Scott Wagner
Analyst · Deutsche Bank
Thanks, Blake, and let me add my warm welcome to everyone as well. As Blake said, we feel great about what we delivered in the first quarter. We grew customers more than 9% over the last year, ending Q1 with approximately 13.1 million paying customers. Our average revenue per user, or ARPU, grew nearly 10% on an annualized basis year-over-year to $115, up from $105 a year ago. As Blake said, bookings grew 13.7%, and solid growth in both customers and ARPU drove revenue up 17.5%, with each of our 3 product lines Domains, Hosting and Presence and Business Applications growing at double-digit rates.
Now we report and measure our top line in 2 ways: bookings and revenue. Our bookings represent the cash we collect when a customer purchases a product. We typically collect the full purchase price at the time of sale and then recognize GAAP revenue ratably over the term of a customer contract, which averages a bit more than a year. Over the past 5 years on average, we've generated 90% of our revenue each year from customers already in our base at the start of the year. While we experience annual customer churn of less than 15%, the 85% of customers who do stay with us typically spend more, which translates into limited annual revenue churn. In short, we have a very stable revenue model.
I'll briefly run through the results in each of our 3 revenue lines. First, on Domains. We continued to extend our market leadership with Domains revenue up 10.4% in Q1 to $199 million. The domain market continues to grow on a secular basis as more businesses and individuals claim and name their ideas online. While Domains revenue continues to expand for us, it now contributes about 53% of revenue, down from 56% a year ago as our other 2 revenue lines grow faster. Our objective in Domains is pretty simple. It's to enable our customers to easily find the perfect name wherever they are in the world, and there are several ways that we're working to make that happen. First, we've continued to expand our domain inventory. With more than 300 gTLDs and ccTLDs now available through GoDaddy and over 760,000 new gTLD domains under management since we began launching the new gTLD program in early '14, including .guru, .club, .nyc and hundreds more names.
Second, we're simplifying and improving our proprietary domain search experience. We see hundreds of millions of searches for domain names on GoDaddy every year, so we're in a unique position to use search patterns to reveal the most refined recommendations to our customers and help improve customer conversion.
Third, we're integrating the primary and secondary markets to allow our users to identify the best domain amongst all available names, including entirely new domains alongside those already-registered domains that might be for sale. As Blake noted, we acquired over 200,000 domains in late April to increase the liquidity in the secondary market, and we've been really pleased with immediate interest in the names that we've acquired.
Our second product group is Hosting and Presence, which grew 21.2% to $140 million in Q1. Hosting and Presence now makes up 37% of total revenue, up from 36% a year ago. We've been improving and expanding our offerings in Hosting over the past year, focusing on providing our customers with great performance, reliability and speed, while adding new options like our industry-leading Managed WordPress product and robust virtual private and dedicated server offerings. And just last week, we launched GoDaddy Pro into general availability, providing web designers and developers with a new suite of products and support that will help them save time as they build and manage websites for their clients. We worked with several thousand web pros in the beta of GoDaddy Pro, creating and refining tools that ease project management for these web professionals. Now we expect these various innovations to allow us to add more products and deepen our business relationships with our existing Pro customers and also to attract more end customers through this really important set of influencers.
On the Presence side, we're continuing to see strong new sales and renewals of our DIY website builder product as well as terrific reception of new products like our Online Store builder and SEO product.
In our third revenue line, Business Applications, we continued to see very strong growth, with revenue up 53% to $37 million for the quarter. Business Applications now makes up nearly 10% of our revenue versus just $7.5 million last year at this time. We're seeing strong adoption of the Microsoft Office 365 product suite we introduced in 2014 and solid renewals of our proprietary workspace email product as well. Our newest product, GoDaddy Email Marketing launched just last month, builds on our acquisition late last year of Mad Mimi and provides our customers with really simple, elegant and effective email marketing tools. The products in our Business Applications suite, in particular, demonstrate the power of our integrated platform to bring new products and service offerings to our customers over time.
Now before we leave revenue, I'll touch briefly on our growth overseas. A key focus for us over the last couple years has been bringing all these products to customers in key international markets in localized form. We've made a huge push into Europe last year and began 2015 with offerings in 37 countries and 17 languages, with a primary focus on major English-speaking markets as well as Latin America and Europe. We gained share throughout 2014 across our major Tier 1 markets, including the U.K., India, Canada and Australia and expect to begin moving into Asia late this year in localized form.
