Yelp Inc. (YELP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. I think everyone's moving from room to room, but we're going to get started on our next session here. So it's my pleasure to have the team from Yelp. Here, we've got Jeremy Stoppelman, Co-Founder and CEO; David Schwarzbach, CFO. Before we get started, David, I know you've got a bit of a disclosure statement to read. So why don't I throw it over to you first.

All right. Excellent. Eric, thanks for having us. We'll be making some forward-looking statements during the conversation today that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our SEC filings for more information on the risk factors that may affect our results.

Here we go. Okay. Jeremy, let's start with you. The company has been on a journey. We've been through the pandemic, the post-pandemic. You have a lot of different initiatives you're putting in place to sort of align the platform for the longer term. Why don't you bring us up to speed over the evolution in the last couple of years and how you're thinking about the future of Yelp?

Yes. I mean my -- thanks for the introduction. It's great to be here. I think my journey is now almost 20 years old. And so it's been quite the ride -- quite the roller coaster. We started here in San Francisco, grew city-by-city. And in 2018 began essentially a reacceleration and a rethinking of our model. And we started leaning into things like Multi-location, Self-serve, things that we create additional leverage, really catering to our advertiser base by driving more value. And that plan really started to work for us. In 2019, things were looking good. 2020 got off to an incredible start. Like many businesses, it was an incredible start. And we were right in the bull's eye of the pandemic. So that did impact us. But what it allowed us to do was to take this strategy that we had built kind of in the 2016, 2017, 2018 time frame and accelerate our plans to really reinvent the business for the future and for the long term. And we're now celebrating our ninth quarter of consecutive double-digit revenue growth. And the plan has really been working. I think even in a challenging macro, it's very clear that advertisers are finding a lot of value. Consumers, of course, continuing to get great value. I think in July, there was 82 million consumers according to comScore on Yelp. They're affluent to really a great demographic and -- if you look at the age groups, it's 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 sort of younger side, 1/3, middle age, 1/3, older, 1/3. It's a very attractive group for advertisers. And it's been going really well. We had a great Q2. Very proud of our growth there.

Okay. So there's a lot to talk about with respect to the things inside your control in your building. But as you referenced, we do live and is probably 1 of the 2 main topics here at the conference the last 3 days in a volatile macro environment. There's been ups and downs and puts and takes around different pockets of the advertising world. What's your current view coming out of Q2 about what you're seeing for the broader advertising macro environment and how it's impacting your business?

I mean the takeaway for Yelp is, we have a really resilient advertising base, and it seems that our advertisers are really leaning into the value. I think you can say, well, why is that? I think, the people, the consumers that are coming to Yelp are coming to transact ultimately. And so it's a down funnel audience. It's an audience that is engaging with advertisers in a way where oftentimes that advertiser can find out, did I get ROI? Did I get value? Did a lead come in through. And so there has been what appears to be a flight to quality. People want lower risk investments on the advertising side. I think Yelp clearly represents that to a large part of our advertiser base, and that reflects in the performance that we saw in Q2.

Maybe sticking with that theme of where your advertiser base is today and where you'd like to get it longer term. How do you think about the mix in the business between larger advertisers and SMBs, dollars that are brand in nature versus direct response or DR in nature and how to strike the right balance of building scale on the advertiser side?

Yes. I mean from a sales perspective, we're selling essentially the same thing largely to all of our advertisers. So you do have different senses of scale. So an enterprise or a multi-location advertiser might be going across hundreds or thousands of locations. But ultimately, they're buying the same thing that we're selling to SMBs, which is largely search advertising. So you have a consumer, they're looking for a plumber or they're looking for a restaurant or they're looking for a yoga studio, and then they're seeing ads against those results. And that person is at that moment of making a purchase decision, finding a new business, and that's proving to be really valuable for advertisers. And whether it's enterprise-level customers or whether it's SMB customers, they're looking to stay busy in this challenging macro environment, and they're finding ROI on Yelp, which I think, shows up in our growth. Looking across the business, Multi-location grew by 15% in Q2. I think that reflects the power of what we're providing in terms of advertising. We also have for those Multi-location customers a lot of attribution solutions, be it third-party or we also have a lot of first-party data. Consumers really trust us. They're looking as they're out and about in the city. And so often, we have location information. We know where that user -- that consumer service -- and that's really valuable to our enterprise customers to know that people actually -- they didn't just see the ad, but did they come in and ultimately did they drive additional revenue.

