Atlas Blog

Facebook Conversion Pixel Added to Atlas Universal Action Tag

Lori Goode - MSFT — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:48:00 GMT

Atlas clients can now quickly and easily piggyback the Facebook conversion pixel in the Atlas Universal Action Tag (UAT).

The Facebook conversion pixel is now available as a drop-down option in the Atlas UAT, in addition to the existing UAT Program and Uncertified options.

While piggybacking the Facebook pixel will still work in the Uncertified drop-down (as any pixel would), Atlas clients can benefit from the new drop-down by using additional features like Selective Pinging and the validation of whitelisted Facebook domains. The new UAT network type does not require any additional paperwork or subscriptions, and is available now to all Atlas clients.

- Lori Goode

Improving Universal Action Tag Pixel Load Times

Lori Goode - MSFT — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 23:04:00 GMT

The Atlas Universal Action Tag (UAT) manages multiple pixels easily and at scale. With extensive controls surrounding when to fire piggybacked pixels, flighting pixels to align to campaign dates, and a robust program that provides clear guidelines for data use and privacy, the UAT is a trusted and reliable container tag for advertisers.

Earlier this week, we introduced a new feature in the UAT: a UAT pixel test that helps identify when there are issues with piggybacked pixels, and provides quick feedback on pixel latency, or more serious errors when pixels fail to load.

By selecting Test on the UAT page, each pixel will fire and return the result of the test in-line. Results will indicate the pixel load times, as well as when the pixel fails to load.

The test results are aimed at providing general guidance to troubleshoot latent UATs. The pixel test can help you:

Quickly assess the response health of all pixels piggybacked to a UAT to safeguard the website experience
Q/A newly added pixels to ensure they were generated and implemented correctly
Ensure conversion pixels from the vendor are being properly fired to avoid data loss

This feature is one of the ways we’ll look to continue to improve the Atlas UAT.

-Lori Goode

Atlas Now Integrated with Adobe Genesis

Lori Goode - MSFT — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 03:47:00 GMT

There’s a lot of data out there. If you’re like many marketers, you may be managing multiple data sources to tell a story about your advertising effectiveness across disparate sources and tools.

With the Atlas Adobe Genesis* integration, clients are now able to access Atlas data from directly within SiteCatalyst, including Atlas impressions, clicks, conversions, and cost. This automated data integration allows you to spend less time collating varied data sources, and more time analyzing the results and taking action.

If you’d like to hear more about the integration or just get started, contact your Atlas Account Manager.

--Lori Goode

*formerly Omniture

Atlas Sale to Facebook Final

Lori Goode - MSFT — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:00:00 GMT

We’re happy to report that Atlas is now officially part of Facebook!

After we announced that Microsoft reached a definitive agreement for Facebook to buy the Atlas business, the Atlas team had the opportunity to meet with customers and partners across the globe to gather initial feedback on the future opportunity for Atlas. These conversations were extremely valuable, and we walked away from those engagements with a renewed energy around solving critical industry challenges. Well, the time has come to start planning for the future.

Beginning Monday, April 29^th, the Atlas team will begin operating under Facebook. We firmly believe that this relationship with Facebook will give us the ability to provide better insights to marketers while still protecting their privacy and the integrity of their data. Our plan is that Facebook will continue to keep Atlas neutral and unbiased towards any publisher, including FB inventory. We want to assure all our clients that Facebook's commitment to transparency, control, and accountability has not changed. In keeping with those commitments, we prepared a simplified Atlas privacy policy, which starts from the provisions contained in the existing Atlas privacy policy, and includes updates to reflect Facebook's ownership of Atlas. You can find the new privacy policy here.

We are so excited to roll up our sleeves and redefine the future of Atlas, not only by improving the user interface and marketer tools with the goal of making Atlas the most effective, intuitive, and powerful ad serving and measurement business in the industry, but also in uncovering unique differentiators under Facebook.

