Cars.com Inc. Common Stock

Good morning and welcome to the CARS second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. This call is being recorded and the live webcast and the accompanying slides can be found at investor.cars.com. An archive of the webcast will be available at CARS Investor Relations website. I'll now like to turn the call over to Robin Moore-Randolph, Director of Investor Relations.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the CARS second quarter 2023 conference call. With me this morning are Alex Vedder, CEO, and Sonia Jane, CFO. Alex will start by discussing the business highlights from our second quarter. Then Sonia will discuss our financial results in greater detail, along with our 2023 outlook. We'll finish the call with Q&A. Before I turn the call over to Alex, I'd like to draw your attention to our forward-looking statements and the description and definition of non-GAAP financial measures, which can be found in our presentation. We will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures today, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted operating expenses, and free cash flow. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure can be found in the financial tables included with our earnings press release and in the appendix of our presentation. Any forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. For more information, please refer to the risk factors included in our SEC filings, including those in our most recently filed 10-K, which is available on the IR section of our website. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements Now, I'll turn the call over to Alex.

Thank you, Robin, and welcome to our second quarter 2023 earnings call. I'm pleased to report another quarter of solid results and profitable growth. Revenue grew 3% year-over-year to $168 million, driven by dealer revenue that increased 6% year-over-year to $153 million. We also improved our adjusted EBITDA margin sequentially to 27%. Our success this quarter was driven by a number of factors that will underpin performance for the balance of this year and into next. Specifically, the rollout of our marketplace repackaging initiative, increased adoption of our digital solutions, and our continued investment in delivering the highest quality in-market digital audience to our partners. We are over 60% complete with our marketplace repackaging initiative that we started earlier this year, and the results have been strong. We're seeing improved yield from repackaging with two-thirds of our dealer customers opting into our upper tier packages. This is driving both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Our new packages allow dealers to capture the benefit of our investment in product development and more than 30% increase in traffic and value over the last five years. As dealers opt in to our higher tier packages and leverage more features, their engagement increases and it is far more likely for dealers to stay within our ecosystem. In fact, we're seeing our strongest retention from higher ARP dealers who use at least three of our products, which leads to an ARPD of approximately three times the average customer and shows a clear upside potential as we remain focused on cross-selling additional products. As with any pricing initiative, we experience incremental cancellation and, as expected, This was largely confined to a segment of lower inventory dealers with legacy rates. In total, ARPD for the quarter grew 6% year-over-year, and Marketplace accounted for more than 50%, or $78, of our year-over-year growth in ARPD. Please note that a significant portion of our repackaging work in the quarter was back half-weighted, and as a result, the benefit will not fully be reflected in our financials until the third quarter. While our marketplace repackaging initiative has been significant focus this year, we continue to see strong results from cross-selling solutions, which drove the remaining 50% of our year-over-year ARPD growth. We added more than 500 new website customers since last year, bringing our total to 6,200, up 9% year-over-year. We also saw 1,800 net new website product upsells compared to the prior year. And Accutrade, our no-risk dealer appraisal solution, also demonstrated momentum with connected customers growing to more than 750 units, up approximately 130 units sequentially and 650 units year over year. And dealer usage also continues to climb. Appraisals completed using Accutrade totaled more than 430,000, a 10% sequential increase. As used car prices continue to fluctuate, it's more important than ever to have real-time transparency and consistency in a vehicle's valuation. AccuTrade improves profitability by accurately pricing any car every time within minutes to close deals that are right on the money. Combining digital solutions with demand generation capabilities is a strong differentiator for our strategy. This quarter, Cars.com supported 27 million unique visitors to shop, buy, and sell vehicles across 156 million visits, a 5% increase from the prior year. As a reminder, more than 60% of our audience comes to us organically, which is also a competitive advantage and a testament to our longstanding investments in editorial content and the Cars.com brand. We clearly see the power of our audience through our traffic delivery into dealer websites. Cars.com is consistently the leader in driving website referral traffic directly into dealer systems. In fact, we generate two times as much traffic as our publicly traded peers, and the strength of our organic traffic also allows us to bring more net new visitors to our customers than any other marketplace. Platforms promote their participants, whereas aggregators hide them for selfish gain. As dealerships lean more on Google Analytics to monitor and measure traffic and value delivery, they will see Cars.com's platform power is far more evident. Further, consumers referred to a dealer website buycars.com are three times more likely to buy a car than shoppers who only visited a dealer's website. This is proof that access to the uniquecars.com audience helps dealers sell more cars faster. Innovation has also been a part of our DNA since the beginning, and we continue to evolve both our consumer and dealer experience to allow far more efficient buying and selling of vehicles. Increasingly, innovation is becoming synonymous with adoption and integration of artificial intelligence. We have been doing this for some time. We use AI behind the scenes to help power our conversations chat tool, a messaging solution that instantly connects customers with dealerships 24-7. Anabot, our proprietary AI-fueled chatbot, handled 60% of all conversations on our marketplace and DI-powered websites this quarter, and Anna's advanced language learning model continues to self-educate and improve. I'm also excited about the power and potential of generative AI to improve our products. Using large language models to analyze millions of reviews only available on cars.com, we are now using generative AI to synthesize consumer sentiment regarding dealer experience. This helps consumers understand the expected dealership experience without having to sift through hundreds of dealer reviews. We are also using generative AI to synthesize vehicle reviews and listing details. This quarter, our teams have deployed technology that will provide users with bulleted synthesis of vehicle attributes, cleaning up cluttered vehicle detail descriptions into cleaner, more powerful,

Hundreds of reviews are sifted through unstructured data.

We're using the power of AI to gain efficiencies, create better consumer and customer experiences, and add meaningful value.

We have a new ad campaign called Possibilities.

which reminds us that both car buyers and sellers want the same thing, a happy customer driving off the lot in their next ride. As the second largest purchase that most consumers will ever make, car buyers typically spend two to three months sourcing information and getting inspiration about vehicles, retailers, financing, and valuing their trade-in. Importantly, a car purchase is often triggered by a lifestyle or life stage change. and our new campaign showcases the excitement of purchasing your next car, and our new tagline, Where To Next, highlights how personal transportation We're well-positioned to drive our growth for the second half of the year and beyond through our continued dealer adoption of our new marketplace packages, our digital solutions, and providing a high-quality market audience to our partners. Now, I'll turn the call over to Sonia to discuss our detailed financial performance in greater detail. Sonia?

Thank you, Alex. We achieved another quarter of solid results, delivering both revenue and adjusted EBITDA within our guidance range. Total revenue for the quarter was $168 million, representing 3% year-over-year growth. While we experienced continued softness in our OEM and national revenue, dealer revenue growth was particularly strong and up 6% year-over-year, driven by continued growth in solutions and media products, as well as growth resulting from our marketplace repackaging initiative. And given the subscription nature of our business, we expect to build upon second quarter's results with accelerated revenue growth in the