Seth Birnbaum
Analyst · JP Morgan. Your line is open
Thank you, Allise. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us today to discuss our third quarter results. We have enjoyed meeting many of you in EverQuote’s journey it’s still in the early days as insurance shifts online. Before we get rolling, I want to give a quick overview of our agenda today. I’ll briefly highlight our long-term vision and then discuss our Q3 results, which came in favorable to guidance across the board. Then I’ll discuss the challenges we’ve seen in the first half of Q4 and explain what we’re doing about it. The insurance industry is a large traditional industry, it is evolving rapidly through the application of new technology, data and distribution strategies. Here in EverQuote, we’re excited to help drive the future of the industry with the largest online marketplace for insurance shopping in the United States. Ultimately, we want to be the smartest place to shop for online consumers. Last year, 100 million Americans went online looking for insurance. At the same time in the U.S., the non-healthcare insurance providers spends $120 billion on distribution, nearly all of it over $117 billion was spent offline. To address this opportunity, we’ve develop the market leading technology and data platform over the past eight years to make insurance shopping easy, personal and efficient, saving consumers billions of dollars in the process. We believe our financial results for the quarter to illustrate the strength of our marketplace data and analytics, execution on our multichannel and provider inclusive distribution strategy and the strong secular trends in the industry. Our third quarter results were impressive. Revenue increased 30% year-over-year to record levels while variable marketing margin grew by 36% year-on-year. We reported strong year-over-year growth in our auto insurance business, up 19% and delivered strong growth in our newer vertical with home and life up 210%. Our growth was broad based with eight out of our top 10 carriers, increasing our overall spend on our platform over the past year, and an increasing number of insurance agents in our marketplace. We believe these increases are due to the performance of our referral combined with healthy insurance industry dynamics and success in executing our direct strategy with insurance providers. In Q3, we achieved record variable marketing margin of $12.9 million, a 36% increase from the prior year. Our success was driven by our strategy of expanding direct distribution, driving higher coverage and budget from insurance providers combined with profit growth in newer vertical, progress of provider integration and strong growth in our insurance agency business. This resulted in an increase in revenue per quote request of 38%, which more than offset a 6% decline in quote request versus the prior year, which I will dig in on later in the call. We continue to invest in our four key levers for growth. First, increasing provider coverage; second, deepening provider engagement; third, deepening consumer engagement; and finally, attracting more consumers to our marketplace. Let me speak to the progress we’ve made in the quarter on each of these growth levers. First, in the third quarter, we made progress increasing provider coverage by adding more providers, increasing provider budgets, and expanding the coverage and depth of our marketplace. Adding more providers and expanding their coverage helps us provide more choices for our consumers, generate more referrals and that’s greater monetization and overtime through greater competition in our marketplace options also drive higher pricing. In addition to increasing the number of providers in our marketplace, we worked with current partners to broaden their consumer targeting and current policy holder retention campaign and add coverage for our newer verticals. We continue to grow our carrier call program. We launched a dedicated large agent program to increase coverage from some of the largest, highest performing agents in our marketplace. Finally, we added a number of new partners for our home and life verticals and build the pipeline of new partners for commercial wrenches, which we plan to launch in 2019. As a result of these initiatives to grow our network, our revenues per quote request rose 1% sequentially and an increase 38% over the prior year. Second, we continued deepening our engagement with providers through integrations in smart campaigns. Carrier integrations are a powerful lever to drive more sales for partners, greater monetization, and most importantly even more satisfied consumers. We believe these integrations allow consumers to avoid repetitive data entry and improve consumer satisfaction by providing consumers click-to-quote functionality that will effectively offer consumers real time digital pricing. This increases consumer satisfaction by reducing friction in the buying process and offers the opportunity for us to deepen our relationships and increased conversion rates for providers. For example, in the quarter, one of our partners went from a very modest level of data pre-fill to a full click-to-quote integration. The new interface led to nearly a doubling in the number of consumers who receive quotes, which illustrates how integration can help us reduce friction for the consumer, an increased conversion rate for providers. This quarter, we made progress competing 14 new integrations and further deepening 22 existing integrations. That said, we are dependent on providers IT schedule and as such, believe it will be several years before all of our largest partners are fully integrated. Third, we made progress deepening relationships with consumers through investments in our product and technology. As you know, we are focused on making EverQuote the smartest way to shop for insurance online by offering consumers the best digital experience for insurance. Technology is moving quickly and with insurance at the intersection of IoT, AI, and Big Data, we expect many consumers in carriers will be moving from buying and selling insurance to using newly evolved digital tools to price, collect and manage their risk. EverQuote, can and plan to play a major role in this transition. In particular EverDrive our social safe driving app is a cutting edge smartphone app that helps consumers monitor and improve their driving. We believe it is a useful tool to help our providers grow their businesses with attractive safe drivers and will allow providers to reward drivers by giving substantial discounts for safe driving behavior. By integrating the driving data from the EverDrive app, consumers can save money through premium discounts of up to 50%, helping our partners focus their marketing to attract these high value safety oriented consumers and also help to improve consumer’s driving habits. In the quarter, we rolled out EverDrive’s first carrier partnership and EverDrive users bought their first policies via EverDrive partner safe driving discount. EverDrive partner offers are now live in five states. In 2019, we expect to expand the new states add more carriers and offer new features to EverDrive users such as an in-app policy purchases. While we’re excited to see the first policy purchases via EverDrive this quarter, it’s still very early days and we will keep you updated on the product as we expand our pilot program to a broader launch over the coming year. Our fourth and final growth lever is driving more consumers to our market place. And this quarter our progress as increasing volume was offset by a number of challenges, which emerged in our traffic. As reported in our last call, in the second quarter we intentionally moderated quote request volume growth to better optimize pricing and margin. In Q3, we began to accelerate and grow our advertising campaign to grow consumer traffic for our auto vertical, and while we were successful in growing volume sequentially quarter-on-quarter, we encountered several challenges across the traffic, which kept the pace of growth below our internal targets. We saw incremental ad impression that did not result in incremental visits and conversions, which we believe is indicative accretive fatigue and a need per refresh advertising creative. We also saw evolving policies on social media that required adjustments through our creative and as a result, Facebook discontinued our old ad, while we updated our bids for display advertising and search, we also did not see consumer volume increase at the expected pace. To counter these challenges, we accelerated and improved our creative development process, acquiring new expertise, and shifting resources from other projects to creative development. We successfully relaunched Facebook with new ad and expect to continue to expand this campaign. We implemented new bidding strategies and technologies to help us respond more quickly to traffic ship and have seen increasing volume of consumer arrival from both display and search advertising. We accelerated the pace of our product workloads, development and testing to improve the efficiency of all of our channels. While Q4 has started soft in October, in recent weeks, we’ve seen both sequential and year-over-year volume increases, while holding cost per quote lack in Q4 at higher volumes versus the prior quarter. We believe we’ve turned the corner on traffic road and are gaining volume efficiently per our target. At the same time, we’ve seen some pricing compression in our options, while we are actively adjusting our traffic positions to recapture margin dollars, We’re updating our full year 2018 guidance to reflect this trend in reduced margin. While, we’re obviously disappointed that we’re lowering our VMM guidance for the year, we remain bullish about our long-term outlook and financial models. Furthermore, we remain committed to achieving our goal of adjusted EBITDA break even in 2019, and I would expect to update you on that during our next earnings call. With that, let me turn to John for a brief review of our third quarter financial, and then we will take your questions.