Kedar Deshpande
Analyst · Barclays
Hello, and thanks for joining us. Throughout this past year, we have talked a lot about the fundamentals of our turnaround strategy, reduce our cost structure, and at the same time, improve our core marketplace experience. Let's talk about the progress we have made on both fronts. We are significantly streamlining our cost structure and allowing it to grow our business is today, we are well on the way to achieve our Phase 1 goal to take out 150 million of annual costs and expect to hit this run rate by the end of 2023. We complete a big majority of headcount actions only in the fourth quarter, and expect to begin, to realize the benefits of all right sizing starting in 2023. Our new cost structure should provide us with significant operating leverage and ability to sustainably generate positive free cash flow as we execute on our turnaround strategy. Moving forward, we will continue to look for opportunities to optimize our cost footprint to ensure it remains aligned with current business while still giving us room to grow. And for 2023, we have a goal to identify an additional $50 million of savings and related cost actions by the end of the year. We are also executing on initiatives to improve our core marketplace. And during third quarter, our local category was stable, with global local billings that came in at 49% of 2019. This was in line with our expectation and consistent with our performance levels over the last six months. We are orienting our marketplace around solving everyday customer problems. And to do this, we need to deliver on two strategic priorities; improve our customer experience to ensure customer interactions on our marketplace are relevant, credible and actionable every time they want to come to our marketplace; and improve inventory density our marketplace to ensure, we have the right breadth and depth of inventory to satisfy customer intent. I believe that, if we get customer experience right and if we get our inventory density right, it will help us meet our customers' needs every time they come to our marketplace. Doing this will unlock a customer's willingness to buy local experiences and services from us far more frequently. So going forward, improving local purchase frequency is the most important metric and will be the key major of how well, we are executing our strategy. We are going to be relentless in driving this metric higher. Today, we are seeing customers buy just two to three units of inventory from us per year and we are only retaining 30% of these customers on average for more than one year. These metrics are disappointing, given we are a horizontal marketplace. I believe that, this is because we are not creating the reason for customers to engage with us more frequently. And so, we have created a roadmap of experiments and initiatives with the goal of driving purchase frequency higher. These include; improving search and relevance, enhancing the way we work with our merchant partners, creating new customer incentives and testing new marketing channels and strategies to drive demand. So far, this year, we made a lot of progress on initiatives aimed at building trust with our customers and we expect this progress to help support healthier customer retention going forward. As a marketplace, we have to create an environment that all, but ensures customers will have positive experience every time they come to Groupon. We made meaningful progress here this year. First, we make sure that when customers come to our marketplace and search up a deal on something, they can trust that we offer the best deal. We put a process in place in North America to improve our ability to monitor pricing to make sure customers can't find a better deal anywhere else. Second, customers need to trust that whenever they purchase on Groupon, they will be able to use and that they will have a great experience. This is nonnegotiable for us and we implemented a process to remove high net binding merchants from our platform and proactively identify and help those merchants with degrading refund trends. Trust is one of the foundational elements for the Groupon customer experience we want to deliver. We are also focused on unleashing the power of horizontal marketplace by experimenting with pricing and promotions to encourage your customers to make more purchases across more of our verticals more frequently. We are testing and learning in a number of areas that will give us insights into how we can improve retention of both our existing customers and our new customers. Let me walk you two of these experiments. Last quarter, I told you about a significant test, we were running to encourage cross vertical purchases. The goal of the test was to get customers to browse a specific set of inventory in our catalog, instead of coming to our marketplace for one specific deal. We believe that by surfacing new, specific inventory vertical to our existing customer, making their marketplace experience more interesting, we can improve customer retention. So, the test offers incentives to customers who have purchased inventory from our dining vertical to make a subsequent purchase within our beauty and wellness vertical and vice versa. During the test, we increase the cross vertical purchasers 150% versus a control group. Based on this success, we began scaling this enchanting to our global marketplace in the third quarter. This initiative is currently scaled in 11 countries, and we expect to ramp it up fully in North America before the end of the year. We are also testing ways to leverage Groupon incentives as a means to get new customers to browse and engage with our full catalog of inventory. In our initial test, we