Earnings Labs

Etsy, Inc. (ETSY)

Q2 2019 Earnings Call· Fri, Aug 2, 2019

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day ladies and gentlemen and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q2 2019 Etsy, Inc. earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following management's prepared remarks, we will host a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded for replay purposes. It is now my pleasure to hand the conference over to Deb Wasser, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Deb Wasser

Analyst

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Etsy's Q2 conference call. Joining me today are Josh Silverman, CEO and Rachel Glaser, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, just a reminder that our remarks today include forward-looking statements relating to our financial guidance and key drivers thereof, anticipated marketing spend and other current and planned investments and their anticipated impact on our future financial results, anticipated product launches and impact of experiments, including on conversion rates and anticipated impact on our future financial results. Our actual results may differ materially. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties which are described in our press release, our 10-Q filed with the SEC on May 9, 2019 and subsequent reports that we file with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on our beliefs and assumptions today and we don't have any obligation to update them. Also during the call, we present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release, which you can find on our Investor Relations website. A link to the replay of this call will also be available there and if you prefer to access a replay via phone, you can find that information in the press release as well. We have created a slide presentation to accompany today's opening remarks and recommend you follow along. With that, I will turn the call over to Josh.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Thanks Deb and good afternoon everyone. It's been another encouraging quarter across the board with continued growth in GMS, driven by our portfolio of marketing and product investments. GMS drove increases in revenue and EBITDA and services revenue was solid resulting in an overall steady take rate of 16.5%. We are making great progress improving our product experience and our marketing capabilities and it's paying off. In addition, we have a number of bold new initiatives which we are excited to walk you through detailing how we expect them to fuel our growth even further. First, let's dive in the highlights of our second quarter progress starting with marketing. We have a full funnel marketing approach and in 2019, we have been optimizing our investments in every part of the funnel. In the first quarter, we paused our spend in certain channels in order to test their incrementality and to refine our attribution model. As a result of these tests, we entered the second quarter with an optimized portfolio and conviction around some of the new channels we tested. First, we ramped our spend on Google performance marketing while maintaining and even increasing ROI through efficiency and infrastructure improvements. Second, we are making progress unlocking potential in social channels. We found strategies such as dynamic retargeting where we are seeing positive returns and are encouraged by our progress. Over time, we believe social channels can become a powerful lever to drive incremental growth. Third, we launched a new TV campaign called Belongings, which focuses on buying things that matter to you. It aired for seven weeks on national cable and select digital channels from late-April through mid-June. We are very pleased with the results. Our market research indicates that visits and purchase intent are significantly higher for customers who were…

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Thanks Josh. In the second quarter, GMS grew 23% on a constant currency basis and 21% on an as reported basis, an acceleration versus prior quarter and last year, fueled by both increased product development velocity and optimize investment in mature and new marketing channels. Revenue grew 37% year-over-year to $181 million with growth in both marketplace and services. And adjusted EBITDA was $40 million with EBITDA margin expanding 100 basis points to 22% in Q2 as we continued to benefit from robust revenue growth. Let me provide a little color on our revenue and adjusted EBITDA results. First, marketplace revenue benefited from 21% GMS growth and the related transaction revenue also benefiting from last year's price increase. As a reminder, in the beginning of Q3, we anniversary the increase in our marketplace take rate which has been a significant driver of marketplace revenue growth over the past year. Next, promoted listings revenue was the largest factor contributing to growth in services revenue growing 32% in Q2. As discussed on our last call, in the second quarter of last year we had a onetime benefit of $2.8 million related to Etsy shipping label revenue that did not recur in 2019. In addition, some of our development squads shifted focus to work on Etsy Ads somewhat delaying new product launches that may have had a positive impact on promoted listing revenue. And the last note on revenue, 24% of active sellers have adopted our shipping label service in the four markets where we offer this product or approximately 430,000 sellers. This is an increase of approximately 40,000 sellers compared to the prior year. Despite this growth, we saw a headwind from shipping label revenue as the USPS eliminated one of the rate classes causing sellers to shift to a lower margin…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from the line of Heath Terry with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Heath Terry