Thanks,

Lori Goode

@AtlasAdvertiser | Atlas on Facebook

Looking Ahead

Lori Goode - MSFT — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:00:00 GMT

By now, you might’ve heard the news that Facebook and Microsoft have announced a definitive agreement for Facebook to buy the Atlas business. If you haven’t heard, you can read more on Facebook’s blog here, and read more from Microsoft here and here.

The Atlas team is excited about this new opportunity, and what it means for the direction of our business. We hope that you—our clients and partners—are just as excited. It’s critical to us that we shape our future together.

On behalf of the Atlas team, we look forward to starting the conversation!

Many thanks for the continued support,

Lori Goode

@AtlasAdvertiser | Atlas on Facebook

Display Advertising Still Isn’t Transparent Yet

Geoffrey Coco - MSFT — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 23:01:00 GMT

Day and Night

A new dawn is trying to break in the world of online banner advertising. That dawn will bring a bright light of transparency for advertisers when the new types of ad verification finally become a reality. But a stubborn cloak of darkness just won’t let go of the night. And for now, the nocturnal rats and raccoons of our industry roam free and do as they please under the cover of blind ad networks and exchanges.

Every few years new innovations sweep across the online ad industry that promise new insights and efficiencies. First it was CPA networks, then it was targeting networks, now it is exchanges. But while these innovations have brought advertisers new benefits, they have also created unintended havens for rats and raccoons – fraud and waste – to hide in. CPC/CPA networks created the perfect breeding ground for a practice known as cookie bombing to flourish (flooding the market with down-funnel inventory in order win 100% credit for the conversion). Targeting networks created an inviting vehicle to shovel huge amounts of unsanitary user-generated inventory into otherwise desirable audience buys (remind anyone of the mortgage-backed security mess?). And while exchanges bring much needed innovation and efficiency to the display ad marketplace, they also inadvertently provide the perfect cover for all sorts of crummy inventory: off-screen impressions, split-second exposures, and impressions that are otherwise not-as-described.

Advertisers are all too familiar with the problem of not knowing what they actually got for their spend. But in digital display, it’s become institutionalized. This is not to say that the erosion of transparency was intentional or that there’s a conspiracy to conceal. It’s a simple result of the growing complexity in our value chain, more market flexibility, and more middlemen (middlebots, really). And it’s not that nobody is trying to fix it. Quite the opposite. Over the last 5 years venture capitalists from coast to coast have been building an ad tech vendor army to try to restore transparency to digital advertising. But they’re not succeeding, and the dawn isn’t breaking, and the rats are still winning. Here’s why.

Industry Standards

Various new “verification” techniques, such as brand safety, audience validation, and ad viewability have arisen to solve the problem of campaign transparency. However, these are typically proprietary point solutions that are marketed by individual firms whose M.O. is to win each other’s customers while working around each other’s patents. This fragmented and non-coordinated dynamic hasn’t led to broad market adoption, and it doesn’t work for advertisers. Most importantly, it won’t give major brands a reason to take online as seriously as we’d all like.

Let’s be realistic. The whole ad space isn’t going to be controlled by one benevolent overlord that will grace us with the one golden inventory rating solution. And the ad tech companies aren’t going to put their secret techniques into open source. But if the players in the online publishing and ad tech communities really want brands to move dollars out of print, outdoor, and TV and into online, we’re going to have put our differences on hold and come to the table.

The lack of transparency in display holds back the whole industry, and it will take cooperation by parties on all sides to create a standard. For the record, conforming to a common measurement standard doesn’t mean companies can’t differentiate (there’s always service, price, and good looks). Most importantly, what standards can do is set a foundation for market expansion. Without standards, imagine how the businesses of music, air travel, or wireless would have fared. In the business of display advertising, industry-wide standard measures of audience and inventory quality could usher in a new dawn of transparency and send the rats and raccoons packing.