Got it. Okay. I want to stick with that theme for just 1 minute. This idea of what you've built on Self-serve and Multi-location from the outside in the way we do our work, it's been interesting to see it grow as a percentage of the mix, see broader adoption by advertisers. Where can this go? What can it do for the platform as you think across a multiyear view of bringing in a wider array of advertisers, a different level of budget? How should we be thinking about it as a driver of the business?

Yes. Multi-location and Self-serve represent an incredible opportunity for leverage and have represented an opportunity for leverage. And that's frankly why we leaned in, starting really in 2018, and we've seen continued progress there. And in fact, revenue -- 51% of revenue was driven from Multi-location and Self-serve, which is a great milestone in majority of our revenue. And we don't see that slowing down. We still see a considerable opportunity to keep driving additional Multi-location sales, as well as improving our Self-serve flows, improving the advertising that helps fuel what's going on in Self-serve. So there's a lot of runway in that domain.

Okay. And then just more broadly, when you think about elements of driving your PLA count and how having more opportunities for advertising can be a driver of that, maybe just talk a little bit about some of the variables you're the most focused on about seeing some of that tailwind effect building in the business.

Yes. I mean, there are a lot of different aspects that we focus on in the business. There's the consumer side or how many users are on the platform. There's the contribution side, we've seen healthy growth in terms of reviews. On the advertiser side, certainly, there's a number of paying advertisers. But then there's also like how much budget is flowing through the system. What's the average CPCs or what are the CPCs that they're paying category by category. There are things that are more underlying like what is the quality of those clicks. That's something that's a little bit harder to discern, but it's something that we actually do our best to focus on because it is possible to juice the number of clicks. But ultimately, if the advertiser isn't feeling it in their business, they're going to not retain well. And so at the end of the day, what we're really trying to do is match consumers as efficiently as we can to our advertisers and deliver value for those advertisers while delivering a great experience for consumers.

Understood. You talked a little bit earlier in one of your answers about the strength you're seeing in users and engagement. Talk a little bit about how we should be thinking about the opportunity for rising utility out of your user base over time and how different levels of services that you offer that consumers can take advantage of on the site and the app can be capitalized in terms of both driving the user count also driving higher levels of engagement over the long term.

Yes. I think one of the things that is really special about Yelp is it's incredibly horizontal nature. That gives us the license to participate in various aspects of that consumer's life. And so maybe tonight, they're looking for a restaurant, next week they're looking for a plumber, that's a really unique place to be. And that gives us the opportunity to really build a strong consumer brand. I think that's been some of the key to our success, why has Yelp had 20 years of durability now. Why is it a culturally relevant big brand is because people find daily utility, weekly utility, monthly utility in Yelp. And then every once in a while, they turn to us for something like a services request or Home Services, which grew 25% and year-over-year, has been pretty incredible growth rate there. Clearly, all taking share. And where is that coming through that's coming through new products or newer products like Request-a-Quote, where we've really built out that experience over the last several years. And we continue to have an incredible opportunity to elevate the Home Services experience in particular.

Okay. Sticking with that theme though, you have talked about shifting from a sales-led strategy to a product-led strategy. Talk a little bit about that evolution and how you think about aligning investments from one strategy to another and what it means for growth longer term?

Yes. I think going back to the beginning of the conversation, where we're laying out there, the earliest days of Yelp, we were growing city by city, but we were also driving revenue by an ever-increasing local sales force. And the microeconomics of that really worked for us at the time, the ad tech stack was pretty weak at that time but delivered enough value to really build something significant. And that took us all the way through IPO. It took us all the way to maybe 2015, 2016 time frame, but really began to run out of gas. Like it was just too big of a scale is starting to get really inefficient. And so that's when we really had to focus on how do we rebuild this economic engine to be more efficient to generate healthier margins and to allow us to scale without just adding ever more people to the mix. And fortunately, that's where we wake up today. It's been a really successful transition. We now have 51% of our revenue coming from these more efficient channels. And we're not done. There's still plenty of opportunity to drive more Self-serve. I think it's important to remember, too, the context that we were living in, in 2004, 2005. Like most local advertisers were buying yellow pages. We're getting calls from the local newspaper, it was a totally different time in Self-serve. Yes, it was on the horizon and we did have sort [indiscernible] of a Self-serve experience, but a lot has transpired between sort of the early days and now and customers really expect a highly [ performant ] ad system, really good targeting so that the leads are relevant. And that's something that we've been working hard to deliver, and I think it's starting to show up in the results.

