• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, June 26, 2015

Facebook’s Atlas system for targeting and measuring advertising has been live in its current from since September 2014, and there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence about its capabilities, but this week a big advertising client -- ticket vendor Live Nation -- shared some specific details about its success with Atlas. The announcement was made, inevitably, at Cannes, but Facebook also shared some key insights on its Atlas blog for the rest of us uncool people.

Live Nation used Atlas to target concertgoers and measure engagement for its campaign promoting Madonna’s “Rebel Heart” tour this year, which focused heavily on mobile with components including search, social, and programmatic video display, according to the blog post. Atlas helped Live Nation analyze its consumer data for more than 80 million fans to identify the best-performing publishers and channels for specific artists’ tours.

Among other insights, Live Nation succeeded in raising ticket purchases by 66% through mobile, and correctly attributed this increase -- something it couldn’t have done with old-fashioned cookies alone. The Atlas platform also allowed Live Nation to identify gay dating app Grindr as one of the best performing channels for mobile ticket sales (yes, it’s true what they say about Madonna’s fan base) when another third party platform would have failed to attribute these sales to the app.

Atlas’ attribution capabilities were especially useful because the ticket purchase process tends to take place over multiple devices, including cookie-less mobile. According to Live Nation, 93% of concertgoers use smartphones to search for tickets, but two thirds of the people who open a Ticketmaster or Live Nation email on a smartphone then go to desktop to complete the purchase.

Live Nation isn’t the only one tapping Atlas for cookie-less mobile measurement. To cite one of many examples, earlier this year Mediaocean, which processes advertising data, struck a deal with Facebook to make Atlas available to Mediaocean’s Prisma users.