Twitter (TWTR) is scheduled to report results of its first fiscal quarter after the market close on Thursday, April 29, with a conference call scheduled for 6:00 pm ET. What to watch:

1. USER METRICS: Twitter's monetizable daily active usage, or mDAU, is a closely watched measure of its popularity and growth potential. Last quarter, the company reported global monetizable daily active usage increased 3% sequentially to 192M and 27% year-over-year, while the company's U.S. base rose 4% sequentially to 37M, an increase of 21% year-over-year.

2. AD REVENUE: In Q4, the company reported ad revenue of $1.15B, up 31% year-over-year or 30% on a constant currency basis. The company also reported total ad engagements rose 35% year-over-year and cost per engagement decreased 3% year-over year. At the time, CFO Ned Segal said, “We made significant progress on our brand and direct response products in advance of the recent relaunch of our Mobile Application Promotion offering. Advertisers are benefitting from new ad formats, stronger attribution, and improved targeting, resulting in a 31% year-over-year increase in total ad revenue and greater than 50% year-over-year growth in MAP revenue in Q4.”

3. GUIDANCE: Along with Q4 earnings, Twitter guided to Q1 revenue between $940M and $1.04B and GAAP operating income to be between a loss of $50M and breakeven. Revenue consensus which was $965.14M at the time of earnings has risen to $1.03B.

4. ACQUISITIONS: In January, social podcasting app Breaker announced it acquisition by Twitter. The company said, “Here at Breaker, we're truly passionate about audio communication and we're inspired by the ways Twitter is facilitating public conversations for people around the world.” Additionally in January, Twitter’s chief design officer Dantley Davis announced the company acquired design agency Ueno to help "accelerate the quality and execution of design and product experiences on Twitter." The company also acquired Revue, a newsletter company, in January. In a company blog post, Kayvon Beykpour, product lead, and Mike Park, VP of publisher products, said, "Twitter has acquired Revue, a service that makes it free and easy for anyone to start and publish editorial newsletters.”

5. NEW FEATURES, INITIATIVES, PARTNERSHIPS: In January, Twitter permanently suspended @realDonaldTrump account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”. The move came after the removal of several tweets from the account amid the Capitol attack and the company also announced it had suspended 70,000 accounts following the event. Twitter also introduced a Birdwatch community-based approach to misinformation in January. Twitter's Keith Coleman, VP, Product, said in a blog post: “We’re introducing Birdwatch, a pilot in the US of a new community-driven approach to help address misleading information on Twitter. Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context.” In February, Google Cloud (GOOG, GOOGL) announced a new, multi-year, strategic partnership with Twitter for the company to deepen its initial work with Google and move workloads to Google's Data Cloud. The company also announced in February it suspended 500 accounts in India following government blocking orders. Additionally, Twitter announced a partnership with Jay-Z in February to establish a bitcoin (BTC) development fund. The company also announced during its Analyst Day that it expects to introduce “Super Follows” later this year, where users can pay subscriptions for exclusive content. In March, Twitter introduced a strike system to combat COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and announced its live audio chat room Twitter Spaces is available to Android users.

6. ANALYST VIEW: Truist analyst Youssef Squali said on Monday he believes Twitter's Q1 results will be "strong," in line or slightly ahead of consensus estimates, driven by sustained momentum out of Q4, a richer set of offerings for both users and advertisers, and the delay in IDFA deprecation. Positive conversations with marketers and read through from Snap's (SNAP) results support his thesis, Squali said. The analyst also expects the gradual reopening, easy year-over-year comps and growing traction with DR advertisers to drive revenue and margin improvement in 2021. The strategic decision to rebuild its core ad server and MAP and revamp its tech stack are finally starting to pay off, he said. The analyst has a Buy rating and a price target of $74 on the shares.