Matthew Goldberg: And Doug, I just want to say marketing is an area that we put a lot of focus and attention on in 2023. And I think it is becoming an increasing source of strength for us. We are at each business, thinking about how to leverage basically the full funnel of marketing approach. And so at Tripadvisor, we’ll be able to adapt that to really back our engagement-led strategy by being more up and down the funnel and being more targeted, leveraging data in our marketing like never before because of our data investments. Obviously, Viator had spent some time in 2022 really getting their cross-channel and fuller funnel approach going, and that is continuing to gain traction and will continue to be optimized. And I think really serve that business as it continues to scale and drive leverage.
And then at TheFork, we are very focused on the marketing we want to do across all of our priority markets and thinking about how and when do we focus on new and really leaning into repeat this year and thinking more about — being prudent about some of the awareness stuff that we used to do in the past everywhere and really focusing on priority markets. So I think what you’re seeing is just a much sharper, more strategic, data-driven approach to the full funnel for each segment, and it’s going to deliver.
Operator: Our next question comes from James Lee with Mizuho.
James Lee: Two over here. First on media and advertising business and you seem to have a pretty good position given the size of your audience here. Can you talk about the investment you’re making in tech stack that will make your product even more engaging? And second, at user experience, I think historically, you guys were looking to reduce the number of steps to get to conversion. And can you talk about the progress on that, please?
Matthew Goldberg: Okay. I’ll take the first, and then I think Michael will take the second. So the media and advertising part of our business is one that we, obviously, have a fantastic high intent audience and it’s highly qualified and it’s contextually relevant and it’s interested in travel. And that audience is interesting both for endemic and non-endemic advertisers. And I think over the years, it’s really been a siloed business. It’s existed on its own, and it’s been in maybe competition with other areas of the product. Our opportunity, of course, is to integrate that opportunity more holistically into the overall experience and come up with solutions that are not only great for advertisers and partners, but can be part of the traveler experience that’s value.
Now the media and advertising business had a good year in 2023. I think overall 20 — 12%, 13% growth, which I think was strong by category standards and even stronger when you consider that much of that growth is coming from formats where we have constraints. It’s mostly display. We’re not as deep as we can and will be in a few categories like video, mobile and social. But it’s also an area that’s going to benefit from our engagement-led approach and our investment in data. So overtime, we have not prioritized big, meaningful significant investments in media and advertising in 2023 and that’s an area that we are focusing on and we think about what are the formats that we want to deliver for the future? How do we think about the way that we want to serve advertisers in new and unique ways?
What’s the difference between an enterprise client and a small, medium-size client? And our goal is to get efficiency in our go-to-market productivity in our sales organizations and an integrated offering that I think will drive meaningful bigger, longer deals that are really focused on the value of this audience. And we saw some good traction in ’23, and I think we’re going to continue to lean into that for ’24.
Michael Noonan: Yes. And then your question on kind of user experience and conversion. It’s a broad question, and it cuts across a lot of our brands, primarily at brand Tripadvisor and Viator. Brand Tripadvisor, we’re really excited about some of the strategy work we’ve been working on this year, particularly as it relates to data personalization, I know you’ve heard us talk about this for some time, but really the ability, I think, to impact both our Hotel Meta and our experiences business at brand Tripadvisor, making sure that we are targeting the right people with the right ad or supply for hotel meta that has very definitive conversion impacts. We’re excited about what we’ve seen there. And we’ve done so much fun of work on the experiences product at brand Tripadvisor, right?
And as you know, we continue to experiment with how do we optimize that user experience in that funnel. And there’s a lot of shared learnings between the Viator teams and the brand Tripadvisor teams. And at Viator, funnel optimization is core of what they do. We had very solid conversion gains this year, very proud of the teams and the work they’ve put in there. That goes to everything from getting the right supply and we do have the largest supply base in Experiences market, using data to get the right supply to offer when the person comes and visits us. So making sure we were presenting the right type of supply or supply diversity at the right price and making it seamless to really to get to book. And that’s really what the teams were all about.
