EverQuote, Inc. (NASDAQ:EVER) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

John Wagner: Sure. Thanks, Cory. So included within our guide is, first, the environment that we’re seeing now and as Jamie mentioned, we’re seeing a small subset of carriers that have obtained rate adequacy in our back in-market acquiring consumers. So that’s certainly baked in. And then in addition, a gradual increase in demand from other carriers as they reach rate adequacy, we see the rates that they’ve already taken burn into their book of business and we see them start acquiring it again. And then I would say kind of that is a gradual movement that we see going through the year, including into the back half of ’23. And then I would say our range also includes the fact that there’s a certain amount of uncertainty within the market, right?

Some carriers are very much still struggling with the imbalance between premiums and claims. And so we’ve captured that as well in our guide as well. There’s a range there that allows for the fact that we’re not — we don’t know with certainty what the recovery, what the slope will look like and what the speed will look like. And so we’ve really, I would say, prudently kind of captured those scenarios in our guide. As we look at the breakdown, we certainly — we talk a lot about autos. We also see non-auto growth, the other verticals also returning to growth over the course of the year as well. So we are starting to gear up for growth across the board.

Jayme Mendal: And Cory, to answer the second part of your question, in 2022, we really focused intensely on stabilizing the auto vertical. And as part of doing so, we had to apply an added level of rigor and discipline and expense management. And unfortunately, that came at the expense of a certain amount of resourcing in our non-auto verticals. One example would be in the direct to consumer agency where we entered the year last year with plans to grow agent headcount and health and Medicare business. We made a decision in here to instead focus more heavily on driving up the unit efficiency of that part of the business. And we exited the year with the lower headcount than we started, and we’re comfortable with that tradeoff.

But it will come at the expense of some growth and not exclusive to health and Medicare and any other verticals as well. So as we come in this year, we are planning for reacceleration. We have already sort of reallocated some dedicated resourcing into non-auto verticals. And as the auto business recovers, we will continue to reinforce that move because we continue to see just a huge amount of potential in the non-auto verticals and look forward to getting them back to growth mode.

Operator: Thank you, Mr. Carpenter. Our next question comes from the line of Mayank Tandon with Needham. Your line is now open.

Mayank Tandon: Thank you. Good evening. Congrats, Jayme and John. Good to hear that growth is inflecting higher. That’s encouraging. I was going to just ask more around your expectations in terms of the quote request and the revenue per quote request? How are you thinking about that breakdown as you look at 2023?

John Wagner: Sure, Mayank. I’ll take that. We see it as growth being fueled by a mix of monetization as well as traffic. As we already talked about, we think the environment in which rates are increasing, that has always been for us the biggest catalyst for shopping within the marketplace is when a consumer opens the envelope on a renewal, sees a pretty dramatic increase in rates. And with carriers, a lot of carriers having taken rate to the tune of mid-teens, that’s pretty significant. So we think that drives consumer shopping. And industry-wide, we’ve started to see that in Q4 of this past year. In addition, we believe that also there’s the opportunity for monetization increases. Initially, that doesn’t mean necessarily that is carriers bidding up because there are really the early cohort of carriers that have obtained rate adequacy coming back to the marketplace.