Yelp Inc. (NYSE:YELP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

We continue to make progress on our attribution capabilities, our off-Yelp offerings resonating in the marketplace, new ad formats, and ultimately when you look at folks in this type of macro economy, they want — we are very down funnel way for them to spend money and receive quality leads. So, we’re happy with where we are on the multi-location side, and of course, we have a deep product pipeline that we are looking forward to going down that path in the future. In terms of self service, that 25% growth year-over-year, really, really healthy, now makes up about half of our acquisition were SMB, and I’ve made a host of product improvements there. When you look at the conversion flows for both purchasing ads, claiming a business page on Yelp, recommending in product suggestions for folks to drive more out of their self-serve spend.

And then, of course, we’ve also use paid marketing in a really effective way, and I’ve had opportunities to drive a lot of growth on the self-serve channel through that as well. So, they continue to remain very course strategic pillars for us moving forward, and look forward to them to continue to drive growth in the future.

David Schwarzbach: Hey, Cory, it’s David. Just to follow up on the macro question. First of all, obviously, super pleased with our performance in the third quarter between 12% growth and the 28% adjusted EBIDTA margin, which put us in a position to raise the guide to 13.32 to 13.37 on the top line, and it’s $10 million above the midpoint of our previous guide and on adjusted EBIDTA 319 to 324 which is $7 million above the midpoint of our previous guide for the year, so, overall, obviously very pleased with that level of performance. As usual, whenever we give guidance, we provided taking into account the risks and uncertainties that we see. On the revenue side, the implied guide for the fourth quarter is 337 to 342, which is in line with the third quarter.

And on expenses implies 84 to 89, which is also in line with what we got on the third quarter. Do you think it’s important to underscore on the expense side that expenses can move around between quarters? And there are certain items that have some volatility to them like vacation and healthcare expense. So, we saw reflected that in the guidance that we’ve provided for the remainder of the year.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Sergio Segura of KeyBanc. Your line is open.

Sergio Segura: Great, thanks. Curious if any common traits you would point to for the advertisers that turned off advertising spend in the quarter, and then relatedly for the advertisers that remain on the platform and continue to increase your spend, just how much runway do you see the continued capturing a greater percentage of their advocates? Thanks.

Jeremy Stoppelman: Yes, I can take that one, Sergio. I believe you’re probably referring to where we saw detailed pals overall largely due to a few multi-low customers that did not spend in the third quarter. I would say the profile of those customers is a lot of locations with not a lot of spend. And we’ve been talking about this, like the quality in terms of our advertisers and quality revenue. And as you can tell from the wallet share gains with overall multi-low growing at 10% year-over-year and the company growing at 12% year-over-year, and particularly in such an efficient manner with 28% EBIDTA margins, that’s the profile of folks who did not advertise it in the third quarter, but we feel really positive about where we are moving forward from a pal’s perspective.

Ultimately, we are concentrating on both expanding the total number of paying advertising locations as well as continuing to drive wallet share, and that’s reflected in the record average revenue per location that we saw in the quarter. And I believe the second part of the question was what do we see in terms of demand going forward? I mean SMB right now demand is very strong. We see it across our retail channel. We see it across our self-serve channel and we see it across our most sophisticated enterprise customers, the product lead strategy has really resonated with these customers. And ultimately, Yelp is in a pretty unique position to deliver highly targeted leads across a broad base of business and so we feel like we’re well positioned to kind of capture growth going forward.