Trustpilot Group plc (TRST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi. Welcome to everyone on the webcast and teleconference. And thank you for joining Trustpilot's H1 2021 Results Call. I'm Peter Muhlmann, I'm the Founder and CEO. And joining me on the call is Hanno Damm, our CFO. And I'm really delighted to be reporting our first results as a publicly listed company. Our successful IPO in March marked a significant milestone for Trustpilot, really raising our profile as a leading global review platform that brings businesses and consumers together to foster collaboration and trust. Now a number of you have already met us and heard our story during the IPO road show back in March. But I know there are quite a few people on the call who are also new to Trustpilot. So for the purposes of today's presentation, I will start by reminding everyone of our purpose and strategy. I'll then present our strategic and financial highlights. And finally, I will cover the most important building blocks in understanding why this is such an exciting opportunity. This will provide some useful context for the results we have published this morning. After that, Hanno will take you through the detailed financial results, and we open the call for questions. And so I started Trustpilot to create trust in the Internet economy. First, I wanted to ensure that people like my mom would always buy from a company that would give her a great experience once you bought something online. And if you should get a bad experience, I really wanted her boys to matter. Second, I wanted to create a platform that could help businesses succeed and become better by transparently demonstrating to their customers, how they were really doing and win because of that. So I created Trustpilot as a trusted and independent third-party website where a business could invite its customers to tell them what they thought of it, and we can show those opinions to potential customers in a trusted way. Looking at the market today, I find it's evident that we are more needed than ever. As the entire world and our economy move online, so does information sharing. We are at the center of a powerful structural shift in the way consumers and businesses interact. An estimated 89% of consumer check reviews before making a purchase decision. And this trust layer is critical to business success. But as people, we are overwhelmed with information that we find hard to trust. And as businesses, the customer experience matters more than ever, but we struggled with credible ways to differentiate ourselves and demonstrate this. So with trust as our purpose and a product that is relevant for billions of people and millions of companies, we must succeed with 2 things. First, it is essential that consumers can use and rely on Trustpilot reviews for reassurance that they are dealing with businesses that are trustworthy. So we must always lead on trust. Second, the more businesses and people are using trust pilot, the more valuable it becomes for everybody and the faster it will grow. So we must always lead on adoption and building the network effect between the consumer and business side of Trustpilot. And if we succeed in these 2 things, we believe we can deliver long-term sustainable value for all of our stakeholders. Now there are several performance indicators we track to measure our success towards our strategy and which also act as a lead indicator for future growth. During the first half, we saw the cumulative number of reviews on the Trustpilot platform, rise by 44% to 144 million. The number of reviewed business websites or domain rose by 41% to 626,000. This is an average of 16,000 new business websites added to the Trustpilot platform every single month. Now you've seen companies proudly displayed our Trustpilot star rating or you've been invited to share your customer experience with a company on Trustpilot. More than 73,000 companies do so, and we're approaching 100 billion annual TrustBox impressions. In addition to this comes all the branding from the offline world, television ads, billboards, podcast marketing, Trustpilot is truly everywhere. I think about this. We have 73,000 companies that are actively promoting our brand. In the first half of the year, we saw an average of more than 44 million review invitations sent by businesses every month, an increase of more than 73% compared to a year ago. And so in summary, more and more businesses are using Trust Pilot, which drives consumer adoption further and provides a fantastic opportunity for further revenue growth as we expand the accounts. Next, I'd like to take you through the financial highlights for the first half of the year. So on the back of 40% growth in our strategic KPIs that I just highlighted, we saw almost 30% bookings growth and over 20% constant currency revenue growth in line with the trading update we issued in mid-July. You've heard us say repeatedly that our adoption metrics are a leading indicator of financial performance and bookings are a leading indicator of revenue. So we are very pleased with the overall performance and the reacceleration in bookings growth post COVID. Hanno will walk you through the details on the financials in his remarks. Okay. So those were the headline results. As I send the info, we have a lot of shareholders who are new to our story. So having summarized our key strategic KPIs. I just want to take a moment and summarize the most important building block for really understanding Trustpilot and why I'm so enormously excited about the potential we have ahead of us. The first thing I want to start with is just the sheer size of the opportunity ahead of us. Virtually every company in the Internet economy has a need for trust. Now imagine that you're buying something, it can be a product, can be a service, try to imagine something right now. So it may be that you're trying it on an app that can give you a doctor on your iPhone. It may be that you're trying one of the new banks that only exists virtually. It may be either you're selling your home in your way. Now if I could tell you if the company that is selling this to you is recommended by their customers or potentially that is a scam. When would you not want to know. So Trustpilot is really defining the trust category, acting as the trust layer for the open commerce ecosystem, every business will need a way to signal that they are trusted and that they have a great customer experience. This necessitates a trust layer, just like a marketing suite or a payment suite. And this results in a huge opportunity for Trustpilot. At a global level, there are an estimated 13 million addressable businesses globally, and this translates to a potential opportunity of around $50 billion. Just to give you a sense of the breadth of the opportunity here we show the logos for customers across a variety of verticals we service, truly a point of differentiation for Trustpilot. For people who might be new to Trustpilot, there is often a misconception that our opportunity is all about e-commerce. This is no longer simply about online retail. That's just a small fraction of our market potential. And also, it's noteworthy that even the largest companies have a need for trust and the Trustpilot is relevant to both online and offline businesses. In the lower half of this slide, we've highlighted some of