Ad Viewability

Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening in one corner of the digital ad verification world, called “ad viewability”.

With the rise of ad exchanges, advertisers love the ease at which they can surgically locate and buy the audience segments they want, whereverthose users happen to be. Problem is, as a side-effect of all this efficient buying, advertisers have lost the warm fuzzy of knowing the context where their ads are showing up. They need to know: What content is my ad next to? Where is my ad on the page? What kind of site is this anyway? In the case of viewability, is my ad even being seen by an actual human for any length of time?

These concerns are so acute that a sub-industry has emerged in the area of ad viewability. A trade group consortium comprised of members of the venerable 4As, ANA, and IAB have formed to create the Making Measurement Make Sense initiative (3MS)to study and fix the problem of uniform transparency for advertisers. Atlas is an active participant in the 3MS. A high-profile aspect of the 3MS charter is concerned with ad viewability. To address this, the 3MS members proposed a simple rule to determine if an ad was seen, reasonably unobstructed, for a reasonable amount of time. The 3MS worked with the Media Ratings Council (MRC) to define some guidelines for using the rule to measure viewability in the wild.

Over the first half of 2012 the 3MS leadership organized participating publishers and ad tech companies, including Atlas, to run live campaign tests using the tentatively proposed method. The results came back and uncovered two important insights. First, that a significant portion (36% - 87%) of the inventory bought and sold today is not visible (the numbers varied significantly by inventory source and by vendor implementation). Second, that measuring viewability is really hard to do universally well. Different environments, browsers, devices, user settings, and the dreaded iFrame issue make it very challenging to consistently get good viewability readings on over 25% of the total volume of impressions (again, the numbers were all over the place). The MRC themselves have declared the proposed viewability standard not-ready-for-prime-time in a recent industry advisory.

Even if the implementation of viewability were easy, there’s also the issue of market adoption. The basic idea sounds straightforward enough, right? But, consider what constitutes an ad “impression” today – that the server got a request for an ad. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of publishers book their ad revenue the moment their servers get a request for an ad. Now, when the revenue manager at myadsupportedsite.com can’t book his revenue until an actual human sees his ad, he’s going to be thinking, “holy TiVo, who moved my cheese?!” The de facto impression standard has been in place for well over a decade, long before any of the modern business models were around. So, there’s also a lot of inertia to overcome. Incidentally, if and when a viewability standard does come to pass, instead of plummeting publisher revenues, expect to see quite the opposite. The more predictable outcome, as many others have blogged, is that quality inventory will become more certifiable, and that will spur advertisers to pay more for that quality. Supply and demand says that when you constrain the supply of a valuable commodity, such as visible inventory on quality sites, the rates must go up. As throughout the ages, sellers of quality inventory will be just fine.

In the meantime, the lack of a gold standard isn’t stopping the army of verification vendors from selling flavors of the not-yet-ratified measurement method. Often these viewability services are marketed as part of a broader package of verification and brand engagement solutions. The good news is the awareness brought about by these solutions is helping to keep the spotlight on the need to get a reliable standard of transparency. But until a standard is ratified and these services can be compared side by side, buyer confidence won’t hit a critical mass and publishers and networks will continue to push back hard on the prospect of selling against what remains an undefined currency.

So, is viewability a great idea with no real path to become the gold standard for the industry? The 3MS-ers haven’t given up hope. The members of the consortium have turned their focus to a new proposed technical solution that would make measuring ads in a web page more reliable while at the same time protecting the page and the user from ad-borne threats, the so-called “Safe iFrame” initiative. Like most other proposed technical standards efforts aimed at our highly fragmented industry, this ambitious initiative will require significant energy to overcome the current inertia. But it’s not impossible.

