SEMrush Holdings, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SEMrush Holdings second quarter 2021 results conference call. At this time, our participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Bob Giubardi. Please go ahead.

Good morning. I'm Bob DiGiardini, VP of Investor Relations, and welcome to SEMrush Holdings' second quarter 2021 results conference call. We'll be discussing the results announced on our press release after market close on Monday. With me on the call is our CFO, Evgeny Petitsov, and our CFO, Eugene Levin. Before we begin, I'd like to highlight our participation in several virtual investor conferences to be held during the third quarter. We'll attend the KeyBank Virtual Technology Leadership Conference on August 11th and the Piper Sandler Global Technology Conference on September 14th. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigations Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include statements concerning our expected future business and financial performance and financial condition, expected growth, adoption and demand for our products and features, expected investments and their anticipated benefits, industry and market trends, our competitive position, market opportunities, and our guidance for the third quarter of 2021 and the full year of 2021, and can be identified by words such as expect, anticipate, intend, plan, believe, seek, or will. These statements reflect our views as of today only and should not be relied upon as representing our views at any subsequent date, and we do not undertake any duty to update these statements. Forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. For a discussion of the risks and important factors that could affect our actual results, Please refer to our final IPO perspectives filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, our quarterly reports on Form 10Q, as well as other filings with the SEC. Also, during the course of today's call, we referred to certain non-GAAP financial measures. There's a reconciliation schedule showing the GAAP versus non-GAAP results currently available on our press release issued after a market close, which can be found on our website at investors.femrush.com. And with that, let me turn the call over to Oleg.

Thank you, and good morning to everyone on the call. I am pleased with our performance in the second quarter. Revenue of $45 million was up 58% year-over-year and up 13% sequentially. We saw strength across all our major markets, but particular strength from markets outside the United States and United Kingdom, which grew 65% year-over-year. Our paid users grew 29% year-over-year, while the average check grew by approximately 19% year-over-year. Looking at some of the product highlights from the quarter, we saw strong traction with our digital media marketing tools. As I mentioned in May, we transitioned these tools to a free-to-use model with the goal of driving wider adoption. The initial results look promising as we had over 30,000 active users at the end of June. According to G2 rankings, We are a leader in social media management and I believe the stronger adoption of our solutions is further validation of our leadership position. Many investors ask about the primary use case that drives customers to adopt SEMrush. It's an interesting question because our product offering is far broader than the point solutions offered by our competitors. There is a wide variety of use cases and I would like to highlight a couple of those to help investors better understand what is driving our growth. 3D Chimney Sweeps is a contractor in the Washington DC area that provides critical services related to safety, upkeep and construction of chimneys and fireplaces. Preedy is a new service provider in a market dominated by larger brands with much larger advertising budgets. Preedy engaged with Ardent Growth, a digital marketing agency, to revamp the company's digital marketing strategy. Using SEMrush tools, ArdentGrowth conducted research to plan an effective site architecture, SEO, and content strategy that could rapidly increase previous topical authority. The results speak for themselves. First page rankings went from approximately 30 in September of 2019 to over 300 as of October 2020, and organic traffic increased by over 2,000%. When a prospect searches for chimney sweep in Washington, D.C., pre-decline is ranking third behind angel's list and yellow. We improved visibility translated directly to an increase in traffic and conversions. And as a result, 3D chimney sweeps revenue has grown substantially. And amid a global pandemic that saw many SMEs struggle, the company is preparing to expand. We are focused on solutions for SMEs, but our solutions are widely deployed across enterprise customers as well. Universal Health Services is a leading provider of hospital and healthcare services. UHS corporate marketing is the internal resource supporting marketing and communication strategies and multi-channel tactics for UHS corporate and its subsidiaries. In November 2019, the UHS SEO team purchased a SEMrush license and began analyzing the state of the pilot facilities websites. The SEO team quickly realized the facility sites were lacking content that would drive relevant traffic. Using the SEMrush Keyword Tool, SEO Writing Assistant and Topic Research, the SEO and content teams began producing content around behavioral health and saw immediate results. With SEMrush, we streamlined the process of creating highly effective content and grew conversions by 49% in five months. With the help of SEMrush, UHS grew the number of in-house campaigns by 10x in one year, while also cutting costs by 60% as compared to outsourcing the work to agencies. I would like to close with a few comments. on the breadth of our data assets. A few investors were confused about what data we collect and analyze. I want to make it clear that while building the map of the Internet for working on producing other insights, SEMrush collects billions of discrete data points through a combination of internal and external sources. We take that data and transform it into actionable insights for customers. However, we only collect publicly available data, which does not include sensitive non-public data like credit scores, financial assets, and payment information. Our practices are designed to comply with identity for advertisers regulations in the United States and the general data protection regulation GDPR in Europe. Looking ahead, I do believe we will see a reduction in micro-targeting and it may result in less paid ad spending on the part of SMEs. A lot of opt-in rates could make it extremely difficult to measure returns on paid advertising for sites that generate relatively modest traffic, which includes many SMS. I don't believe the overall marketing budget at SMS will shrink, as it is more challenging than ever to reach potential customers. Rather, I believe a portion of this bad budget will shift to paid and organic search. I believe this would be a tailwind for SEMrush as we offer a best-in-class solution focused on improving organic and paid search results. With that, I would like to pass the call to Evgeny for a more detailed discussion of our financials.