the new customer additions we saw in the first half of the year. And so we have billions of people and millions of companies that can take advantage of trust pilot. So how do we reach them? Our remaining strategic tool is a network effect. The more the people engage with Trustpilot for reading and posting trusted reviews, the greater the reason for businesses to use Trustpilot. And as more businesses engage with our customers on the trust by the platform, by inviting them for review, by responding to reviews, and by showcasing the reviews all over the world, the more consumers will become a worth for Trustpilot. And so this is my reality or network effect between the consumer and the business sides of our platform, where one drives and reinforces the other, really aligns with the heart of trust pilots organic growth opportunity, and it's an area where we're investing aggressively in both sides of the equation. And so by focusing on investing into the network effect, we are constantly improving our conversion funnel. This diagram shows you that funnel, which starts with over 626,000 websites that are reviewed on Trustpilot and notably still only scratching the surface of the total opportunity of 13 million websites that I just referenced. 480,000 of those are by businesses who have claimed their domain on Trustpilot. And more than 73,000 businesses actively engaged with the trust pilot platform by inviting their customers to leave reviews or by featuring Trustpilot on their own website. Out of these 73,000 businesses, 21,000 are paying customers taking advantage of our extensive product offering. And we are continuously working on the network effect. And then this funnel becomes wider, providing more opportunity for us to move businesses through it to become paying customers. So all the active and paying customers are using our freemium software solution, which provides the tools for businesses to get trust reviews, manage those reviews and drive powerful insights from them. Business can begin their journey toward building a trusted brand for free on Trustpilot. And over time, we see that many of these businesses become paying customers taking advantage of the additional features, the functionality and insights that we offer through a menu of subscription add-on modules in our land and expand pricing strategy. This may include the ability to fully integrate their trust score into their online and off-line marketing assets to collect location or product reviews or to analyze the sentiment of the reviews in real time. And customers receive measurable ROI. That's reflected in our very strong net dollar retention rate of 97%. And so our strategy is to convert 3 active users of the Trustpilot platform into paying business customers, retain them as customers over time while expanding our footprint within these accounts to our cross-selling of additional products. Really the defining feature of our service is the ability to showcase the TrustScore. We call this a TrustBox and it leads to a massive amplifier of our brand. Businesses generate more than 7 billion monthly TrustBox impressions, and each month, we're sending tens of millions of e-mails inviting customers to leave reviews on behalf of our customers. Trustpilot is really becoming integrated into the online and off-line marketing assets of our customers. And here you can see websites, mobile apps, posters, leaflets and billboards. And you'll encounter Trustpilot on the Subway in New York or on the side of the London Bus or taxicab. That's because our business customers use our brand to strengthen their proposition across all of their channels. And I really wanted to just pause and consider the power of this and the value of this kind of visibility and the brand awareness that our business customers create on Trustpilot. Our marketing and our branding is amplified by 73,000 companies. So before Hanno goes into the financials, I'd like to just briefly highlight a few areas of investment that we're focused on near term and some achievements in the period. Consumer trust is really a prime focus. It's the foundation we're built on, and it's an area where we're investing continuously. In the last 6 months, I want to highlight, in particular, our improvement in our ability to handle fake reviews. In H1, we deployed new technology to further automate our ability to detect the faces and really to do so at scale. In February, we published our first Trustpilot transparency report. Will be provided insights into the actions we're taking to protect and promote trust online. And it was re-evident from the media reception that we are in the middle of an extremely important and relevant topic that the world cares deeply about. So on the consumer side, we're creating richer company profile pages with more relevant and trusted information that rank better in search engines. We were deepening the community effect of Trustpilot to get people to come back more often and contribute with more content. We're creating better options for people to find alternative companies to buy from. In our business proposition, we're looking at ways that can help businesses collect and manage their reviews and generate valuable insights. An area I really want to call out is our efforts to automate the review collection process. The more automated the process is, the more reduced businesses receive and the harder it is to tamper with them. And so we're now seeing the majority of review invitations happening automatically. We continue to experiment with pricing to make adoption frictionless, while optimizing for account expansion. And I want you to notice that at the moment, our primary focus has been on activating more businesses and on expanding existing accounts. We're also deepening the functionality of our modules to make it more rewarding for businesses to start inviting their customers and to display their star rating. The third area I want to cover is our markets and growth strategy. As you've seen in recent announcements, we have made integrations with various e-commerce platforms. And we're doing that in order to make it easier for businesses to start inviting their customers by strengthening our integrations and our partnership ties with all those leading platforms. We also recently opened subsidiaries in Italy and the Netherlands to further capture the market opportunity in Europe. And last but not least, we're investing in our people across our organization. Our ambition is to attract the best talent in every area of our business. And for Trustpilot to be a place where this talent can thrive. We recently communicated our plan to permanently move to a hybrid model of work that will embrace the flexibility we're all now looking for as well as the wonderful magic that happens when we have all our trustees collaborating in shared office spaces together. During the period, we also strengthened our team, investing in building organizational capability and capacity in areas such as engineering, product development, our user experience, data science and security. And finally, you've seen that we added Tim Hilpert as our Chief Operating Officer. And just announced Alicia Skubick joining us as our Chief Marketing Officer later this year. Now Hanno is going to take you through the financial performance for the first half of the year. So Jane, over to you.