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Great. Thank you very much. Just on Etsy Ads, can you give us a sense as you are obviously dealing with a lot of sellers that have a budget planned around this. Should we expect that this has a potential for net ad spend at Etsy to be down in some part? Or is there enough demand across the platform to be able to reinvest all of the offset from sellers? And then on the guidance for GMS, given the outperformance this quarter relative to expectations as well as the free shipping on the horizon, any reason that we shouldn't expect sort of further upside to the GMS growth over the second half relative to what you guys have guided to? Or is there potentially something we are missing in that?

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

So I will take the second question first and then Josh will take the one on the Etsy ad spend. So first of all, thank you for your questions. And I would say, we have given our best estimates for GMS for the year and so we are comfortable with that number. Baked into there is some conservatism around what we might or might not see from sales tax. So that could be, we are doing our best estimate of that based on what we have seen thus far. We pointed out that that could be a headwind or the macro factors could be a headwind. So we are doing our best there. And then we are also just launching, we have not yet launched Etsy Ads, we are giving you kind of a debut of that product that's yet to come. So that's a fairly big unknown for us. And we are just launching our shipping guarantee. The marketing for that doesn't even start until September. So I think we are doing our best based on extensive testing and speaking with sellers and to give the guidance that we understand, we are pretty confident that we given you good numbers but there's a few unknowns as we pointed out.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

And on Etsy Ads, it's great question, Heath. And you know, I think it's complicated, this new program. So I will start with, we are really excited about it. If you ask sellers what they want from Etsy, one of the top things they are going to say is the opportunity to invest more to drive my own growth. And so this is, we think, over time is going to really make the pie bigger as it's going really give sellers the opportunity to invest more to drive their own growth, have more agency which we think is great and I think they are going to think is great as well. In the near term, it's really important that we are able to put that money to work in a way that drives incremental growth for them and good return on ad spend. And they are going to test and learn their way into the program. And so we are going to be testing and building out our capabilities and they are going be testing. And getting more sellers to come in the program and more sellers to take their budget up is something that we wanted to do over time and we are optimistic is going to happen. In the near term, you know, we are going to have to see how it works. So we are very optimistic about the program in the medium term. It's complicated and we are going to be navigating it in the months to come. All that said, I think that the guidance that we have given you for this year is appropriate. You know there's a number of puts and takes and I think it's appropriate.

Heath Terry

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Great. Thank you both.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Thanks Heath.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Edward Yruma with KeyBanc. Your line is now open.

Edward Yruma

Analyst · Edward Yruma with KeyBanc. Your line is now open

Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I guess as a follow-up Etsy Ads, when do you think you will hit the crossover point where the decline in Etsy funded performance marketing will allow you to basically hold or leverage ad spend? And then I guess as a follow-up, you have asked a lot of your sellers this 12 months between the higher take rate, now free shipping and now potentially asking them to increase advertising through Etsy Ads. What's your sense of the vibrancy of your supplier base, maybe their margins and kind of how happy they are with a lot of changes that will be in place? Thank you.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Edward Yruma with KeyBanc. Your line is now open

Hi Ed. Thanks for your question. This is Rachel. First of all, the vibrancy is robust. We had 18% active seller growth this quarter, up to 2.3 million now. And Josh can speak more about some of the ways we will roll the shipping guarantee out to our sellers. But in rolling out, as we did with pricing we did it very carefully through lots of marketing to them and gauging feedback free testing on all of that and that went as we expected it to. We would expect the same thing with Etsy Ads. We think that Etsy Ads is going to be something that they are very excited about. It gives, we know from the budgets that give us and the amount that we are able to utilize, they have appetite to spend a whole lot more than we are able to spend on their behalf. And this will put more control in them being able to create growth to their own shops and listings. So we think this is something that they will be very pleased about.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Edward Yruma with KeyBanc. Your line is now open