Growing Online Depends On Transparency

For tech players like ad servers, exposing more sophisticated metrics and snapping to new rules for counting and billing will be an expensive investment. But even more so it is an opportunity. We have to remember that the promise of accountable media was the spark that lit the fire in online display in the first place. And we’re already seeing renewed investments by the ad tech titans to upgrade our decade-old measurement stacks to get ready for the rigors of modern media buying and consumption patterns. Specifically, it will be critical to generate comparable measures of transparency across the vast array of consumer devices and not be foiled by blind networks and exchanges.

As the measurement industry continues to mature, some technology stratification will be inevitable. Basic modern accountability measures will become a table-stakes feature and will infuse the entire ad tech landscape in the form of simple URL scoring, basic viewability, and coarse-grain audience makeup. In contrast, highly specialized measurement services will also thrive, selling their sophisticated metrics at a premium. These advanced measures will go above and beyond the baseline standards and will include measures of user engagement, brand sentiment, content analysis, and placement value not available from their ad tech cousins.

Advertisers will continue to hold back online if they believe it’s overrun by rats and raccoons. The key to growing digital in the age of audience buying is reintroducing brand advertiser comfort and control around where they are showing up. If our industry can renew its focus on transparency and rebuild brand trust that we can ensure high quality ad placement, then we’ll all sleep better at night.

Thanks,

Geoffrey Coco

Group Channel Partner Manager

@AtlasAdvertiser | Atlas on Facebook

Getting the job done in half the time!

Karen Valentine - MSFT — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 17:12:00 GMT

You’ve heard the popular saying a million times; if you want it done faster and better, do it yourself. That’s why we’re elated to introduce you to an Excel Macro we’ve been using for years, but just now polished it up nice and shiny for you to use!

Introducing *drumroll please*… the Ad-Specific Redirect macro!

Please, hold all applause until the end.

The Ad-Specific Redirect macro generates view and click redirects for each ad assigned to placements on an Ad Assignment Manager (AAM) spreadsheet. Typically, these redirects are used by folks who want to embed Atlas tracking into some type of fourth-party ad. This may be you!

The macro adds two columns to the end of an AAM. The first column contains the view redirects; the second column contains the click redirects. These redirects can then be trafficked directly to the fourth-party vendor or publisher. It’s also useful for creating multi-click tracking pixels.

Now that you know (this of course, is half the battle), it’s time to go!

Access the Knowledge Base articles from Client Center (login only) to learn how to use this new Excel macro!

Advertiser Suite – Campaign Management – Ad Specific Redirect Macro

Advertiser Suite – Campaign Management - How to Install an Excel Macro

After you’ve learned about the Macro, download the Macro! http://AdSpecificRedirect.codeplex.com/

Thanks,

Karen Valentine

Bienvenue! Willkommen! Benvenuti! Bienvenido!

Steve Hanvey - MSFT — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 14:27:00 GMT

Pop quiz:

What do the following iconic buildings have in common with Atlas Client Center?

You can now learn in the native languages spoken in and around these amazing wonders of the modern world: Atlas Media Console learning has gone global.

Atlas core skills courses have been localized into the following languages and are now presented in an all-new localized Training Application. Read on, and visit the new sites today!

http://advertising.microsoft.com/france/atlas-training-application

Les cours E-Learning de Microsoft Atlas reposent sur des démonstrations, des simulations et des animations. Celle-ci vous assurent des formations efficaces et conviviales pour les usagers qui souhaitent mettre à niveau leurs aptitudes et connaissances. Chaque module se valide par la réponse à un formulaire d’évaluation afin de valider les connaissances. Conçus par des experts, les cours E-Learning de Microsoft Atlas peuvent servir de formation de démarrage ou de source de référence ponctuelle

http://advertising.microsoft.com/deutschland/atlas-training-application

Die E-Learning-Kurse von Microsoft Atlas stellen mit Simulationen, Demos, Animationen und Bewertungen ein ansprechendes, effektives Lernmedium für Nutzer zur Erweiterung ihrer Kenntnisse dar. Die E-Learning-Kurse von Microsoft Atlas wurden von Spezialisten der jeweiligen Bereiche entworfen und werden regelmäßig aktualisiert. Sie können im herkömmlichen Stil als Schulung oder bei Bedarf als Nachschlagwerk eingesetzt werden.