Thanks, Peter, and hi, everyone. I'm Hanno Damm, CFO. Thank you once again for joining us on the call today. Now let's get into the detail of the H1 results. I'll talk about the bookings and revenue trends and how it translated into our first half financial results and our revised outlook for the balance of the year. I'll then hand back to Peter for some closing remarks. And thereafter, we will open the call for questions. I'm pleased to report it was a strong start to the year. As Peter mentioned, on the back of 40% plus strategic KPI growth, we saw the reacceleration of bookings continue from the second half of last year into the first half of 2021, following the COVID disruption a year ago with overall bookings growing 28% on a constant currency basis. Notably, it was a strong performance across all regions with particular strength in the rest of the world region, which consists mainly of Continental Europe. Our LTM net dollar retention rate improved to 97%, up from 91% a year ago and surpassing pre-COVID levels. As a result of strong bookings performance, we ended the period with $134 million in ARR and 22% constant currency revenue growth. When referring to growth rates, we will always focus on constant currency to present a true like-for-like view. Drilling into the bookings and revenue performance in some more detail, I want to point out a few things specifically. The strong bookings performance across all regions with bookings in the U.K. up 27%, the rest of the world, up 36%; and in North America, up 18%. We're particularly pleased with the reacceleration of North America bookings growth, up from 2% last year, a leading indicator of future revenue. ARR was $134 million at period end. Since some of you may need it for your models, let me provide you with the geographical split. U.K., $55 million; rest of the world, $48 million and U.S. $31 million. The H1 revenue growth of 22% was obviously largely a function of last year's bookings growth, and so the geographical split there reflects last year's bookings performance. As we look at bookings growth year-over-year, please keep in mind that we are comparing against the COVID impacted H1 2020, so the balance of the year will have a somewhat tougher comp, as we mentioned in our outlook statement. In the release today, we have spoken about the reacceleration we have seen since the disruption due to the COVID pandemic a year ago. We won't always be providing constant currency month-by-month ARR in this way, but we showed this chart at the time of the IPO, and we've updated for the first half of 2021. You can see 3 clear periods: pre-COVID, where monthly ARR grew consistently at a CAGR of 32% between the beginning of 2017 and 2020. And Secondly, the COVID disruption in the spring of 2020, where uncertainty, lockdowns and a shift to remote working impacted both our customers and our business and monthly ARR growth slowed to 8% on an annualized basis. And lastly, reacceleration. Following that plateau, we have seen bookings in the ARR returned to normal patterns of growth with monthly CAGR of 28% between May 2020 and June this year. In fact, the U.K. and Rest of the World have now returned to the precrisis growth and North America continues its recovery. The majority of bookings and revenue in any given period results from customers we sold to in previous years. That's why our revenue is still stable with high forward visibility. We've been able to meaningfully increase net dollar retention rates in recent years by reducing gross churn and increasing our account expansion. Please note that the retention rate we disclosed are on a trailing 12-month basis or LTM. As you can see, the net expansion was particularly strong in the last 12 months, which is very encouraging and reflects the success of our land-and-expand pricing strategy and investments we are making into our retention teams. Additionally, we saw a pickup in the gross dollar retention rate and as a result, further improving the unit economics. The LTV to CAC in the 12 months ended June 30 was 3.8x for the group. This compares with 3.4x for FY '20. And as we discussed during the IPO, in our more established markets like the U.K., the metrics are even more attractive. Now let's look at how bookings performance translated into the income statement. Total group revenue increased to $62 million, up 31% year-on-year and 22% at constant currency. The gross margin remained broadly unchanged at 81% versus 82% a year ago, with a small decline reflecting investments into retention and account expansion teams, which paid off in a meaningfully increased retention rate as we just discussed. On a statutory basis, the net operating loss was $15.4 million compared to $4.7 million a year ago, impacted by almost $10 million of IPO-related transaction costs. It's fair to say that the adjusted EBITDA came in a little stronger than expected in H1 at $3.8 million, nearly doubling year-over-year. The principal factors behind this were the strong revenue growth we achieved in the period, combined with the phasing of costs through the year and a more gradual pickup in the pace of recruitment than we budgeted in particular in sales and marketing. We thought it would be helpful to split out the adjustments you would need to make to look at the underlying cost base, excluding exceptional items, depreciation and amortization, and share-based compensation. Taking these adjustments into account, the sales and marketing item stands out given that the expense decreased slightly year-over-year. We'll discuss this in more detail in a moment. We grew tech and content as we invested in products, continue to build out our engineering capabilities and, of course, the integrity of the content on the platform. As a percent of revenue, it remained at 22%. And you can see a step change increase in G&A as we took on a number of costs associated with being a public company as well as some of the COVID-related savings are beginning to phase out as alluded to in the guidance. You can find the details of the reconciliation in the release. I wanted to spend some time on the sales and marketing expense, though. We saw a step change in the efficiency of customer acquisition in H1. This follows the actions we took a year ago when we were looking to contain costs and optimize our sales organization as a response to the softness we saw during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is most apparent in the headcount, where average sales and marketing headcount in H1 2021 was 254 FTEs compared with 328 a year ago. And we're emphasizing as we did at the time of the IPO that whilst we do not anticipate that sales and marketing will return to levels seen in previous years as a share of revenue, we do expect to incur nominally higher spend in customer acquisition this year and going forward as we continue to invest into growth. The phasing this year will be more back half loaded. Let's take a brief look at the key items on the balance sheet. We closed the period with $91.4 million in cash and cash equivalents, up from $50.4 million at year-end. This is after paying down and refinancing our credit facility, of which we had drawn $12.9 million to bolster liquidity during the onset of COVID last year. Of course, the balance sheet was also considerably strengthened following the IPO and associated capital raise back in March. If you met us at the time of the IPO, you will remember this slide. As we think about growth, we see multiple avenues of expansion over the medium to long term. We plan to further invest into consumer engagement and product-led growth. We expect to increase our retention rates, layer in new services and monetize the opportunity through upsell and cross-sell. We believe we can enter into new geographies and verticals where we are currently underrepresented. And lastly, we could pursue strategic M&A to accelerate any of these avenues. We've raised our revenue guidance for FY '21 today. We previously provided guidance for high teens constant currency revenue growth in the current year, in line with last year's bookings growth. On the back of stronger H1 FY '21 performance, we now expect to achieve a rate of constant currency revenue growth for the full year, consistent with H1 FY '21. As noted, part of the constant currency bookings growth rate in H1 reflected an element of recovery and reacceleration from the disruption caused by COVID in a year ago. Hence, bookings in H2 will face a tougher comparison and the rate of growth in the period is likely to be a little lower than in H1. With that, I will hand it back to Peter for some closing remarks before we open the call for questions.