Yes. Just to build on that. This is a pioneering new program and I think that's pretty exciting. I do expect that the reception from sellers will be, on the whole, very positive because it gives them more agency and Etsy is very committed to marketing our sellers. This gives us a chance to move up the funnel in a way that each individual seller can't. So we can do things like give them more TV advertising, driving people the homepage, brand awareness of Etsy driving frequency, getting people to download the app. And that results in more organic sales for our sellers, which is great for all of our sellers. If some of them want to opt-in to further fuel their growth, they can do Etsy Ads and it's optional for them to do that, but it allows them to even further fuel their growth. And as I talked about in the script, there is a lot of reasons why they might have more appetite to do that than we do. Their gross margin for the 5% commission, when you run the math on how much which we can afford to, for example, buy a Google PLA there's many circumstances where I think a seller would be ready, willing and able to spend more on that click than we can. So this really is an opportunity for the sellers to invest in an area that they are suited to invest. That allows us to reallocate to where we can best use our income statement to their best interest. To your question about when and how we would be moving and reallocating that timing, we are heading into the fourth quarter and we will continue to be investing ourselves and having our sellers invest. The most important thing is that they get a really good return on ad spend and we are going to make sure that we stay very close to this, that our sellers get a good return. That's what's going to have them liking the program and continuing to invest. So we are going to be continuing to invest with them, at least for a period of time to make sure that the returns are really strong.

Edward Yruma

Analyst · Edward Yruma with KeyBanc. Your line is now open

Great. Thanks so much guys.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Edward Yruma with KeyBanc. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Edward Yruma with KeyBanc. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Kunal Madhukar with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Kunal Madhukar

Analyst · Kunal Madhukar with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open

Hi. Thanks. A quick one on the long term growth outlook that you have on one of the slides. It still remains at like 16% to 20%. Given free shipping and given that naturally whether it is 84% of the shipping charge that moves into GMS or not, I was hoping that that would have, the 16% to 20% might have inched up more than that. And then the propensity to buy, that side of the equation and the increased intent to buy, how much would that impact the 16% to 20% target as we kind of think about it?

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Kunal Madhukar with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open

Yes. Thanks for the question and thanks for your optimism and enthusiasm about the long term growth. We share that. So we gave those long term targets just in March and we are not in the habit of updating those on a very, very frequent basis. So we gave those just in March. We are confident. We were confident in those targets when we gave them. We are very confident in those targets. We continue to be very confident in those targets today. And we are not updating them at this time.

Kunal Madhukar

Analyst · Kunal Madhukar with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Kunal Madhukar with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Nick Jones with Citi. Your line is now open.

Nick Jones

Analyst · Nick Jones with Citi. Your line is now open

Hi. Thanks for taking the question. We have heard you talk a little bit about educating sellers over time and then we have kind of seeing some moves that may be for sellers and other to kind of adopt the kind of behavior you are looking for. Are there kind of other opportunities to push sellers in the right direction so you can maybe bypass some of the more tedious education? And then a quick follow-up on whether maybe Prime Day had an outsized impact this year compared to previous years?

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Nick Jones with Citi. Your line is now open

