Facebook is preparing to roll out a new advertising platform aimed at improving the effectiveness of online ads, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The ad management platform is based on a redesigned version of Atlas Advertiser Suite, which was bought from Microsoft by Facebook last year, and is expected to strengthen Facebooks measurement and analytics capabilities, both on its own services and on third-party websites and apps.

The Atlas platform was taken on by Microsoft as part of its $6.3bn (£3.8bn) acquisition of ad agency aQuantive in 2007. Microsoft was unable to make the Atlas suite work for its own purposes, and wrote off $6.2bn of the aQuantive deals value in 2012. Facebook has not disclosed how much it paid for the technology.

Currently, Facebook supports 1.5m advertising customers and has reported strong growth in its ad business across all geographic regions, but still lags behind Google in the US for online display ads. Its mobile advertising revenue accounted for approximately 62 per cent of its overall ad revenue, according to its second quarter results, and has grown 151 per cent year-on-year.