Thank you, Hanno. Before we go to the Q&A, let me just quickly summarize the key points. We've had a really good start to the year. We've seen strong performance across all regions. We're making very good progress against our strategic objectives to be the most used, most trusted global review platform. Our organic growth continues to benefit from a strong viral network effect with the consumer and business side of our platform are continuously reinforcing each other. And so we've raised revenue guidance for this year based on the strong H1 outcome. And we truly are becoming the trust layer for the open commerce ecosystem and are potentially creating one of the brands that defines the times we live in. And so with that, we'd like to open the call for any questions you may have. So operator, please begin the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Sir, your first question comes from the line of Adam Wood from Morgan Stanley.

First of all, congratulations on an excellent first half of the year. I've got two questions, please. The first one is on that really nice improvement in the net retention rate. It looks as if you're now more or less back on the trajectory you're on pre the pandemic and kind of recaptured what you lost. Could you just talk a little bit around how much you feel that is just the recovery strength in e-commerce that would naturally have come back anyway? And how much is those efforts that you talked about around retention teams, cross-selling and upselling, maybe a little bit around the products that are getting that attention on the upsell. And if it is you feeling you're impacting it, is there any reason why we wouldn't continue on the trajectory you're on, pre the pandemic? And then secondly, just on the U.S. markets. You talked about that efficiency in sales and marketing and the reductions that you made last year. I guess the U.S. markets bore the brunt of that and maybe saw the biggest impact, and we're seeing that in slower revenue in the group now. Could you just talk a little bit about the environment there, the efforts you're making to invest, what money you're putting in specifically in that market? So seeing a nice improvement in bookings there. But again, could you just talk a little bit about what you're doing to impact that.