In the first quarter, our international revenue grew 23.4% to $96 million and now makes up over 1/4 of our total revenue. We feel good about how we're delivering on the top line.
Turning to cost. Perhaps the most attractive attribute of our business is our customer unit economics. That's the profits that we generate over the lifetime of a customer relationship versus our cost to acquire that customer. In 2014, we acquired customers for roughly $50 to $60 each. Our average customer has generated more than $550 in gross profit during the course of their relationship with us. That's an LTV-to-CAC, or lifetime value versus our cost to acquire a customer, of approximately 10x and is personally my favorite metric for measuring the power of our business. We closely monitor and manage the metrics that contribute to this ratio. As we focus on moving overseas and target higher potential value segments like web professionals. Our costs to acquire customers may increase over time, but we expect to maintain attractive LTV-to-CAC ratios as the total spending and margin profiles of our customers increase as well.
Looking briefly at our cost lines. Our gross margin increased by more than 280 basis points year-over-year to 63.5% in Q1. This is primarily because our 2 smaller higher-margin revenue lines, Hosting and Presence and Business Apps, are growing faster than our average. In Q1, our 2 go-to-market expense lines, marketing and advertising and customer care, grew the fastest year-over-year as we put more relative muscle behind the products and geographies that we've introduced over the past 15 to 18 months. By contrast, we got operating leverage from our 2 other major operating expense lines, G&A and technology and development. While the pace of growth slowed in technology and development in recent quarters, we still put nearly $68 million into that category in Q1, and over the past 5 years, we've invested nearly $1 billion in technology. Hopefully, you see and appreciate how we're balancing these various operating expenses to both serve our customers and help distance ourselves from other companies as well as, at the same time, allowing for modest margin expansion. And everyone can see how that played out in our Q1 results as our solid top line growth, combined with prudent investment, helped us grow adjusted EBITDA to $94 million in the quarter, up 17.8% year-over-year and producing margins of 25%.
Now I'll note that Q1 typically represents our highest-margin quarter each year. We expect modest margin expansion for the full year overall, but we do expect our profit margins as a percent of revenue in the next several quarters to be lower than Q1. We also converted more than 90% of adjusted EBITDA into unlevered free cash flow in Q1. Unlevered free cash flow grew more than 70% year-over-year to $85 million. We expect our business will continue to generate substantial cash flow, but due to the timing of working capital needs and CapEx, our free cash flow generation may be lumpy quarter-to-quarter. Over time, we expect unlevered free cash flow to be roughly 70% to 90% of adjusted EBITDA.
Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the first quarter with net debt of $1.3 billion. Now as you all know, we completed our IPO immediately following quarter end, issuing 26 million shares at $20 per share and yielding $520 million in gross proceeds. In late April, we paid off a $300 million senior note and $75 million on our credit revolver. If the IPO and use of proceeds had occurred on March 31, our net debt would have been approximately $851 million and our pro forma leverage ratio would have been approximately 3x, which is a really comfortable level for the business over time.
Looking forward, I'll provide some quick color on what we expect for Q2 and the full year financials. For the second quarter ending June 30, 2015, we expect revenue between $390 million and $395 million and adjusted EBITDA to fall into the range of $75 million to $78 million. For the full year ending December 31, we expect revenues to fall in the range of $1.595 billion to $1.605 billion and adjusted EBITDA to fall in the range of $322 million to $327 million. The midpoint of our outlook for the full year translates into year-over-year growth of 15.3% for revenue and 19.5% for adjusted EBITDA, implying an adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 20.3%. We believe these targets allow for a healthy level of reinvestment in products, technology and care for our customers to deliver long-term value as well as delivering a solid incremental return for our shareholders in the near term.
And as we said earlier, we feel great about the strong first quarter that we've delivered, and we look forward to continuing to do more for our customers in the months and years ahead. We believe that GoDaddy's unique combination of products, technology and care will continue to differentiate us in the market and to produce strong financial results going forward.
With that, we'll open it up for questions.