Thank you, Oleg. Q2 revenue of $45 million was up 58% year-over-year and came in above our expectations. Growth was once again driven by steady increase in paying customers and an increase in the average monthly recurring revenue per paying customer, or average check. We experienced average check growth in the second quarter of approximately 19% from the year-ago period, as we continue to see a tailwind from the price adjustments we implemented earlier this year that, among other results, led to the growth in the number of additional user licenses purchased and the richer mix of guru and business accounts. Our trailing 12-month revenue retention was 121% as of the end of June, up from 160% at the end of March. These results reflect an improvement in churn as compared to the higher levels experienced during the second quarter of 2020. Cross-margin of 77.3% was 170 basis points from a year ago, but down slightly from the previous quarter. The year-over-year improvement was due to higher revenue and sequential decline was largely due to additional spending on third-party data and increase in hosting fees. Non-GAAP operating expenses of $34.3 million in the quarter were up 50% from a year ago and up 18% from the previous quarter. The growth was driven by additional headcount as well as the high cost associated with operating as a public company. Higher public company expenses contributed to the 35% sequential increase in G&A in the quarter. I expect operating expenses to continue to grow in the back half of the year, but the growth will be more weighted to marketing and product development with G&A spending growth moderating. Strong revenue growth and higher gross margin were partially upset by higher operating expenses and contributed to non-GAAP net income of $290,000 in the second quarter, up from a net loss of $1.9 million a year ago. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $180.8 million, up from $171.9 million as of March 31st. The increase in cash flows primarily due to approximately $10 million received in April from the partial exercise of the over-allotment option granted to the IPO and directors. Cash flow foundations in Q2 was marginally positive after an exceptionally strong first quarter. Looking ahead to guidance, we expect second quarter revenue in the range of $47.3 million to $47.7 million, representing 47 to 48 year-over-year growth. For the full year, I expect revenue in the range of $182 to $184 million, which would represent 46% to 47% year-over-year growth. We expect to accelerate our investments in the second half of the year with a focus on marketing. These investments will likely weigh in profitability and therefore expect a 30% non-gap loss of 4.5 to 4 million dollars and non-gap loss of 7.9 to 6.3 million dollars for the full year 2021 we achieved 58 revenue growth in the second quarter in our second consecutive quarter of non-gap profitability our performance in the first half of the year clearly suggests we have a large opportunity ahead of us and a proven go-to-market strategy to capture that opportunity Our solid financial performance in the first half of 2021, combined with a successful IPO, puts us in a position to make incremental investments to support growth, investments that I believe will benefit the business going forward. With that, Alec, Eugene, and I are happy to take any of your questions. At the rate of, please open the line for questions.

At this time, if you would like to ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Again, that is star and the number 1. Your first question comes from the line of Michael Turretts with KeyBank.

Hey, guys. Congratulations on another good quarter post-IPL. One very high-level question. Obviously, you've accelerated really strongly coming out of COVID with digital transformation being led by digital marketing and other front office spending areas. How much do you think that's a pull forward that we've now seen, and how much do you think this is a sustainable growth rate that we can see into the next couple of years?

Thank you. First of all, good morning. This is Oleg. Our strong quarter and, you know, our strong performance in the first half of this year, this is a clear signal for us what we work in that direction. Our market is huge. We have the best opportunity. And we are working on numbers for next year and so on. We've already given this...