Yes. Thanks for the question. I really appreciate it. It's our job running a platform to look after the good at the comments and we just have more data and it gives us an opportunity to gather more data and sometimes have more insight than any individual seller would have a chance to have on their own. I do want to say, we do not consider education to be tedious at all. We consider it to be absolutely our day job. It's really important that we take the time and have empathy for the fact that sellers, they really count on us. It's a really big part of their lives and we really get that and this is a partnership. And so we worked really hard to communicate with them. So I think the way we have handled shipping, I hope, is indicative of how we think about this. We have been talking to sellers about free shipping for two years and we have been providing a lot of educational information. We have been giving them a lot of data and we been taking stronger and stronger strides to encourage our marketplace in the direction that it's gone. So the announcement we just made is the strongest. And again, it's designed to allow our sellers to compete on a level playing field with all of the other e-commerce players out there where when you look around you see free shipping almost everywhere you go. And so we are just trying to make sure that our sellers get to a level playing field. We do have some kind of courage and conviction because of our role as a marketplace we get more data than any individual seller has and that means as a leadership team sometimes we need to lead and educate and communicate to our sellers and then we will do some things to help make sure that the whole marketplace gets to what serves our sellers best and we will keep doing that.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Nick Jones with Citi. Your line is now open

Second question was Amazon Prime Day.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Nick Jones with Citi. Your line is now open

Say that again. I am sorry.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Nick Jones with Citi. Your line is now open

Nick, your second question was on Amazon Prime Day, correct?

Nick Jones

Analyst · Nick Jones with Citi. Your line is now open

Yes. Just if it had an outsize impact this year compared to previous years?

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Nick Jones with Citi. Your line is now open

I don't think we are commenting on individual days, but the guidance we have given for the rest of the year, we think appropriately incorporates how we see the rest of the year.

Nick Jones

Analyst · Nick Jones with Citi. Your line is now open

Got it. Thank you.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Nick Jones with Citi. Your line is now open

Yes. Thank you.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Nick Jones with Citi. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Shweta Khajuria with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Shweta Khajuria

Analyst · Shweta Khajuria with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open

Thank you. Two questions please. One on the impact on revenue from shipping and Etsy Ads. So can you quantify a little bit, so the full year guide increased by $12 million at the midpoint. How should we think about where it's coming from of that $12 million between the two? And then the second on seller adoption for the shipping service, Rachel, I think you mentioned 24%. I may have gotten that wrong. So what percentage of sellers do you think have adopted right now? And how do you think that grows in the back half once it's fully launched? Do you think it would be 50% of sellers, 70% exiting the year that would be using the free shipping? Thank you.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Shweta Khajuria with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open

Great. So I will take the first and Rachel take the second. On the first, your question is really, can we break down the revenue increase, I think? When we were increasing our guidance, how do we break down the components? And we are not going to give you specifics, but let me try to give you directional and dimensionalize it. First, we are taking up our GMS guidance and as we pick up our GMS guidance there is some revenue flow-through the just naturally comes from that. So that's a component of why we are taking up revenue. When you talk about GMS for just a second, we entered the year giving guidance and when we entered the year, we had a sense that we were going to make progress on free shipping. In fact I said in every opportunity that this year, we will make really material progress on free shipping. We feel really good about the progress that we have made in the first half of the year on product and marketing. We think that those teams have done really well. And we have had a chance to test some of our free shipping ideas and do simulations and things like that. And the combination of all of those make us even more confident in the second half of the year. And thus the increase in guide to GMS which has some revenue impact. But the larger piece of increasing our guidance on revenue is Etsy Ads. And there are two components to Etsy Ads. One is simply a reclassification. So Google Shopping did not use to count as revenue and now it does. So the simple reclassification of Google Shopping from not revenue to revenue has an impact obviously on our revenue. But all of that is a straight flow-through with no gross margin. The second thing is, we expect increased seller adoption and increased budget, which will in fact, grow revenue. And that is true revenue growth that has real implications for revenue over time. To the extent that that's on the Google Shopping side, that still a pass-through but again over time we think Etsy Ads has real margin accretive value to Etsy.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Shweta Khajuria with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open

So before I jump into the second question, Shweta, I just want to punctuate the point that the revenue guide that we gave, at the midpoint it implies a 17.1% take rate, up from the 16.5% take rate that we have seen in the first half of the year. So I wanted to make that point to you, you are rightly capturing the fact that the revenue guide was up significant increase in our run rate. On the shipping, I just want to make sure I am clear that. I did say that shipping adoption grew to 24% for sellers in the four markets that we offer it. So it's offered in four markets. So we are talking about shipping labels and products that we offer them as a seller service. That is not 24% adoption of the free shipping guarantee that we have just rolled out. We did not give a metric on how much that has been adopted but we are really pleased. The progress is exceeding what we expected, where we expected to be at this point.