are giving Groupon Bucks to customers when they purchase our full price market rate inventory. Our hypothesis is that by providing this additional value via bucks, G-Bucks, it will incentivize customers to purchase our full price inventory and give them back to Groupon later to use their G-Bucks and make another purchase. Our initial test results have been promising. We have seen anywhere from 6% to 22% lift in conversion depending on the test. We are also seeing repeat purchases. I have to say, it's still very early, and we are only testing our Atlanta market. But we are excited about the potential of this initiative to improve conversion and purchase frequency. We will continue testing, learning and tracking our existing test cohorts before scaling in North America and international markets. Another way to incentivize customers is to meet customers where they are by making it easier for them to purchase and book their services and experiences with merchants they know and love. We had a great win here recently with a large theme park, Universal Studios Hollywood. Our team was able to create a bespoke integration that transition this merchant from physical voucher based experience to an online bookable experience that provides customers with a date based pricing and convenient streamlined ticketing experience. This update means that we can now provide our customers with a more seamless search and purchase and redemption journey. In addition to improving trust and driving and unleashing the power of our horizontal marketplace like other marketplaces out there, we are continuing looking at ways to improve search and relevance. We recently began testing a new ranking algorithm in some of our international markets and have seen early but promising results. In our tests, we are adding an auto complete function that features specific deal offerings in the search drop down menu. So for example, when a customer begins typing in sushi, instead of providing matching recommended search terms, like sushi making class or sushi buffet, the search bar will populate with local and relevant sushi dish available on our marketplace. This allows them to click directly onto a deep age, keeping the search landing page quality together with the goal of driving higher conversion. We are also testing ways to optimize our search algorithms and better showcase personalized de-recommendations throughout the customer journey. For example, we are testing the impact of including personalized to be at the bottom of the page and during checkout. While we just started testing in October, in the poor countries where we are testing these combined improvements, we are seeing 10% higher revenue per customer. We plan to expand these days to North America in fourth quarter. Now let's get into how we are improving our inventory density. We need to have inventory that is engaging and meets the needs of customers every single time they come to our marketplace. This is critical to our success. This is how we satisfy intent. This is how we create more reasons for our customers to buy from Groupon again and again. To do this, we are working on few priorities. At the highest level, we are working to make sure we have the right breadth and depth of local experiences and services. Inventory in any given geography, delivering on this call, all the time will tell customers that they can come to Groupon first when they're looking for local. They can trust that we will have what they need. So how are we working on this today, in two ways; first, we have restructured our North American sales force to better align with our inventory density polls; second, we are relying on resources like margin marketing, self service, and calling offers to help us scale. Regarding our sales force, we now have a smaller, more focused team. We are doing a better job of using our deep treasure trove of data to inform our supply acquisition efforts and identifying inventory that will create a better customer experience. Our supply acquisition strategy is now focused on acquiring and retaining inventory in geographies and verticals that we believe will drive incremental consumer demand. This is the first and most important criteria. What does this mean in practice? This means that, our sales team is incentivized to acquire merchants' inventory that customers want to buy in target geographies, where we do not have adequate coverage. Instead of eight massage in any given geography, let's say, we would direct our team to bring on the first or second new salon, et cetera. Our North America sales team alone cannot help us to scale our inventory strategy, so we must do a better job of leveraging scalable resources to take us the rest of the day and we are. We are leaning into three of those resources today; merchant marketing, self-service and CLO. First, we are stamping our efforts to leverage merchant marketing to help to acquire and deepen relationships with merchant partners. Merchant marketing will support our supply acquisition strategy in three key ways; one, by using marketing resources to target specific inventory verticals and geographies, where we have gaps; second, by helping to improve the perception of Groupon brand before our sales team reaches out; and third, managing leads more effectively and channeling merchants to sell our self-service depending on their needs and potential. After merchant partners join our marketplace, merchant marketing will focus on deepening relationships with our merchants by driving self-service awareness as a means of quickly and effectively managing campaigns and cross-selling into new deal types or products. With self-service, North America continues to leverage improved platform