbing of the web: It serves up ads all over the web and takes a cut from any advertiser using its services. Atlas carries between 10% and 15% of all ads for buyers on the web, according to LeadLedger. It is second in size only to Google's DoubleClick ad server.
Most people have yet to digest that fact: Facebook is now the second biggest web ad server to Google. The deal closed recently, and Facebook has yet to report the revenue impact of Atlas in its own numbers.
Atlas has yet to shrug
A lot of people assumed that Facebook bought Atlas because it wanted to create an off-Facebook ad network, maybe one in which Facebook data could be used to enhance targeting through Atlas. But that's not the primary goal for Atlas. Facebook has been quite clear about why it acquired Atlas from Microsoft: It wants the data Atlas can provide.
Zuckerberg said on his Q1 call that "Atlas is a really important part of continuing to develop our measurement capabilities": He wants Facebook to be able to tell advertisers how their ads perform even when consumers are offline, and haven't been anywhere near Facebook prior to going shopping:
Disclosure: The author owns Facebook stock.
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