Coming to Your Twitter Feed: Ads That Preview Company Websites

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Twitter unveiled a new ad unit Friday: Website Cards. The ads will be rolled out Friday on both mobile and desktop.

Image: Will Fenstermaker/Mashable

By Kurt Wagner2014-04-25 18:03:15 UTC

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.

See also: Brace Yourselves: 15 New Types of Twitter Ads May Be Coming

The new ad units will appear in user Timelines worldwide beginning Friday on both desktop and mobile.

Twitter rolled out Website Cards Friday, a new type of ad unit.

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.

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Topics: Advertising, Social Media, Twitter, twitter cards, website cards