http://advertising.microsoft.com/italia/atlas-training-application

I corsi Microsoft Atlas E-Learning consistono di simulazioni, dimostrazioni, animazioni e valutazioni per offrire una risorsa di formazione utile e flessibile agli utenti che desiderino aggiornare le proprie competenze e conoscenze. Ideati da esperti dell’argomento e aggiornati su base regolare, i corsi Microsoft Atlas E-Learning possono essere utilizzati come strumenti di apprendimento tradizionali (training) oppure come risorse di riferimento veloci.

http://advertising.microsoft.com/espana/atlas-training-application

Los cursos E-Learning de Microsoft Atlas utilizan simulaciones, demostraciones, animaciones y evaluaciones con el objetivo de ofrecer una experiencia de aprendizaje atractiva y efectiva a los usuarios que necesitan actualizar sus habilidades y conocimientos. Diseñados por expertos en la materia y actualizados de forma continua, los cursos E-Learning de Microsoft Atlas pueden desempeñar el papel de curso de aprendizaje tradicional o de recurso de referencia puntual.

If you do not already have access to Client Center you will need to contact technical support: itsemea@microsoft.com. You should also have already set upyour own Windows Live ID and password.

Thanks,

Steve Hanvey

@AtlasAdvertiser | Atlas on Facebook

What Atlas Analytics Can Do For Facebook Advertisers

Sanjay Vasdev - MSFT — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 19:49:00 GMT

In our previous post Atlas Gets Social, we discussed the benefits of harnessing social display as a new measurable channel, providing unprecedented insights into Facebook’s reach, overlap, and synergy as well as its place in attribution. These metrics are wholly accommodated by a suite of Advanced Analytics reports that Atlas offers.

Consider the Search and Display Synergy Analysis. This report takes the notion of paid search being a supreme bottom-funnel conversion driver, whose success may have been assisted by the efficacy of display advertising. By examining cookies that converted through search only and comparing these to cookies exposed to both search and display, the actual lift perpetuated by each display publisher can be quantified, hence building a case for the potential reallocation of media dollars.

Facebook itself can be viewed as such a publisher and stacked up against its display counterparts in the measurement of influence on search. If it can be determined that Facebook lends a higher level of contribution, this may justify continued investment.

Campaign Builder is another indispensable tool for marketers focused on identification of overlap and exclusivity across their media buys. The Atlas Campaign Builder tool gives a definitive answer into how many cookies are showing overlap between the Facebook campaign and other Atlas-tracked media buys (i.e. is the same advertiser’s message reaching the same user across multiple networks?). Concerns may be amplified if the level of duplication between Facebook and (traditional) display is so large that it renders both channel investments sub-optimal. Or that average frequency on Facebook tips over the point of diminishing returns, where the cookied user starts to become oversaturated with the advertiser’s message.

Campaign Builder aligns with Atlas’s Engagement Mapping vision in identifying publishers who may be driving engagement but may not be reaping credit for such. As marketers increasingly adopt the ethic of looking more holistically across entire conversion paths and scrutinizing touch points with varying levels of attribution, the conversation turns to weighting time-based variables such as sequence and recency. Some marketers, for instance, value first and last click as the most salient conversion drivers with engagements in-between (‘assists’) deemed influential, but to a lesser extent. Through Atlas’s Click Purchase Path Analysis, they can glean insights into where Facebook advertising dwells as an introducer, influencer, or closer across each unique click path, essentially creating a virtual representation of the digital conversion funnel.

While the Click Purchase Path Analysis tells a very succinct story on the flow of traffic to point of conversion, the eMap Factors Report complements nicely by showing how Facebook wins or loses attribution across eachvariable in Engagement Mapping in accordance with the advertiser’s chosen model.