Yes. Thanks, Adam. Let me address them in the order you asked them. So on the retention rate, I think you're right. We're back on this trajectory that we had talked about during the IPO where we have seen a really sequential improvement in retention rates, both by reducing gross churn and by improving net retention. Obviously, COVID impacted that as it impacted some of our customers in certain verticals more dramatically. But I think you're seeing the benefit of our change pricing and packaging really play out with this modular approach and the land and expand strategy and the ability to really upsell accounts and selling more modules to them over time. And obviously, we'll continue to do that and try to drive that rate higher. But I think it's also really important to note that our pricing strategy overall is really focused on adoption and driving as many businesses to be actively using Trustpilot and displaying TrustBoxes everywhere and inviting as many consumers as possible because we long term believe that's how we're going to capture markets and get to shares. And so retention rates continue to be split geographically by sort of virality in market penetration. On the U.S. market, you're spot on, and we've really seen that impact of the cuts we made there and then the recovery there more dramatically than in any of the other markets. And we're now obviously continuing to reinvest into the market as we're reaccelerating. But as you heard us say in the prepared remarks, we are seeing a little bit slower pace of investment into sales and marketing than we may have anticipated, partially due to the slower ability to hire. And so we're picking up these efforts quite dramatically and have started to pick them up in -- over the summer. But in an ideal world, we would have even done so a little earlier than what we've seen here.

The next question comes from the line of Stacy Pollard from JPMorgan.

Just a little bit more dig on the U.S. as well. Do you think the go-to-market is any different there at all? Or do you think the shift towards more automation and sales? Is that particularly successful in the U.S.? And then what about partnerships? What are your most successful and where you're looking to expand? And then second question on Rest of World. Maybe could you give us a bit more color on where the growth is coming from by country? Is that more in your stronger markets like Denmark or Netherlands? Are you really starting to penetrate some of the less-penetrated markets for you like maybe Germany or France.

