While Twitter’s earnings and short-term forecast were a bit short of analyst standards, the company is optimistic about its long-term revenue targets due to continued user growth, opportunities in performance ads and a modest impact from Apple’s privacy changes.

The company grew revenue by 23% year-over-year in Q4 on a constant currency basis, bringing its full-year revenue growth to 37%. The company did, however, end the year with a $493 million USD loss, which was attributed to investments in its business, as well as a one-time charge related to settling a class-action lawsuit last year.

Twitter ended Q4 with 217 million monetizable daily active users (mDAUs), a 3% increase over Q3 and a 13% increase year-over-year. Over the course of 2021, the number of mDAUs on the platform grew by 25 million.

Total ad engagements on Twitter were down 12% year-over-year in Q4, though with cost per engagement rising by 39%, it allowed the company to grow ad revenue by 24% on a constant-currency basis. Ad revenue in the U.S. was up by 21%, with international revenue up 26%.

The ad results also suggest that Twitter has been better able to handle Apple’s recent privacy changes, which require apps to explicitly ask users for permission to share data and have had a major impact on earnings at companies like Meta and Snap. Chief financial officer Ned Segal said the company expects these changes to only have a “modest” impact on earnings going forward.

Despite the sizeable year-over-year growth, the $1.57 billion USD in Q4 revenue was also slightly behind analyst expectations of $1.58 billion USD, which Segal attributed to an advertiser slow-down in the last few weeks of the quarter, adding that spending has already picked up in the first few weeks of Q1.

Revenue forecast for the current quarter is $1.6 billion USD, a modest target by analyst standards but which Segal said is due to the completion of the sale of in-app monetization platform MoPub last month. Segal also said that the company remains on track for its goal of 315 million mDAUs by the end of 2023, as it does for its goal of reaching $7.5 billion in revenue by the same time.

He attributed this confidence to an increased focused on performance ads – the company hopes to make direct response ads 50% of its revenue, compared to 15% at present – as well as a greater ability to pursue opportunities with small and medium businesses now that teams working on MoPub have been reassigned to other areas.