Shweta Khajuria

Analyst · Shweta Khajuria with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open

Okay. Thank you very much, Josh and Rachel. Got it.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Shweta Khajuria with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Shweta Khajuria with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Rick Patel with Needham & Company. Your line is now open.

Rick Patel

Analyst · Rick Patel with Needham & Company. Your line is now open

Hi guys. Thanks for taking the question and congrats on the strong execution. I am hoping for some color on GMS per active buyer. So good great progress there. Can you provide some granularity of what's driving that growth? I think Rachel called out frequency, but I am just curious, are your search results optimizing product pricing as well? And just curious where the opportunities are and how sustainable the continued increases are?

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Rick Patel with Needham & Company. Your line is now open

Yes. The number one driver is while we are seeing visits per visitor does well and I think you know TV is helpful to remind people of when to come back to Etsy, sort of more moments in which we are relevant. So that's helpful. And conversion rate continues to see progress. So it turns out that many of the people who shopped on Etsy come back to Etsy, not infrequently. We have just got to get them up online to buy. And so we continue to see some progress in conversion rate as well. And it's really the combination of those two that are driving the GMS per buyer. What I didn't mention is AOV. So we have seen less progress to-date on average order value. So the increase in GMS per buyer really is a function of people buying more often. So far it's not so much that they are buying more expensive products. Although, I think that there is a real opportunity for us to move AOV as well over time. And we are excited about the potential there.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Rick Patel with Needham & Company. Your line is now open

I will just add that we had so much to talk about in this call that we didn't give as much color around which products we were working on that drove the conversion rate increases or the visit increases. We did talk about a tremendous number of product wins and an increase in velocity of products that we are putting into market. And as we follow up after this call at various conferences and on one-on-one calls, we can share a little bit more color on the progress that we making on search and other, the four rights to win that Josh laid out.

Rick Patel

Analyst · Rick Patel with Needham & Company. Your line is now open

And can you contextualize marketing from a U.S. versus international perspective? I am just curious how these cohorts have behaved differently to various marketing initiatives you have tested and how we should think about the opportunity going forward?

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Rick Patel with Needham & Company. Your line is now open

Yes. A great question. So first, let me break out into performance marketing and then above the line. In performance marketing, we apply pretty much the same standard all around the world. So we talked about our ROI thresholds we apply to the marginal until the next dollar has a margin of return less than our cost capital. That we do everywhere. Above the line marketing, we have really only been testing in the U.S. And so we aren't really able to talk about the impact of above the line marketing outside the U.S. yet. But we do expect that to change. But at this time, we have begun with above the line marketing in the U.S. Did that answer your question?

Rick Patel

Analyst · Rick Patel with Needham & Company. Your line is now open

Yes. It does. Thanks very much.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Rick Patel with Needham & Company. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Rick Patel with Needham & Company. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Maria Ripps with Canaccord. Your line is now open.

Maria Ripps

Analyst · Maria Ripps with Canaccord. Your line is now open

Great. Thank you for taking my question. Just a follow-up on frequency. Any incremental color you could share with us on your progress with improving frequency? And then in terms of habitual buyers, can you talk about how long they have been with Etsy on average? What are the most responsive to you? And what are some things that you see in their behavior that maybe you can leverage across your broader user base?