In summary there is little doubt that bringing social display metrics into a unified audience activation platform like Atlas will yield tremendous gains for advertisers. For Atlas, the advent of third party tracking permissibility adds new channel reporting capabilities to its already robust repertoire. Accurate measurement will help draw conclusions on the quality of audiences delivered at scale. Marketers will be better informed on the synergistic aspects of Facebook advertising, gain better understanding of its reach and overlap, and aid the movement of marketing budgets to appropriate sources. This all serves to reaffirm Atlas reporting and its Advanced Analytics as a true lynchpin in the decision making processes of agencies.

Thank You

Sanjay Vasdev

@AtlasAdvertiser | Atlas on Facebook

Atlas Gets Social

Sanjay Vasdev - MSFT — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 20:21:00 GMT

Social networking continues to capture an increasing share of online users’ time, redefining how people interact with their personal social circles and brands in both online and offline environments. Facebook leads as the driving force behind this shift in consumer behavior accounting for the largest share of online minutes across the entire web in 2011 ¹. Its share of the US display ad market grew to 27.9% for 2011, compared with 21% a year earlier, according to data released by comScore in January 2012 ², far outpacing Yahoo! and Google. In fact by the end of last year Facebook was already reaching over half of the internet audience, 55 percent (a 43% lift from 2007)³.

With Atlas standing as an approved ad tracking vendor on Facebook, there are immediate opportunities for marketers to leverage our reporting and Advanced Analytics suite. Advertisers can quantify the true value of their investments on Facebook, helping them understand where the social network sits within the digital marketing mix, its influence on other channels, and how it should be appropriately credited under different attribution models.

Conversations on attribution reach, overlap and channel synergy have largely excluded social due to its lack of integration into unified tracking platforms. Atlas now embraces this historically marginalized channel through injection of tracking into Facebook ads, recording impressions and clicks through to conversion on the advertiser’s webpages and delivering measurable social marketing ROI.

Advertisers create and designate an ad to an engineered audience in Facebook, comprised of various parameters, including demographic and interest-based criteria. The resonance of the message within each audience can then be measured with precision and reported within Atlas. From this, a compelling story can be told.

For example, advertisers can gain true insights into the traction their messaging holds in driving acquisition. In addition, by merit of supported impression and view through metrics, latent branding effects can be examined, identifying correlations with consumer behavior weeks to months following exposure to Facebook advertising.

Audiences and creative messaging can be constantly refined until the advertiser sees the optimal results they are striving for. Additionally through statistical aggregation the overall performance of social display can be evaluated and pitted against other channels that are competing for credit.

Viewing Facebook tracked data through Atlas’s Engagement Mapping, advertisers can ascertain where Facebook falls within the purchase funnel and make the most informed decisions as a result. The implications of Facebook tracking within Atlas, however, reach far beyond linear performance measurement and standard reporting. In my next post, I’ll suggest ways you can begin to further analyze Facebook data through our Advanced Analytics suite.

Thanks,

Sanjay Vasdev

¹Source: http://www.comscore.com/content/download/12701/263185/file/comScore_2012_US_Digital_Future_in_Focus.pdf/

²Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-30/facebook-builds-its-lead-in-display-advertising-comscore-says.html

³Source: http://www.comscoredatamine.com/2012/02/facebook-shows-strong-growth-over-past-five-years/

Unveiling New Attribution Analytics for Direct Response Advertisers

Sanjay Vasdev - MSFT — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 17:42:00 GMT

Digital advertising measurement has undergone a renaissance in recent years with growing adoption of alternative models of attribution beyond the Last Ad standard. To many marketers, it is a fallacy that the last engagement prior to conversion should be awarded full credit as it overlooks the influence of other touch points in cookied users’ histories that help foster awareness, consideration, and intent.