I think you're right to mention there is some, I would say there is some pull forward from the back half of the year, given how strong the first half was on the back of the reopening that we see across the board. So as you may see from our guidance, Our outlook for Q3 and for the back half of the year, I would say, is slightly more moderate, as we would need to see how the situation unfolds across the globe in different markets. Okay.

And then, Evgeny, as a follow-up, perhaps you could – the growth in average check or revenue per customer at 19% is a fantastic acceleration – Perhaps you could parse that for us. You called out some impact from pricing, but can you maybe stack rank the other impacts, whether it's in terms of incremental products or incremental units? What's really driving that strong growth in the AR uppercut structure?

Yes, there are a number of factors which drive the average share growth. One is the continuous change in the product mix. So we see a higher share of higher-priced packages. And again, following the changes in pricing, we see our new customers lending an average – the new lending and average check, which is about 20% higher than we had last year. I think that will be the second contributing factor. And the third one, as you mentioned, is the accelerated growth in add-ons and additional usage limits, such as user seats. So all of those contribute to this higher average check growth. So we see that we provide more value, which our customers take, and this is reflected in the growth of the check.

Great. Very helpful. Again, congrats on a great second quarter out.

Thank you.

Your next question is from Mark Murphy with J.P. Morgan.

Yes, thank you very much. I'll add my congrats on a solid Q2. I wanted to ask you if you could just comment on how ambitious are your plans in the social media marketing realm and as social media channels are starting to be viewed as a more important marketing channel than the website itself for more companies out there. What is it that customers are asking you to build for them to optimize their visibility in social media?

Thank you. I will start with the midterm plan. management tools for us and here it's very important for us to give functions and insights and tools for some marketers who are not so experienced with online marketing. It's very important to bring them to such marketing industry and create the right Right, insights, right, behavior, and I think in general, we want to give more and more value to such unexperienced audience. But if you talk about long-term plans, you really... Hi, this is Eugene.

In terms of overall pipeline, we definitely have a lot of features and plans. Right now the focus is mostly to get a bigger presence to become a key player in the social media management ecosystem. Answering your question about websites versus social media presence, I think for For an average business, definitely website is going to be more important for a foreseeable future, but we're seeing a lot of a new generation of marketing people who start with social media and then later evolve into broader web presence with websites. I think that kind of just reiterates Oleg's point about building products for entry-level marketers. And then moving forward and answering your question about other things that people ask us to build, So, existing customers definitely ask us to build products for other buyer personas. So, for example, people from customer success departments who also monitor mentions and want to reply to them, especially when there are some complaints about quality of products or things that can impact reputation. So, hope it answers the question. In the short term, focus only on market share, right? on user growth, in the long run, we'll probably start going into different buyer personas within same organizations.

Okay, understood. Thank you for that, Oleg and Eugene. Evgeny, I had just a couple of quick ones for you. One is a housekeeping item. I don't know if you happen to have or if you're disclosing where headcounts ended for Q2. And then the other part of this, financially, I'm trying to think back historically. Do you have a feel for how your ARR, if you look at the sequential build in the ARR numbers, which looks very strong in Q2, has that historically been stronger in Q2 or in Q3? And You know, if you have any high-level commentary on just maybe how we could think about that into Q3 of this year. Thank you. Right.

I would start with Capcom, the Capcom project. And we are not disclosing it, but I think we could highlight what many other companies face such new reality of. remote work approach and I think these are prepared very well for this remote approach. I think with our culture, with our structure, with how we build autonomous teams, how we manage teams, give goals, and so on. They're doing really well. And with our focus on best talents, with our focus on best employees, I think such a remote approach helps us. We don't see any significant difficulties with hiring such a remote work approach, it helps.

I wouldn't be reading into it right now too much because we see, I would say, a fair amount of distortions which are based on the start of the COVID and post-COVID reopening, which affected seasonality. But if we look at the typical year, I'd say there would be a slowdown at the end of the year as we end December and probably the mid-year as we go into the summer. And there you would have some, like, seasonal slowdown. But, again, this particular year may be different.

Just to clarify, Jenny, there's a slowdown, a mid-year slowdown. Do you mean just a typical July and August because people are on vacation, or do you mean…

Yeah, I would say that when we look at the end of the Q2, that will be end of June where the vacation period starts. So that's where there will be typical slowdown versus the end of Q1. Or when we look at the end of Q4, that will be end of December where everybody is still in the Christmas holiday mode. That's why this period will be slower versus the end of Q3, which will be very busy. That's what I meant.

Very clear. Thank you. I appreciate that. Take care.