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Maria Ripps with Canaccord. Your line is now open

So the metrics that we gave in the call was that our habitual buyers were again the fastest growing consumer segment. And so those are the buyers that spend $200 or more and visit us six times or more -- or six or more purchases rather in a 12-months period. So we are pleased that we are influencing that category through our marketing and product initiatives. The other we see is that GMS on a trailing 12-month basis per active buyer continues to grow. It grew to over $100 in the quarter for the first time ever and that was the fifth consecutive quarter of growth. And when you look at that number on a two-year stack, it's again an acceleration. So that's a proxy for us saying, on average over a 12 month period. So it smoothes out seasonality as we have more active buyers. So they are buyers that have only come back to us in a 12 month period, that number is growing. And so that, to us, is one of the metrics to give that shows that frequency is actually having an impact.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Maria Ripps with Canaccord. Your line is now open

And in terms of describing the sort of average tenure of habitual buyers or some other characteristics, first, they tend to not show up as habitual buyers on day one. They tend to been with us for more than a year. So what you see is people steadily use us more and more. And what seems to differentiate a habitual buyer versus a not is that they could understand the treasure chest of Etsy. They figure out how to find the best stuff on Etsy, which as we talked about at length, we want to make that easier. And these are the folks who figure out how to navigate that. And they have their own tips and tricks. So spending time with them figuring out what those tips and tricks are and how to build those into the core experience, so everyone can have that experience is part of what we do. But I take heart in those other than that describing a habitual buyer is a little tough. It's not that they are all wedding people or all baby people or all home furnishing people. It turns out that they are pretty diverse in almost every other way. And what I like about that is it suggests that it's not a small niche where it's only one or two use cases that lead to this behavior. There are many different use cases that can lead to this behavior. We have just got to make it easier for the sort of mass audience that to find the treasure chest that the habitual buyers have had the temerity to do. And I think we can get a lot of value there.

Maria Ripps

Analyst · Maria Ripps with Canaccord. Your line is now open

Great. Thank you both.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Maria Ripps with Canaccord. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Maria Ripps with Canaccord. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Brian Moyock with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Brian Moyock

Analyst · Brian Moyock with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Thanks for taking my question. Just to go back to the last question a little bit on new buyer growth. Rachel, I might have heard it. My signal was in and out. Did you mention that you might be changing the ROI payback, kind of extending the payback that you are applying for the marketing spend going forward? And if that is happening, just to us talk about what's causing that strategic change? And how do you think about incremental cost of buyers going forward next?

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Brian Moyock with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Yes. So we talked about that because we have shifted the mix of our overall spend to include upper funnel marketing which is television and digital video, those tend to have longer term payback periods because we are relying on the frequency of the impression causing people to understand why Etsy and when Etsy. So that takes longer for that to have or it has more legs to it also. But we haven't reduced our ROI hurdle and we have the same expectation of ROI. It's just the payback period shifts out a little bit.

Brian Moyock

Analyst · Brian Moyock with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Got it. And then we go to the other half of the equation, so the conversion points. I know you have mentioned a few times about couple of specific examples, we have conversion wins. I guess I just wanted to ask if you could sort of nail down the one or two key points of friction you still on the platform to really drive higher conversion from like repeat visits? And what are the things that you are really watching to drive faster overall GMS per provider from better conversion?

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Brian Moyock with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

So at the risk of being boring, but I don't mind boring because we keep coming back to the same things. Can we really have a great search and discovery experience so people can find the good stuff easily? We have built the trust in the brand so that buying from someone you have never met feels safe. It's really those core, can you find it and do you have the confidence to buy it element. And what I hope you see is us making really steady progress, sometimes incremental, sometimes more bold in those journeys. I think the free shipping launch over the past few weeks is an example of us doing something more bold in that direction.

