Another Twitter Ad Test: A Carousel For App Install Ads

Twitter continues to tinker with its advertising display. Earlier today, we reported that the company is experimenting with displaying promoted tweets on people’s profile pages. Now we notice another new wrinkle — a carousel-style app install ad unit that displays in timelines on iOS and Android devices.

The new unit was spotted several weeks ago by The Next Web blog and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed to us today that it’s a limited experiment.

The carousel ad unit gives users the ability to swipe through a selection of promoted tweets — the example we saw on the Android app had five. The unit is set off from the timeline by a break in the background shading and labeled with a “Suggested Apps” heading.

Such ads aren’t new to Twitter, but grouping them together in this way is and seems like a smart way to display more ads less intrusively than if they were served one at a time. Whether enough people will swipe through and click through to make the ads effective is another issue, and likely one of the metrics Twitter is studying in the test.