Thank you, Mark.

Your next question is from Brent Braceland with Piper Sandler.

Thank you, and good morning here. I want to start with the international. I'm an international woman. I'm one of the upside lovers this quarter here that drove another quarter of accelerating growth. What's driving the success internationally? Is this just an underserved region? Is the success coming from maybe underserved market segments around small businesses, big-size businesses? And any color on the opportunity internationally would be super helpful given the momentum you're seeing here this quarter.

Hi, this is Eugene. So in general, I think It's largely related to how different markets are going out of COVID and how different restrictions are getting less strict. So, ultimately, a lot of people are going back to business. A lot of people can, you know, start consuming more. So, that means a lot of businesses have to do more investments in marketing to attract this new demand. I think, in general, this curve in the United States was not the same as curve in many other places. For example, In the United States, vaccination started earlier than in many even European countries. So that meant that, for example, in the U.S., we would start seeing this a couple months earlier than in the rest of the world. So that probably explains at least part of the discrepancy between growth rates in the United States and the rest of the world.

Got it. So something piece of recovery internationally, just different driving different momentum. They're super helpful, I guess. And as a follow up for me, just looking at the Semrush App Center, I know it's new, but it looks like there's about nine add on products ranging from $15 a month to $200 a month add ons. I know you specifically called out the success and local listing add ons this quarter. But how should we think about increasing attach rates of these add on products? that provide an incremental lift to growth once the anniversary, the price increase, just trying to understand that potential of that App Center as a way to drive additional add-on product revenue.

Just a little, we are very happy with the reception that we received with our App Center. We want to create Right now we see very positive feedback from our customers and we have also positive feedback from vendors, from partners. And we have good pipeline of future applications. But when we talk about a touch rate, in any case.

Yeah, right now, this is just the very early stages of the launch. So it's more, we look more at what our customers pay us rather than the numbers. I think it will be too early to bake in these numbers and do any good forecast, if you ask me, Brent. And you do media. Yeah, just one more.

Yeah, it seems a good interest, but a little too early to have a kind of financial impact, which leads into my last question, Eugene. Average price per check rose 19%. Just specifically, how much of that increase was tied to the price increase versus kind of increase of add-on products?

So I'd say the largest impact comes from two parts. One is the change in the mix of the lower-priced funds versus higher-priced funds. And the second largest will be coming from the, I would say, higher average share from new paying customers. I mean, the usage of add-ons also contributes. This will be the third, I would say, third most important one.

Okay, very helpful call. That's all I had. Thank you. Thank you.

The next question is from Tom Roderick with SQL.

Yeah. Hi, everybody. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions.

So I guess I'd love to start on kind of the value of the entire value prop here. I mean, there's been all sorts of noise about IDFA out there and the cost of various mobile advertising strategies have gone way up. So we seem to to create a little bit more of a lever relative to the demand for some of your products, many of which have a little bit of a longer life in terms of generating marketing leads. Kate, can you talk about just the broader impact that some of those marketing changes have had on the demand stream? And then, Danny, you were kind of talking about spending on third-party data has gone up. I'd love to understand how the cost of that third-party data perhaps has had, you know, perhaps there's been a ripple effect relative to some of the downstream effects from IDFA. Thanks.

So, this is Eugene. I'll start with the first one about broader trends that we see in advertising and how they impact our future. I think one development that we've seen in previous quarter is that Google technically changed the timeline for cookie depreciation in Chrome browser. So that was kind of positively reflected. received by the advertising industry. But at the same time, when we do surveys for our customers and we ask them on what parts they're going to increase marketing spend and on what parts they're going to decrease marketing spend moving forward, retargeting is still one of the areas where they're planning to decrease spend. And then when we go into more kind of qualitative feedback collection, then they highlight that they're going to expand their span on content specifically and especially long-term marketing activities. So, for example, evergreen content that ranks for a long time and can be used years forward. And this increases is going to come to some degree from reallocation of the budgets from retargeting to content marketing. So that's kind of feedback that we are collecting from our customers. At the end of the day, I think Google extended this kind of time that brands have to adjust to new reality, but it doesn't mean that Retargeting is here to stay for a long time and other intrusive forms of advertising. My expectation is that we are going to see reallocation of resources from those things to more sustainable organic marketing. And, Tom, on your question of the data cost, basically this is a – as we alluded to this earlier, we continue to invest into diversification of the data sources. Whenever we have a data source or whenever we source data for one or another product or feature, we usually would rely on the multiple sources. to avoid any issues with loss of one or another vendor. So that is a continuation of our investments into getting more, I would say, more data sources plus increased data quality for a number of products. This is a step-up increase. It is not connected with the growth of revenue. So I expect that we will see operating leverage as we go forward. However, having said that, we may continue buying more data if we find this suitable and attractive.