Okay. We talked a little bit about macro in the front. The other dominant theme at this conference has been artificial intelligence. It's pervaded through pretty much every conversation. Most companies I'm talking to are referencing the ways in which artificial intelligence, generative AI, machine learning can improve their outward-facing products into their business environment, but also ways in which making investments to drive greater levels of efficiencies and process internally. Talk a little bit about what you see in the landscape. Obviously, you've been around technology shifts in Silicon Valley your whole career. And this is another seismic 1 when you talk to a lot of people in this part of the world. How you're thinking about the technology shift aligning with investments and what it can do both externally and internally for your company?

Yes. Thanks for the question. I would say LLMs is -- I'm a bit of a candy store. I see low-hanging fruit everywhere. Things that would have been very difficult, if not impossible to do in terms of manipulating all of our great trusted data, are suddenly like at our fingertips. You can tap into it very simply with an API. We've already booked some of our first wins with LLMs. And I would say machine learning and AI in general are not new to Yelp. We've been working on it for at least a decade, as ML really became a powerful tool we stood up an internal initiative and had a fairly large team that was pushing it into all aspects of our business. With LMS, we're doing the same. We have an internal working group that's identifying and prioritizing all the areas where we can find wins especially the low-hanging fruit and get them implemented as quickly as possible. And it's not just limited to the hard-core tech side of the business, the ad system contributors, like there's all sorts of product implications. But then there's also business operations and what can we do more efficiently in a more personal manner by leveraging LLM. When our client success team is communicating with a customer, can we improve the communications with LLM, so we have a separate initiative internally designed to identify those opportunities and begin experimentation. I guess it's worth noting, too, the company from a product and engineering standpoint is so different than it was in kind of the prior to 2016 era. As part of our transformation, we have an internal process, an annual process to identify all the most promising projects and really be hyper rigorous about what's the ROI on every technical initiative, every consumer product initiatives that we've got, we have an estimated impact to revenue. And then we track it religiously throughout the year. And if something goes off the rails, because we have a staffing problem or whatever, we're able to triage it. And so that's been a big part of our operational excellence and why we've been able to consistently perform for a number of years now.

Okay. Maybe to bring David into the conversation as well, just the investment curve behind some of these initiatives. I find when I talk to companies, there's the efficiency gain narrative that people have been trying to drive over the last 6, 9, 12 months, but then there's a lot of excitement about investing against some of these longer-term initiatives. How should we think about the investments that need to be made to realize the potential of these initiatives versus maybe trying to strike the right balance of margin versus growth over the longer term?

Yes. Maybe just starting with LLMs and then speaking more broadly, the opportunity for us is large, what is very nice with regard to LLMs is that capital investment to create the weights that go into these LLMs has been made by other parties. And you have Facebook is open sourced, its weight. Amazon has a product, OpenAI is offering a product. So we can rent the LLM capability. And because what you do on Yelp is narrow constrained, the cost of compute is low for us. So we're really able to take advantage of them without seeing costs go up. Equally important is, it's not new to us using this kind of sophisticated algorithmic matching, whether it's on the ad tech side or even for what we surface to consumers directly in the app and the feed, so we have the database, the compute, the ability to distribute it where it needs to go, the ability to surface and display it in a way that's engaging. So none of that's new for us. So it's just fitting into what's already an operating system. So that's with regard to machine learning and particularly LLMs or AI and LLMs in particular. More broadly, what Jeremy was saying, we go through this planning process and look where is the best place to deploy our engineers to be most productive. It's the same thing that we do with sales reps, whether it's in local sales or in enterprise. And we really track it as we go through the year, and we're willing to make operating changes as we go through the year. If something isn't yielding, we're going to shift the resources over. And I think that ability both to track the performance, to reflect on it as part of the planning process is part of what's enabled us to drive margin. And then the last thought is the shift to a product-led growth model does, we believe, deliver margin over time. And you saw that in the second quarter where we had 13% growth and 25% adjusted EBITDA margin, I think those are milestones for us.

