Facebook has today expanded its partnership with web analytics firm Omniture in a bid help advertisers further utilise the social network as an advertising platform.

The announcement comes as rival social network Twitter prepares to launch its first and hotly anticipated advertising platform and follows the news of Facebook’s new partnership with eBay.

Although Facebook has been around for a little over six years, advertisers have remained reluctant to spend ad dollars on the social network because of lack of ROI.

But, using Omniture’s products, advertisers will now be able to measure how effective their ads are on Facebook as well as compare their success with other ad platforms.

Advertisers will also be able to use Omniture’s search engine marketing management tool to buy Facebook ads.

Omniture will be able to identify highly valued Facebook audience participants depending upon their affinity to brands – as per their their Facebook profile, such as being a member of brand pages, groups and other information. This would enable the brands to serve their ads to a very targeted audience, which would ultimately result in a higher conversion of ads.

The partnership with Omniture, which Adobe Systems bought last year, aims to boost ad spending on Facebook.

Worldwide ad spending on Facebook is expected to hit £401million this year – a 39% increase from 2009.