Hasta La Creative!

The holy grail of digital advertising is tying an ad — any ad running on any digital property — to a subsequent product sale. Facebook, Google, AOL, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter and other top digital ad sellers are pursuing it. But Facebook increasingly appears to be closest to success, according to industry executives following the quest.

Most recently, Facebook has run a small test with a brick-and-mortar retailer, tracing ads that ran in one of multiple third-party mobile apps to sales made in one of the retailer’s stores. “We actually connected their point-of-sale [system] and were able to connect it through — just like with one location with one little experiment,” said David Jakubowski, Facebook’s head of ad tech. “They were able to show there was a 13% lift in sales as a result of a whole bunch of this mobile activity.”

Here’s how Facebook is getting there. First, Facebook’s registered user base of more than 1.4 billion people give it a way to track many people’s online behavior whether they’re on or off Facebook. Facebook can see when users are on certain third-party mobile apps and deliver an ad based on things you like on Facebook. Second, there’s the company’s Atlas ad server and the growing ad-tech business Facebook has built around it.

Continue reading at AdAge.com