With its foray into attribution, Atlas was the pioneer in going against the grain of traditional understanding of how digital media should be remunerated. As a departure from the industry de facto measurement model, Atlas embraced a more holistic approach with Engagement Mapping: a platform-integrated system for reapportioning credits based on weighted factors. Brand advertisers found they could give more than passing recognition to larger ad sizes and more sophisticated rich media units, while Direct Response advertisers could place greater merit on variables such as Click Weight, Sequence, and Recency.

For this latter group of DR-focused marketers, Atlas debuts a brand new advanced analytics report, Click Purchase Path Analysis, supplementing its already robust suite of Engagement Mapping reports. The premise of this analysis is that examination of all active display touches in a conversion funnel is key to understanding where media engagement dwells and how its level of contribution varies according to its proximity to point-of-sale.

The Atlas Click Purchase Path Analysis offers insights into the following:

· What is the typical click path to conversion for my online consumers?

· What unique click paths exhibit greater level of abandonment?

· Which sites, placements, and creatives drive active engagement at the top and bottom of the funnel?

· What level of cross-channel behavior is observed across unique click paths?

By presenting a chronology of clicks against every component of a media plan, DR-driven marketers can create statistical models that quantify the contribution of each touch in the engagement process – as an introducer, closer, or assist. A score is computed to determine which sites, placements, and creatives are winners and losers in attribution, hence allowing spend to be optimized efficiently. The analysis itself is modeled on Atlas’s Keyword Path Analysis,which formulates a similar attribution story around paid search.

While analysts can mine huge repositories of cookie-level data to form their own inferences around optimal path to conversion, the Click Purchase Path Analysis performs this heavy lifting by aggregating performance against each unique click path into a single readable output, thereby alleviating resources on the agency side.

The Click Purchase Path Analysis is a brand new Advanced Analytics Pack (AAP) report that is now available to order through your Client Partner.

Thank you,

Sanjay Vasdev

@AtlasAdvertiser | Atlas on Facebook

Introducing New Geo Analytics

Sanjay Vasdev - MSFT — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 17:02:00 GMT

Advertisers have long acknowledged that messaging resonates differently across regions, and often put great care into how and where their inventory is served. For example, offers and promotions may be localized to specific countries, states and DMAs. Economic and social factors also play a part in how consumers engage with advertising. Serving a mortgage offer to a population with low home-ownership would have little propensity to convert, and may be considered a waste of media dollars. For such reasons, marketers require both their ad serving platforms and publishers to target with geographic precision. From an analysis perspective, marketers want to know:

How is my media performing across different geo locations?
Are my publishers abiding by specified geo targets?

The Geographic Performance Analysis, part of the Atlas Advanced Analytics Pack (AAP), is instrumental in answering these questions. In our commitment to evolving customer needs, we’re excited to announce some great new extensions to this analysis with the introduction of weekly trending, and the ability to tie location-based performance back to media plan.

These enhancements are borne out of the following realities:

Geo-specific performance rarely follows a linear pattern and may exhibit peaks and declines over certain time periods
Aggregating performance across multiple media plans into a single analysis is an operational efficiency afforded by Atlas; but, it is also important to understand how geo performance varies across each media plan.

The new Geo Weekly Performance Analysis accommodates three additional dimensions: Week Of, Media Plan Name, and Media Plan ID. This analysis replaces its predecessor and is now available to order through your Client Partner.

Thank you,

Sanjay Vasdev

@AtlasAdvertiser | Atlas on Facebook

Atlas Providing Ad Tracking on Facebook

Geoffrey Coco - MSFT — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 23:21:00 GMT

I’m happy to announce that Atlas is an approved ad tracking provider on Facebook.

This means that advertisers who use Atlas can independently track the delivery and measure the performance of the ads they place on Facebook.