Yes. Understood. I do want to turn to the service segment to make sure we get to this. You've been on a journey on the services side of the business over the last couple of years. What -- you mentioned earlier where we are now in terms of Request-a-Quote, but can you talk a little bit about what you've built on the services side? How you see it evolving from here? And we get a lot of questions from investors about the competitive dynamic in the Services segment. Who are you competing with? You're obviously taking share from other players in the market that means the number is going to speak -- right, the numbers kind of speak for themselves. But -- just talk a little bit about competitive landscape, product road map, what you built, how should we be thinking about this business building and scale in the coming years.

Yes, sure. I think the first thing that surprises some people that maybe haven't followed the Yelp story in a while is 60% of revenue coming from Services. And where did that really begin? I mean, funny enough, as Yelp took off, we did see activity in all categories. It just turned out that we got kind of review liquidity in restaurants early on. And so the brand is very synonymous with restaurant, food and nightlife, RF, as we like to call it. But it did have services utility and a number of years ago, several years ago, we decided to lean in towards services with some simple adjustments. We had a messaging feature built in to the app and the website where you can message the business. And instead of having the phrase message a business, we tried swapping it to Request-a-Quote in certain categories. And all of a sudden, we saw the volume pick up. And so we saw there was something there, there was consumer demand for that kind of functionality. It's a very simple, easy test. And that began a long, a multiyear product strategy around how do we really elevate this experience, how do we make it ready for prime time, how we drive valuable leads to advertisers create underlying matching technology, be able to deliver that consumer, not just to 1 business and a messaging infrastructure but multiple businesses so they can really have productive conversations and it could be really efficient for consumers and a great opportunity for business owners. Fast forward to today, that's where we're at. Request-a-Quote is a really great experience. It's built into many categories within Services. It drives a lot of value to businesses. And we're building on top of that with Yelp Guaranteed, which is something we've recently announced, where Yelp actually leverages its brand to help step in and say to consumers, "Hey, if you interact with this business through Request-a-Quote, Yelp is going to stand behind this -- any transaction that results up to $2,500. So what's that good for? Well, it's great for helping businesses convert. You may be a new advertiser, let's say, to Yelp and you're just getting your business started. And in fact, we've had incredible creation of services businesses over the last few quarters and coming out of the pandemic. And so with that new business has started on Yelp, well, Yelp standing behind you with the Yelp Guaranteed is a great way to start interacting with consumers. And ultimately, getting leads, closing those leads and hopefully building a reputation over time on Yelp.

So sticking with that theme that you sort of introduced there, how do you think about the broader cross-selling opportunity because you built the scale you have on the Services side. Obviously, you still got the other side of the business as well and elements to tie those 2 together to sort of amplify and reduce churn, increase activity at the business level when you think out over the medium term?

Yes, I think there's different ways to think about the cross-selling. I mean, in one way you could look at something like Yelp has Guest Manager, which is a front of house product, for instance, in the restaurant space, and we're able to sell ads in Guest Manager. So that's a cross-selling experience. But you can also look at it as how can Yelp keep a simple sales process for a business that wants to get additional leads and how can we maximize that? Well, we can make our ad tech stack more efficient. We can go off of Yelp and take our same audience and reach them in other places on the Internet to drive efficient low-cost leads. There's ways to extend what we do beyond just sort of the core Yelp ad product, and deliver more value for that business, get a greater share of wallet, get them to increase their spend over time. So that's, first and foremost, where we begin, but are there additional opportunities to layer in products that have value? Absolutely. But we think the anchor is going to be driving value for businesses, delivering valuable leads, things like Request-a-Quote, where it's tangible. They know they're getting value and it's a good ROI.

Okay. On the business side at the top line, I just want to ask one more Yelp audience, you built that into a certain level of scale. How should we think about that business evolving and the prospects for that in the years ahead?