Yes. So the go-to-market, I think it's more necessarily different than what we've done in the other markets. It's just a much, much larger market. And so while we've been able to get to critical mass in the U.K. or in Denmark and maybe some of the other European markets now quicker in the U.S., that's proven to be more difficult and a longer road. But we are seeing really good success both in consumer adoption and business adoption, and we're now opening up additional channels that we haven't used previously, like partnerships, for example, although that's sort of still early days, some of these e-commerce integrations were just launched in Q3. So there's -- it's not -- hasn't been in the past been a driver of the bookings growth there. We believe, over time, they will become more importantly. On the Rest of World, we're not providing sort of a breakdown by country, but it's been really great across many of the European countries we're selling into. So I mean, in addition to the Nordics, we're selling it to France, Italy, the Netherlands, we've seen good success in Germany. Peter mentioned that we opened up subsidiaries now in Italy and the Netherlands. So we'll be able to recruit talent there locally rather than having to hire them into Denmark and then selling out Denmark into these markets. And so it will remain an area of growth for us.

Yes. This is Peter speaking. I'll just add on the U.S. expansion that we also really think that the product plays a key component there, particularly the consumer product. So that's also why you see us continuously investing into making the consumer proposition more viral to give a deeper sense of community there so that we are really getting the Trustpilot users to do a lot of that expansion for us. And also as the self-service nature of the button, making it as easy as a click of a button for any business to get started. That's obviously partially where the partnership comes in, but also just into the automation of the entire product line. And so you will see us really making those tech investments to accelerate growth in the U.S. market.

The next question comes from the line of Poul Jessen from Danske Bank.

I have a few questions as well. Also on the reviews, if you look on it on a sequential basis, you are accelerating the growth in reviews. So I was just wondering at the IPO, you gave a split on North America versus other. Is it broadly based acceleration? Or is North America falling behind? Can you give a little more insight there?

Yes. I mean you -- we didn't provide a geographical split, but I think the -- there wasn't anything specific about any of the regions that would have prompted us to do so, so that the growth was kind of in line.

And then on -- if I look at the number of subscribers as a percentage of both active accounts and domains review, then the percentage continues dropping over the -- since 2017, 2018. Would you see that continuing going forward? Or will there be a point where you would see that the network effect starts working and thereby, you should start seeing a growth in the number of subscribers in line with what you see in domains reviewed or active domains?

I think the fact that we have so much consumer adoption, increase in accelerating consumer adoption, which will always lead to more reviews and more reviewed domains and then businesses claiming those domains. I think this will always be running ahead of the actual paying subscriber growth...

So you wouldn't see that at some point that the brand Trustpilot start getting a position in the market, meaning that we should see a pickup in the subscription because that they would find it attracted to subscribe to get insight into the data behind that we should see an acceleration in the number of subscriptions.

Yes. No, I think this -- of course, we would expect to see an acceleration in the growth of the number of subscriptions. Also keep in mind, this is net of churn. And so our efforts to reduce gross churn over time will also help there. But my point was that we have an ever-increasing pool of consumers using Trustpilot, and they're growing off a much larger base and accelerating off a much larger base. And so even if we just keep a constant rate of subscriber conversion, that will lead to an acceleration of subscriber growth.

And my final question is come up...

Yes, I'll just add that if you look at this from a strategic perspective. So how do we really win this? Like if we believe that there's a fundamental is say, a $50 billion or $100 billion opportunity ahead of us. And we want to position ourselves as the business that captures that opportunity. So strategically, at the moment, the most important thing is that we are the trust leader and that every business and every consumer is using Trustpilot. The biggest risk we have strategically is that there is another company that all the companies and all the people are using or that there is another model that's somewhat way more trusted than we are. And so that's why we're extremely keen partially on getting consumers to be more active, and that's why you see so many businesses being reviewed. And also while we're really aggressively pushing our free product, and we're very confident down the line that we can convert more of them into paying customers. But I think, as Hanno said, the percentage growth of the 3 businesses using us will probably be bigger than the -- that's always say, ahead of the conversion into paying customers. But strategically, it's just so important for us that it is Trustpilot that they start using, which is why we've really been focused on this and really been driving this upwards.