to help our merchant partners to launch and ease their deals and also to bring new merchant partners to our marketplace. In fact, September, over 75% of our new inventory on boarded through self-service. These two resources are allowing us to figure out new better ways to supplement the reach of our sales team as they focus on acquiring and retaining right merchant partners, and helping them grow on Groupon marketplace. Rounding out the trio of scalable resources is card-linked offers or CLO. As a reminder, CLOs are digital cash back rewards that consumers automatically receive when they opt to link their debit cards or credit cards to Groupon. Our hypothesis is that, we can seamlessly and quickly bring on these specific types of inventory through partnership and technology to help; A to fill inventory gaps; B, to showcase inventory like dining options that consumers are using more frequently. Having more of this type of inventory on our platform should drive traffic, engagement and purchase frequency. We recently completed our CLO integration, which more than tripled our North America dining inventory. Since the beginning of the launch in September, we have already seen signs of success. In dining inventory search conversion increased by more than 15% since we launched CLO, and we hit our target redemption rate. This means that more customers are searching for and discovering great quality local dining margins, claiming CLO offers and redeeming them by making purchases at local merchants. While these early results are promising, we still have more work to do to really move the needle. First, we need to make this inventory easier for customers to find by improving our search and relevance. And second, we need to improve the user experience. So, it is easier for customers to engage with this type of inventory. And if we get this right, I believe this initiative can be an important driver to improving customer engagement and purchase frequency. We have launched a number of initiatives in Atlanta, which we are using as a test case to see how we can supercharge results and get customers to buy more frequently. Ultimately, our goal in Atlanta is to keep customers engaged on our platform and improve our customer purchase frequency by 20%. In early results, we have seen Atlanta customers come back more frequently in the last 45 days compared with customers in other U.S. cities. In terms of what is working, we have seen our coupon customer incentive initiatives deliver a left in repeat purchase rates. But again, it's still early, and we have some more work to do to optimize other initiatives in Atlanta, such as how we surface our CLO inventory to customers. We expect to make further progress here as we continue to test and iterate. And I look forward to updating you on our progress. As we continue to make progress improving our core business marketing will play a key role in retaining and bringing new customers to our platform. During the third quarter, we significantly increase our investment in SEM and display marketing. And we are confident that these were sound investments that will deliver incremental ROI over time. That said, we have not yet optimized our strategy to use mid funnel marketing investments to maximize our in period returns in our performance marketing channels. So in the fourth quarter, we are reallocating some of performance marketing dollars into mid funnel marketing campaigns to see if we can optimize our marketing spend. We started testing in October with the launch of second annual Groupon day event which feature big savings or local experiences and services, and one of a kind deals. The goal of this campaign was to grab customer's attention and get in early on holiday purchasing patterns. So what did we learn from this campaign, we learn that we can drive more consumers to our site and improve billings. While we did not quite reach the goal is set for the campaign, we did drive traffic up nearly 5% and conversion nearly 7 basis points during the ADP. Also we are sowing the seeds with the future customers. We were able to dry increase that download email subscribers and SMS subscribers. I'm excited about the progress we have made so far, but we still have more work to do. Over the next few quarters, we are continuing to test, learn and recalibrate our marketing investment so that we can improve our brand perception. Put Groupon in the consideration set for both customers and merchants, and make our investment in performance marketing delivers better returns. Finally, on the inventory front, we are on track to launch a standalone beauty experience platform to better serve high intent customers looking to explore and find trusted providers for high end minimally invasive beauty treatments. A test of this concept is planned for launch before the end of 2022 in the Charleston market. We are pleased to share that we lead our first ever ESG report this October, which outlines how we are working to create value for and uplift all our stakeholders, including our employees, our customers, our merchant partners, and the communities where we operate. This report helps us paint the picture of the foundation. We have established for ESG at Groupon. What we have accomplished to date and where we can go. You can find the report on our corporate website and I encourage you to read it when you have a chance. Before I turn it over to Damien, I want to congratulate him on being named permanent CFO. I have been impressed with Damien's extensive experience and leadership since joining Groupon, and I'm excited for him to continue to lead our finance and accounting organization. With that, I will turn it over to Damien to walk you through our Q3 results.