And we’re excited about other things we’re working on this year. Matt mentioned loyalty program at Viator. These are all things that we think that are really going to enhance that — those conversion benefits. So a lot of progress been made across the teams. We think there’s more progress to be had and we’re excited about it.
Operator: Our next question comes from Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer.
Jed Kelly: Can you just talk about the competition you’re seeing in performance marketing channels with some of your competitors, both with Viator and with core Tripadvisor? Seems like some of your competitors recently have indicated they’re still going to spend a lot going into ’24.
Michael Noonan: Yes, Jed, so I’d say, as you know, these markets are extremely competitive, different competitors in different areas. Viator — the Experiences space is a competitive one. You do have a broad competitive dynamics in the paid channels. Obviously, there’s a few operators that are larger and more at scale that tend to show up in those paid channels more regularly, but you still have a pretty broad kind of long tail of others that are bidding in that market, fewer so that are in the brand campaigns. Again, there’s more of the scaled operators in Experiences that are actually marketing and branding very specific to the Experiences. We’d assume that it would continue and that’s where we, again, getting back to being disciplined about our acquisition, make sure we’re using our dollars wisely to users that we think will convert, but not just convert, we’ll come back.
And that’s the key, as you know, we’ve said for some time to how we think about the economic model. At brand Tripadvisor, when you think about primarily Hotel Meta, that is a very competitive marketplace. And you think about where we are competing against in the paid channels are all the players you would imagine in the hotel ecosystem. And that’s why, again, we have to be very disciplined in our approach. We have been very disciplined by, as we said many times, maintaining our marketing ROASs. We are excited about the investments that Matt really alluded to in his prepared remarks around thinking about using data and personalization around, again, acquiring the right type of users that we believe can really convert — not just convert, but actually have a sustainability and LTV to it, right, that we believe can get to the app, we believe can get to some of the goodness that Matt talked about that we see in our app ecosystem and are starting to really think about how we use our data to acquire those right users that have those attributes and promote that behavior.
So we’re excited about where that can lead us this year. And again, we’ll continue to be nimble as we move through the year on both areas.
Operator: Our next question comes from Brian Fitzgerald with Wells Fargo.
Brian Fitzgerald: A quick follow-up on Viator. Nice quarter. [indiscernible] grow to 25%. Can you talk a little bit about — you talked about the competition and it being a competitive space. Is that sequential decel there? Is it a factor of that consumer demand? Or is it competition you talk to? Or is it really — it sounded like from the main call, it’s just a normalization of pent-up demand in prior periods. So if you can kind of parse out, hey, it’s consumer demand macro. Hey it’s competition. Hey, it’s normalization. Hey, it’s 1/3 of each of those. And then experiences in dining revenue on brand Trip was up 12% year-over-year. So we’re seeing nice growth there. How much runway is there? And how would you assess your ability to cross-sell inventory across the travel and Dining and Experiences? Is there more runway to drive Experiences and Dining out of brand Trip?
Michael Noonan: Yes. Great. I’ll take the first one and Matt take the second. Yes. So when you think about — and I think the question is really around Q4 decel. I think it’s really two big areas, right? One, it’s really, as we said, a slowdown in new bookings. And that was really driven by two things: One, macro. There was a lot of volatility in the quarter and it just — it was a dampening of demand as we came out of some of that volatility. Two, we are going to be — and it said, thoughtful — very thoughtful about acquiring the right type of user, and we’re very careful about our marketing spend in the quarter. And then secondly, I would say, we are lapping when you think about the funnel, we’re lapping some prices and margin impacts that have helped revenue, right, through the year in 2023.
And these are things that, as we look forward, you wouldn’t expect would be as big a contributor to revenue. So when you think about that, if we had a kind of a new user demand was a little bit lower because of some of the macro and the things we said, yes, I think that you’d have a knock-on effect as you move into the new year, but we feel pretty good about where we are in our — in the position that we have, kind of where we’re starting the year. But yes, that would be a factual statement. So second question…