Brian Moyock

Analyst · Brian Moyock with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Great. Thanks.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Brian Moyock with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Thanks Brian.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Brian Moyock with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

Jason Helfstein

Analyst · Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open

Thanks. I wanted to dig in a bit more I guess around marketing and how you magnify everything that we have effectively put in place over the past call it five quarters. I assume you have done testing around all of the new initiatives, labels, shipping and then big data, right. Your kind of movement to the cloud and leveraging all that. When do you start to see the confidence behind that to the point more marketing and bring it all together? Thanks.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open

When you say confidence around the marketing, do you mean the return on our marketing spend or the shipping? I am sorry. Can you provide a little bit of context?

Jason Helfstein

Analyst · Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open

Yes. The increase in marketing spend to drive adoption. So I think that is what I have been trying to understand, when you are confident to step on the marketing gas to drive the topline?

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open

I see. Great. Got it. So look, we spend what we think we can get a really good return on. And we have a lot of discipline around that and we are proud of that discipline. So what you are seeing us do right now is take our margins down just a tiny bit, which I think is really good news because it means we have got a lot of confidence in the marketing initiatives and the product initiatives we have right now. So much so that we are going to spend a little more into them and we feel really good about that. So let me give you a little more color, maybe you would be interested in that. So for example, in performance marketing, we think that we can have better data feeds. And having better data feeds, we are going to be able to be more effective with folks like Google and some of the social channels. We think that our bidding strategies can become more nuanced and segmented. And we think that's going to have an impact. We think our landing pages can get better. And Ryan, our new CMO, is a real expert and really technical in these areas and by the way our marketing team has been doing a fantastic job without a CMO for the past few months and I want to call a shout out to that team that's really done a great job in spite of not having a CMO. But with Ryan there, they are even more equipped to go attack those kinds of opportunities that are going to make our marketing in the performance channels more effective. And then in TV, we are pretty new to TV. We have been doing this for less than a year. And so the size of budget we are putting to TV relative to folks that have been doing this for a year or less is actually, I have done a lot of benchmarking of peer companies and we are not being that timid, I don't think for folks that have only been doing it for one year. That said, we are optimistic that if it continues to work like it seems to be working so far, you might see us take our TV budget up further in time to come and we are excited. And I will say that the launch of Etsy Ads makes the pie bigger. This gives us the chance to bring the sellers in the equation even more and let them help to fund some of the performance marketing channel, which they are uniquely well positioned to do so we can invest even more above the funnel and make the pie bigger for everyone.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open

And Jason, this is Rachel. I will just add that Josh mentioned in his prepared remarks that we pulse TV on and off and TV will pulse back on as we enter the late third quarter into the fourth quarter. So I think we are spending a healthy amount on upper funnel marketing. And then on our performance marketing, we don't even give the team a budget. We give them an ROI hurdle and they spend as much as they can up to where that hurdle is. So we feel like we continue to optimize there so that they can spend more. We continue to test less mature channels so that we can give them that kind of like open to buy to go out and spend up to the ROI hurdle and we have confidence in the channel. So I think I would consider us to be on a more aggressive side of using marketing as a lever for growth.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open

Profitable growth, right. Just we are super focused on profitable growth.

Operator

Operator

All right. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Marvin Fong with BTIG. Your line is now open.

Marvin Fong

Analyst · Marvin Fong with BTIG. Your line is now open

Great. Thank you for taking my question. Just to drill a little bit more into the Etsy Ads. So I understand what you are saying about sellers have better economics so they can spend more than Etsy might otherwise be. So is it inconceivable that they will actually be spending more in aggregate than Etsy's current paid search budget? It sounds like in the long run, they can probably be spending multiples than what you guys are spending right now? And just mechanically, how would that work in that, you guys will check to see if that seller has an Etsy Ads budget? And if not, you will purchase that paid ad yourself still? Or how mechanically is that going to work? Thanks.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Marvin Fong with BTIG. Your line is now open

