Twitter is making good on its promise to surface new types of ads this year.
On Friday Twitter announced Website Cards, a new ad-unit that highlights a small photo, a line of text, and a URL to an advertiser's webpage. Twitter believes this combo of an image and a call to action will help drive more traffic for advertisers than a simple image and URL pairing, the company wrote on its blog.
[seealso slug="twitter-major-ad-push"]
The new ad units will appear in user Timelines worldwide beginning Friday on both desktop and mobile.
Website Cards are the newest type of Twitter ads, joining app-install advertisements that started appearing for users earlier this month. Twitter also allows advertisers to promote specific tweets or accounts, and a recent report from The Wall Street Journal claims the company is planning more than a dozen additional ad units this year, including the possibility of shoppable tweets.
The new ad unit comes less than a week ahead of Twitter's Q1 earnings announcement. The company is not yet profitable, and investors who helped balloon the company's stock following a late 2013 IPO will be anxiously awaiting news on the Twitter's ad performance. News of better, more efficient ad units should help appease investors.