Specifically, Atlas advertisers can measure impressions, clicks, and user interactions on Facebook ads, alongside the rest of their media campaigns. Atlas advertisers can now even track through to conversion on the advertiser’s webpages.

Atlas advertisers will continue to enjoy the same the measurement capabilities they’ve come to expect from Atlas across the rest of the publisher spectrum: unique reach, average frequency, day part, conversion attribution, and other advanced analyses.

Taking advantage of the program is simple: Atlas clients can simply submit Atlas tracking tags along with their creative to Facebook during trafficking. For more information please contact your Atlas account representative.

This is just another way that Microsoft Advertising is helping our advertising customers unlock the value of online media. Stay tuned for more!

Thanks,

Geoff Coco

@AtlasAdvertiser | Atlas on Facebook

Online Learning Trends & Client Center Solutions

Steve Hanvey - MSFT — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:13:00 GMT

Online training has been developing as an integral part of the learning landscape at businesses globally for some time now. Atlas has also invested heavily in its service and support offering in the shape of Client Center.

Client Center continues to demonstrate strong growth in all areas, specifically: active users, monthly searches and completed training courses as seen below.

Online training will continue to grow and develop with such strong backing. The following trends are particularly relevant to our clients:

· Flexible learning drives efficiencies: Modularised online training allows users to learn at their desks in smaller chunks, providing positive business impact on cost and operational efficiency.

· Churn + Classroom = Lag: Due to churn, there is constant need for current and continuous role-based training. Companies who want to deploy new technologies quickly and efficiently will require users to gain new skills without the lag of classroom-based training.

· Truly globalized: Online training continues to remove the boundaries and barriers to specialized learning by truly globalizing access and standardizing essential skills-based training. In a global economy it is essential that every collaborator in the process is on the same page at the same time. Online learning affords a company the best chance to get up to speed on a new technology all at the same time, without the limitations of geography, travel, expenses, and limited classroom sizes.

· Engaging interactivity: Technology has pushed forward experiential learning and users now benefit from interactive, engaging education rather than stale classroom scenarios.

· Work and learn anywhere: In an age of the flexible work anywhere culture, online training plays an essential leading part. Role and skills based programs can be experienced from the comfort of a living room or internet café, adding value to the users work-life balance and smashing traditional boundaries to learning.

Experience the future of learning yourself at:

https://advertising.microsoft.com/client-center/home

https://advertising.microsoft.com/europe/client-center/home

Thanks,
Steve

Data Driven Marketing: Learn to Save Time and Resources in Upcoming Webinar

Lori Goode - MSFT — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:27:00 GMT

How much time do you spend pulling campaign reports, formatting them, and sharing them with your stakeholders? And how many data sources do you have to include? How quickly can you make time-sensitive creative or media optimization decisions for live campaigns?

If you’re like many agency and advertisers we know, these are among the greatest challenges in our world of data driven marketing.

That’s why we’ve partnered with Praxinet, a leading provider of Microsoft-based software solutions, to bring Business Intelligence to Atlas clients in a simple and scalable way, hosted for you in the cloud.

Atlas will be holding a webinar on Tuesday, May 22 to introduce you to Praxinet’s Atlas+ Enterprise Hosted solution, which provides new media data management, analytics, and dashboarding hosted in Microsoft Azure.

This solution addresses many of the data challenges marketers face today:

Data Management, across channels and disparate data sources
Share timely, relevant data with various stakeholders
Save time and resources in tedious data pulling, analyzation and formatting
Make quick optimization decisions across creative, media, and budget performance

Find out how easy it is to get up and running with a comprehensive data management solution in no time!

For an invite to the Atlas+ Enterprise client webinar, please reach out to your Atlas account representative. For those that can’t attend, we’ll post the webinar to Client Centerfor viewing at your convenience.

Webinar details
Date: Tuesday 22nd May 2012

Time: 2:00 pm (EST); 11:00 am (PST)

Duration:30 minutes

Thanks,

Lori