Perion Network Ltd. (NASDAQ:PERI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

There was some area that I’ll, let’s say less and show lower numbers versus our plan, but some others that offset the weaker area. But generally speaking if I’m talking about searches results and the display advertising, because they all as you can see the number this is very much aligned with the plan. The drivers for the quality of that offset more than everything. The negative trend is retail and CTV. This is the main two areas that helped us to offset the negative trend. And the last is about the CTV. You’re right that we believe that part of the reason we’re able to show better results with the CTV is related to the weakness that we have on the standard CTV. The ROI, the OS [ph] that we are showing is better than the standard and we believe that this is part of the reason we are able to be very attractive and to be able to keep the CPM which are relatively high as you know and this is part of the reason why the growth, the year-over-year trend is very much positive.

Operator: Thank you. Next question today is coming from Jeff Martin from Roth. Your line is now live.

Jeff Martin: Great. Thank you. Good evening and also expressing my support and sympathies. I wanted to get a sense Maoz and Tal, next year how should we start thinking about growth in search and display? Do you believe that retail media can continue to support growth in the double digits on revenue overall? And any insight into whether you think there’ll be some M&A activity next year? Thanks.

Maoz Sigron: Yes, so let’s start by saying our organic business is growing right and we expect it to continue to grow next year, both in search, on retail, on CTV, on all on all five [ph] currently we have great signals from all parts of the business. Having said that, we are also evaluating a few candidates for M&A. We feel strongly that we need to have another arm, more technology, maybe a new vertical, so we are working on that very actively.

Jeff Martin: Great. And then just to follow up. There wasn’t much discussion about SORT and SORT related metrics and growth, maybe give an update there.

Maoz Sigron: Absolutely, absolutely. So I’m actually glad that you added that. So few things about SORT. First of all SORT is doing great. It stays very strong and it keeps driving more and more campaigns to us. As we said in the past SORT is not a standalone product. SORT drives, it’s AI driven targeting capabilities that do not require any cookies or any privacy formats of any sort. We’re extremely happy about SORT. Even now, especially when Google just announced that they’re going to restrict the ability of advertisers to look at IPs through Chrome and SORT doesn’t use that. So it’s a home run for us. If cookies are going to go away, if IPs are going to shrink, SORT doesn’t use both of them, so we’re extremely happy about that.

We feel very strongly about us having SORT as a secret sauce to continue our growth. And yes, we don’t feel that adding KPI to SORT every single time actually helps or predicts anything about our growth. But it is our secret sauce and we keep investing in that when we’re adding more and more features to it and it’s very much alive.

Operator: Thank you. Next question today is coming from Max Michaelis from Lake Street Capital. Your line is now live.

Max Michaelis: Hey, guys, just one from me. Looking at the quarter, it seems like advertising came in a little bit softer than expected, still 14% growth which is solid, but surge helped perform. Is that the way we should be thinking about Q4 in terms of modeling? Thank you.