Yes, Yelp audience is really exciting, a relatively new offering for us, where we can take the really valuable audience we were talking about that is that on Yelp. In July, the 82 million comScore users that have great demographics. And what we've heard is from our advertisers, we want as much of that as you can give us? Are there other additional opportunities? And what we've built out is a way to get that off of Yelp. So as that user travels to other places on the Internet, we can still identify that user and deliver them -- deliver an ad opportunity to an advertiser that wants it. And so it gives us leverage for existing advertisers that are already spending often the Multi-location folks that are already spending on Yelp. And it also introduces Yelp to brand advertisers that really didn't have a home on Yelp. And so that's purely incremental and a very exciting opportunity as part of audiences.

Okay. So you bring it all together, we've talked about the various avenues of growth and what you're building. If we look out over the next 1 to 2 years, what are you most excited about in terms of the product road map ahead for the company? Where -- like if we get this right by execute here, if the team and I get this more right than wrong. This is going to be the biggest elements of drivers of our success.

I mean, the #1 thing I would be most excited about is the team that we've assembled. I think if you look at our execution, it's been so consistent and clean for quite some time. I feel like we have a rock star team assembled, everybody on the bus is the right person to be on the bus, and that's what's generating the value. I can tell you all the cool things that are on the road map of which there are many, many things. But those ideas come from somewhere. And ultimately, it's the team, and it feels like the team is motivated, energized, stable. And so that gets me really excited, keeps me hopping and skipping to work every day. But from an experience standpoint, I think continuing to elevate the Services experience like seeing the growth numbers that we're getting there. The 25% in Home Services gets to be really jazz like. And I'm pleased to try and think about how can we really elevate that experience on the services side? How can we make Request-a-Quote 10x better than anything else that exists on the Internet. To the point -- the vision is really how can we get to a place where someone says, you're an idiot for not using Request-a-Quote. Not just like, "Oh, yes, it's really good. And like, yes, it helped me find my mover or what have you. But I want it to be so braindead and simple for someone to say, look, just forget about everything else that you've tried, you have to go over to this platform. I know it takes a few steps but it's absolutely worth it because of insert product features here.

Okay. All right. Very clear. David, I asked you before about investments against the AI road map. But broaden out the answer for us a little bit. When we think about what the highest or most pressing investment priorities are on a multiyear view, how would you and Jeremy sort of characterize what those investment priorities are that we should be thinking about as uses of capital, uses of OpEx in the business?

So for context, I think it's important to underscore that obviously -- we've given our guidance for this year over $1.3 billion, but we're holding head count flat. And so we see this year as a proof point for leverage in the business and our ability to deliver. And then underneath that, if you're holding head count flat, that means that you'd better be really good at allocating the resources across the business. And it definitely goes to what Jeremy is saying, which is service is a very high priority for us. I would say equally, we want to drive that consumer engagement. And so we are continuing to update the Yelp home feed. We're using AI to make that relevant to folks. We want to prompt people for reviews because we're a content site, we're a publisher. We monetize through advertising. So those themes remain there as well as increasing monetization of services leads. So we're very consistent in the strategy that we set for ourselves, deliver more value, increase monetization, make sure that -- you're having a great experience when you come to Yelp, and we're really selling through the most efficient channels. Those 4 topics, which have been the topics for several years now remain the topics and we're allocating resources against it to be productive.

One other area that I heard on the last earnings call was a bit of a shift in the way you think about your customer acquisition strategy. Maybe talk a little bit about what informed that decision and what you think you're trying to solve for in terms of aligning sales and marketing, maybe bringing it back to the funnel conversation from earlier and what might amplify sort of user or customer growth?

I mean I would say we're always looking for what's the most efficient channel. And that's been part of our strategy since 2018 as we shifted away from local. It's how far can we push Multi-location? What do we need to do to drive that business forward? What are the product features that we need to align against that? What is the attribution solutions that are necessary? How is the landscape changing, et cetera? And then on the Self-serve side, there's a martech aspect to it. How are we delivering those businesses into the flows? And then how are we streamlining the flows, doing simple things like making password-less login like has a real impact suddenly on you can spend more money. You can drive more businesses into the flow and all of your organic just got better. So there's a lot of opportunities to optimize go-to-market there.