Yes, great question. So let me start with the second and then go to the first. So mechanically, yes. A seller gives us a budget and then we look at their listings in their shop and we work with Google to figure out what would be a responsible bid to buy a visit on their behalf. And we look at what we estimate the conversion rate of that visit would look like and therefore what would the return on ad spend. And what we are really tying to do is back into what do we think their ROAS will be and spend as much as we can reasonably spend on their behalf while maintaining a good ROS. And we obviously have much more sophisticated tools than any individual seller would be able to have on their own and are landing on the Etsy domain, which has a lot of confidence and performance better on average than landing on an individual seller's domain. There is real value in that as well. So that's how the program works. And could it be bigger than Etsy's existing performance marketing spend over time? I would say it's too early to tell. We are going to come into this in the second half of the year and test and learn our way in. But we think it can drive a lot of value for sellers and we are really excited about that. And so we are optimistic about the future of this program.

Marvin Fong

Analyst · Marvin Fong with BTIG. Your line is now open

Great. And just as a follow-up, it sounded like you were saying that social retargeting is now ROI positive? If that's the case, are you planning on expanding your marketing spend in that channel? And could you just give us an idea of how big that channel is maybe relative to TV or some of the mass channels?

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Marvin Fong with BTIG. Your line is now open

Yes. So we did call out that we are finding some tactics within social that we have now figured out how to get ROI positive with dynamic retargeting being one. And so you should expect us to use the same methodology, which is the next dollar should still be ROI positive. And when the next dollar isn't ROI positive, we don't spend that dollar. So as we unearth tactics, we use them. Dynamic retargeting means that someone who has been on Etsy and has found a particular product on Etsy, we might have the opportunity if they are also on Facebook too. So it's only a certain community of people that you can reach. So the size of that is smaller than being able to target, for example, everyone on a social channel. But I think it is early days for Etsy's marketing capabilities and I think that as we invest more in better mar-tech, I think we can continue to unlock more opportunities to invest in growth.

Marvin Fong

Analyst · Marvin Fong with BTIG. Your line is now open

Great. Thanks Josh. Thanks Rachel.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Marvin Fong with BTIG. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Rachel Glaser

Analyst · Marvin Fong with BTIG. Your line is now open

Thanks Marvin.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Elliott Alper with D.A. Davidson. Your line is now open.

Elliott Alper

Analyst · Elliott Alper with D.A. Davidson. Your line is now open

Great. Thank you. Now that you have lapped your price increases last year, how should we, if at all, think about your strategy regarding future price increases? And secondly, you touched on this a little bit before, but eBay on its earnings call indicated GMS growth has negatively impacted by 100 basis points due to online sales taxes. Are you, if at all, quantifying the impact for you? Thank you.

Josh Silverman

Analyst · Elliott Alper with D.A. Davidson. Your line is now open

Sure. I will start with the second and then go to the first. We are not qualifying it, but we think we have appropriately baked it into guidance. It is affecting. We do see that when we begin to collect state sales taxes, it does affect conversion rate and GMS to some extent and there is real price elasticity. So the states that have higher sales tax, it affects more than states that have lower sales tax. So we are seeing that. California is coming online soon. That's a big state. While we are not quantifying it, we are seeing some impact and we believe, although time will tell, we believe that we have appropriately baked it into the guidance that we have given you. With regard to price increases and take rate, I think that Etsy Ads is a really great example of an optional service we can offer to sellers that delivers a lot of value for them and makes the pie bigger for everyone. So this is an opportunity for us to keep our mandatory fees low while offering great value-added services that they may or may not choose to opt in to but as they choose to opt in to them, the effect is that Etsy's take rate goes up. And so we are quite excited about Etsy Ads and the future of Etsy Ads. And if you look at just taking the midpoint of guidance for the second half of this year, it implies as Rachel says that our take rate goes from 16.5% today to 17.1% in the second half of the year and does that in a way that we think sellers are going to really like. They don't have to use Etsy Ads if they don't want to. They are going to get a ton of value from the Etsy platform, if they don't use it. But they can get even more value by adopting Etsy Ads and we like that strategy.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude the program and you may all disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day.