Okay. And my final one here is on the net retention rate. If you were in the previous years, apart from 2019, you were below 90% in last year, it was both in first half and second half, 91%, and now you're at 97%. If we take a shorter period, I would assume that math would do that you are approaching 100%, would you see yourself moving above 100% on a net retention rate?

Yes. I mean I think long term, we would definitely continue to strive to drive retention rate up. And that's why we've showed you the trajectory of sort of ever-improving net retention rates. So it's definitely long term a possibility.

Next question comes from the line of Edward James from Berenberg.

Three questions from me. Firstly, just keen to understand the sort of margin profile and how we should think about that given, how the cost base, particularly the marketing investment is going to phase this year and with such high net [ revenue ] retention rates, it seems like take a large effort for the business not to maintain the sort of margin profile it did in the first half, which is add-ons to the guidance given that like broadly breakeven EBITDA for 2021.

Okay. Do you want to -- okay, we can go through these questions one after the other. Look, I think the -- what you've seen really is the pace of investment into sales and marketing lagging what we were expecting and revenue being somewhat higher in the first half of the year than we expected, but we'll -- and I think we said this in the prepared remarks, and I'm happy to reiterate this. We're expecting to step that up in terms of the spend on sales and marketing in particular. We've also aggressively hired into the product and technology area. And so you will see that step up in the second half of the year. And so we'll definitely have lower margin in the second half of the year, and therefore, the balance of the full year results than we've seen in the first half. That was sort of an aberration to some degree.

Okay. And in terms of the growth in active users domains reviewed and those KPIs, are you able to give us any color or commentary on how that may differ between the regions, particularly focusing on the U.S. versus, say, the rest of the group?

As I was saying before, we haven't broken it out, but there wasn't really any notable difference between any other regions that we felt like it was noteworthy.

Okay. And then finally, in terms of monthly bookings growth and bookings trends, it's quite a substantial sort of acceleration, clearly. Has that sort of accelerated towards the period end? Or is that being sort of a gradual increase throughout the period. So just trying to get a sense for how the absolute numbers are trending into the second half of the year.

Yes. We don't -- I think the monthly numbers are not so helpful because there's always sort of in-quarter seasonality. And so I would just refer you back to the remarks you had about the overall H1 versus H2 bookings performance. And obviously, we feel pretty good about the full year outlook for bookings. But we do expect the H2 growth rate to be a little lower than H1 given the tougher comp.

[Operator Instructions] Mr. Jessen has a follow-up question.

Two short questions. One question is on what you write about the integration with Shopify. Could you put a little more words? And if you see any traction of that kind of opportunity for potential or existing customers? And then secondly, I was just curious following your local prices since the IPO process. I can see you raised prices in Germany as the only market in Q2. Is this just to bring German prices in line with rest of Europe? Or is it indicating that you are having more traction in that market?

So if I start with the Shopify platform. So generally, we are really investing into building integrations into all the major platforms that facilitates review collection, the invitation of reviews from businesses to their customers. And Shopify is just one of them, and we're pursuing a great number of partnerships. We do have expectations from this in the sense that, that will reduce the friction for new businesses to start using Trustpilot. And so we see it as an accelerant for the go-to-market. It's not that long ago that the Shopify deal was even signed. So now we need to start and push the marketing in that platform. But overall, looking at all the platforms, I'm very bullish on what this can do for Trustpilot.

Yes. And on the pricing, I mean, I think we want to get into sort of commenting on the variances of regional pricing. But I can tell you that we're constantly experimenting with pricing to really drive adoption first and foremost. And we're obviously focused on LTV to CAC and unit economics. And the teams are sort of constantly looking at where is the right level and how do we drive the business forward.

And Stacy Pollard from JPMorgan has a follow-up question as well.

Just a quick one. Any update on the CMA review? I noticed you haven't been particularly targeted. I presume that's because you've essentially preempted as described in your trust and transparency report. Do you still have pretty good confidence on that side?

Yes. I don't think there was anything else to report other than what we've put in the release, obviously. In these matters is always like hard to comment around beyond what we put in writing.

No further question at this time. Please continue, sir.

Okay. Then I'd just like to thank everyone for their interest and attention. And I look forward to speaking with you all again in the future. Thank you.