Facebook officially buys Atlas advertising software from Microsoft

In a bold move to try and improve its sales revenue, Facebook published a statement regarding their recent acquirement of the Atlas Advertiser Suite – an ad manager and measuring tool – from Microsoft on its official blog today.

Facebook hopes that this acquisition will increase its advertising presence online as well as increase its efficiency in measuring campaign effectiveness.  More importantly, it allows them to successfully build an external ad network and potentially go head-to-head with Google.

“Atlas’s powerful platform, combined with Nielsen and Datalogix, will help advertisers close the loop and compare their Facebook campaigns to the rest of their ad spend across the web on desktop and mobile,” explains Brian Boland, Director of Product Marketing at Facebook.  “Our belief is that measuring various touch points in the marketing funnel will help advertisers to see a more complete view of the effectiveness of their campaigns.” If you remember, Facebook’s partnership with Datalogix, which is essentially giving marketers the means to track you on and offline, was met with much controversy.

The post failed to mention the price tag that came along with the purchase, but this deal allows Microsoft to finally let go of Atlas, which cost the company a whopping $6.3 billion as part of their acquisition of digital ad agency aQuantive in 2007.

The software company gained nothing from that transaction and decided to write off a huge chunk of the costs tied with the deal last July.  Despite that, Microsoft remains optimistic and prioritizes instead the building of new services and devices that are great platforms for advertising, like Windows 8, the Microsoft Surface tablets, Xbox Live, and Skype.  In Microsoft’ own official blog announcing their deal with Facebook, Advertising Chief Operating Officer Dave O’Hara said, “This deal allows us to dedicate even more energy and resources to those areas of our business that are core to the future direction of Microsoft Advertising.”

Atlas is currently based in Seattle and it is reported that the team will continue operations from their office there.