Outstanding. Yeah, that's really good color on the reallocation from retargeting the content. So that's great. I hate to go back to Mark Murphy's question, but I think it was kind of a good one with respect to setting expectations on the path of the ARR journey as we go through the year. And maybe putting a finer point on it, I want to make sure I understood what you're talking about. Just historically, again, from Q2 to Q3, were you saying that that is kind of a flattish? seasonal trend from Q2 to Q3. So if we just went back and look at last year, there was a jump from Q1 to Q2 and then from Q2 to Q3. Would we expect that to be flattish at that 120 million mark, which is what filings have shown for the second quarter of last year? Or was that up? I'm just trying to get a feel for how we should set expectations for ARR. I know you don't formally guide to it, but historically, is that up single digits or flat in Q3. Just again, sorry to kind of beat that dead horse, but would love to understand the modeling purposes.

That's absolutely worth it. So what I tried to say there, and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear, is that last couple of years mixed everything up. I mean, we had a difficult seasonality prior to 2019. Now it's very difficult to say what the typical or normal quarter looks like. What I was saying is that when we're looking at, say, new demand, we would have a slower growth at the end of December and as we enter into the summer period. That's what I was trying to say. Otherwise, I mean, our return revenue will be like staying or a solid base which would continue to expand. so right now we are more cautious in into setting expectations for the back half of the year as we i would say seen a a typically strong first quarter or i would say q1 as well and then um it's difficult to say what the back half of the year would look like i mean we we're seeing a i would say uh softer new demand based on everybody's going to vacation right so we want to make sure that the q2 is what we will get right but then I'm hoping I'm giving you enough color there, Tom.

Well, you are, and part of it is I'm not really asking you to guess exactly how the third quarter is going to shake out, but just if you have the number for Q3 for last year, and again, I know it was a weird year because Q3 started pretty slow and then ended pretty hot for SMB. So just as we get to the end of this year, it would be interesting to know if that's going to be a tougher compare or an easier compare just relative to how last year shook out. I would say –

Yeah, Tom, I think it will be tough to compare because the growth at the end of last year was strong. So that will be my take on it. Okay.

No, that's helpful. I appreciate that detail. So thank you very much. It's great. I'll jump back in the queue.

Thank you.

Again, if you would like to ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Again, that is star and the number 1. Your next question comes from Brent Thiel with Jefferies.

Great. This is James on for Brent. Thanks for taking the questions. Could you guys talk about the reasons for raising the full-year revenue guidance but then not taking up the non-GAAP net loss guide, you know, understanding that you're investing more in marketing than you originally planned? But just curious if there's any markets that you're looking to lean more heavily into on the marketing side and just if you could talk about some of those investments, that would be really helpful. Thank you.

Sure. Thank you for the question. as we have uh mentioned in our last quarterly call we will be investing more into the marketing as we go into the year and as you rightly mentioned that that will be largely uh that will be the key i would say investment uh direction where we'll be putting money uh into so as we are growing our revenue we see more room for investments and we want to support the growth as we go into the uh end of the year and as we transition to 2022 There is no particular market which we can say we will be allocating this money on. Our growth is broadly distributed amongst the geographies where it were present. So it's more, I mean, I would say it will be as evenly distributed as it was before.

Got it. And then I guess just another follow-up on the price increases. You know, you've had a couple quarters now, I guess, to digest those. Curious if you could just comment on how that's impacted churn and then just new customer ads and, you know, sort of what you're thinking for the rest of the year.

It's hard to say what was the impact on demand and customer acquisition because there are so many round-the-ears things here and we see such soft months and we see such high level of demo right now around us and I would say it's hard to say what was the impact on new customers.

And for the second, and if we look at the churn levels were, I would say, normal or I would say slightly better than usually in the first half of the year. So if anything, this transition to the new pricing was very successful from what we saw. That's great. Thanks.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to the speakers for closing remarks.

Thanks, everybody, for joining us. We will look forward to seeing you at our virtual investor conference in the third quarter or when we report third quarter results. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference. Everyone else has left the call.