And just to add one of the things that we talked about earlier this year, and it's really a year in which we're building out the componentry, but SEM is a place where we've never played. And just on the consumer acquisition side, '19, '20 and '21, we only spent $11 million. By going into SEM, obviously, you want to generate the lead, and that's going to be valuable because it's in services. But when you come to Yelp for that services Pro, there's a reason to keep coming back to Yelp. That's our broad-based consumer app advantage and the horizontal nature of the categories that we serve. So we really do see this opportunity play in an area where you get to double up. You get much better account -- password list log-ins necessary, getting better at our martech stack is necessary, making the landing page experience better is necessary. All those things will make Yelp better regardless. But that's all been a set of capabilities that we can apply to making SEM financially attractive for us, and then we want to get the person to come back. So historically, it's been come to Yelp for restaurant and stay for services. There's a little bit come for services stay for the restaurant.

Understood. So for those who haven't been in tuned with the Yelp story in a while, you do have some -- I think you've identified about what your focus areas are as a company in terms of returning capital and capital allocation broadly. Can you just remind folks what your priorities are on the capital allocation front? And then maybe I've got a follow-up on that.

Yes. So again, it starts obviously with our budget for the team and how we allocate that and with a goal of holding head count flat by the end of the year compared to 2022. We got to be really efficient there. In terms of capital in excess of the target cash balance, Obviously, we've been repurchasing shares. I think we've closed in on [ $1.3 billion ] in share repurchases. We've very consistently bought back $50 million in the second -- in the first quarter of this year, $50 million a quarter last year. So we are committed to returning capital to investors as part of our approach. We generate a lot of free cash flow. At the same time, we're an unlevered business. And with that free cash flow, it does give us room for tuck-in acquisitions. So we do hold some capital on the balance sheet for tuck-ins. And we definitely see those as an opportunity, whether it's to accelerate a feature or bringing capability to the site that may take a bit longer for us to build ourselves.

Yes. Sticking with that theme for a minute, there's been so much disruption in the local digital landscape and the Home Services landscape and yet when I talk to companies that might want to deploy capital to build scale, they talk about there still being a wide bid-ask spread between some of the private companies that are out there and some of the public companies that are out there. We had a VC panel here yesterday, [indiscernible] all the grades, and they were bemoaning the bid-ask spread as I think they're looking for some M&A exits.

We have a big asset I presume.

Yes, exactly. But when you think about using capital as to possibly accelerate your business plan or increase scale? How do you go through that process of thinking about that as a tool in your toolkit, Jeremy?

Yes. I mean, historically, we have deployed capital. We've done tuck-ins before, but we're very thoughtful about it. I think -- we don't want to chase tennis balls. We've always been a pretty focused company. If we have a long runway, and we're building something and it's going well, like we want to lean into that first and foremost. But if there's inorganic ways to accelerate where we think we can manage the risk, the price makes sense. I think absolutely, it's something that we do contemplate. We have a Corp Dev team. We are constantly looking at the landscape, and trying to evaluate whether it's best to build or whether it's best to buy. And so we are very thoughtful about that, but always with a careful eye towards like not blowing investor money and really focusing on ROI.

Understood. So we've got a minute or 2 left here. We've talked a lot about how the platform has evolved. What you're excited about on the product side and the go-to-market strategy, some of the investments you want to make. Bring it all together for us, if we have this conversation a year from now, what are your highest priorities in terms of strategy, product, the things you're the most focused on that you think will move the needle for Yelp as a company the most in the next 12 months?

Yes. I mean I think as the CEO, there's a lot of plates that you're constantly spending and you're trying to keep them all revolving as fast as possible without dropping any of them. So I see my job as absolutely continuing to curate like the stellar team that we've got continuing to lean in on the product and engineering side where we're already seeing opportunities or where there's new opportunities like leveraging LLM. There's low-hanging fruit everywhere, like, from consumer features to deep within the ad system and to really pushing our teams to take advantage of the opportunities ahead of them and then execute relentlessly against those important initiatives that we line up. We're well into our planning process right now. It's both a lot of stress, but a lot of fun. As we see all the new ideas, we started attaching approximate revenue numbers to them. And that gets us really excited and motivated as we look towards 2024.

Okay. Well, Jeremy, David, I really appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation this year. Please join me in thanking the team from Yelp for being part of the conference this year.