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

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Twitter CEO Dick Costolo speaks at CES in Las Vegas in January.

Image: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

By Kurt Wagner2014-04-05 01:30:13 UTC

Twitter is stepping up its advertising game in a big way, according to reports.

New app install ads, among other ad formats, are coming to the service in the next few months, according to multiple reports that surfaced this week. In total, Twitter is planning to add 15 new types of ads, and CEO Dick Costolo showed them off to a group of ad execs at company headquarters last week, according to The Wall Street Journal

See also: The Year in Twitter: Top Milestones of 2013

The most well-known of these new formats will be app install ads, which enable advertisers to include a "download now"-style button within the ad that takes consumers to the app store. A Twitter blog post from February mentions the ads and their functionality within Twitter cards. (Cards help advertisers package their content within a tweet.)

Reports from this week suggest the ads are nearing launch. It's an ad type particularly popular with mobile game developers, and users first started to see these app install ads over the past few days.

Other reported ad formats build off the same idea by using an embeddable button to immediately connect consumers with companies. Twitter has been experimenting with a "click-to-call" button, and is also working with payments company Stripe to create shoppable Twitter ads, according to The Journal.

It's not surprising that Twitter would turn to this form of advertising given the success Facebook has had using them. The social network first offered app install ads in 2012, and users downloaded more than 245 million apps through the ads last year alone, according to BuzzFeed .

Twitter investors will be watching this new ad push closely. The company is not yet profitable, and experienced a 24% stock plummet following slow growth numbers in the company's Q4 earnings call.

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Topics: Advertising, app install ads, apps, Apps and Software, Facebook, Marketing, Social Media, Twitter, twitter cards