Yelp Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Yelp's second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all 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 the session, you will need to press star 1 in your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to turn the conference over to James Milt, Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us on Yelp's second quarter earnings conference call. Joining me today are Yelp's CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, TFO, David Schwarzbach, and COO, Jed Nachman. We published a shareholder letter on our investor relations website and with the SEC about an hour ago, and I hope everyone had a chance to read it. We'll provide some brief opening comments and then turn to your questions. Now I'll read our safe harbor statement. We'll make certain statements today that are forward-looking and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this call and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release Thank you for joining us today. These measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. In our shareholder letter released this afternoon and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on our website, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP financial measures as well as historical reconciliations of GAAP net income to both adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin. and with that I will turn the call over to Jeremy.

Thanks James and welcome everyone. Our second quarter results demonstrated the resilience of our business in spite of the significant headwinds faced by local economies following the emergence of COVID-19. Yelp's diversified mix of categories, geographies and sales channels helped us adapt to the rapidly changing environment resulting in our traffic and revenue improving over the quarter. I'm proud of the speed and confidence with which our teams confronted one of the most challenging periods in our history. Due to our disciplined actions on expenses in the face of uncertainty, coupled with solid revenue performance, we added $35 million of cash and cash equivalents to our balance sheet. While we began the quarter with a significantly smaller workforce operating in a fully remote environment, We adapted our product efforts and operations to support our users connecting with their favorite local businesses in a socially distant world. We provided new tools for local businesses to connect with our consumers, allowing them to post custom messages, to update their service offerings to include virtual options, and to list health and safety measures. We also continued to make progress on important strategic initiatives, including home and local services, which has long been our largest and often fastest growing category. We continue to increase the percentage of monetized leads through additional improvements to our ad system, including better matching and requester quotes. Revenue in the subcategory home services grew slightly compared to the second quarter of 2019. We remain focused on evolving our go-to-market to improve our sales efficiency over time. Throughout the quarter, our local sales team maintained a consistent level of productivity, even while working remotely. We also delivered a new profile product, Yelp logo, and scaled our Connect offering. Our continued investment in self-serve helped drive strong acquisition in the channel, which reached near record levels of advertising starts in June. Though the pace of economic recovery remains uncertain and will not be uniform, we have confidence in our strong balance sheet and our proven ability to operate with flexibility in this environment. This month, we are pleased to return many of our furloughed employees and restore reduced salaries for our teams. This sets us up well to reestablish our growth momentum and capture demand as the economy recovers. With that, I'd like to turn it over to David.