GoDaddy Inc. (NYSE:GDDY) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark McCaffrey: Yes. Thanks, Vikram. I’ll start with, as we’ve done in prior quarters, we use a range, and that range takes into account the unpredictability of our aftermarket business. And we try to build that into our thought process as we go quarter-to-quarter. 7% is still part of the guided range. It allows for the upside or downside to our transactional business. When we’re talking about the difference between these numbers, we are talking about a few million dollars either direction. And overall, on a $4 billion business, we feel good about the momentum it is driving. So hopefully, that gives a little bit of help on the first part of that question. On the second part of the question, we love our momentum going into 2024.

If you look at our bookings growth and applications and commerce outpacing our revenue within the quarter. If you look at domains, 8% bookings growth versus 4% revenue coming out of the quarter and going into Q4. You look at the pricing actions, we take the overall growth of applications and commerce just as a bigger part of the picture. It really shows a lot of that momentum going forward. We have a lot of confidence in that, I would say, momentum going into 2024 and our ability to grow upon that. But we’re feeling good about where we’re headed.

Vikram Kesavabhotla: Okay, thank you.

Christie Masoner: Our next question comes from the line of Trevor Young from Barclays. Trevor, please go ahead.

Trevor Young: Great. Thanks. First, Mark, just sticking with that commentary around the domains booking growing 8%, nice acceleration there. Can you break down what the contribution there is from price versus actual growth in domains? And then, Aman, you mentioned getting some leverage in care over time from changing consumer behavior. What did you mean by that specifically? And then as part of the automation process that you see there, do you see opportunity to further reduce headcount either with — in terms of in-house headcount or your contractor partners within care specifically?

Mark McCaffrey: All right. Thanks, Robert. And I’ll start with the domains. And I would say both, right? We took pricing actions in Q3 that started to show up, especially in our bookings, but is accelerating our revenue, but we are seeing strong demand within domain. Now the strong demand also has a compounding effect because we’re seeing them attached to that second product faster than we ever did, and that is showing up in our growth in bookings and applications and commerce right now. So I’d say it’s a combination of all those working in the same direction, giving that momentum and giving us that confidence going into 2024.

Aman Bhutani: And on care, Trevor, over the last couple of years, we’ve done a good job of leveraging our care line item as revenue has grown. We’ve kept care pretty flat to down. When we look forward, I continue to see opportunities for automation, and the consumer behavior piece that’s really important is that more and more consumers want to engage with care using chat or messaging. And that just is a lower cost interaction for us versus voice calls. We’ve also optimized how we connect with customers around the world, and that is continuing to be a tailwind for us because in our case, chat or messaging is running well ahead of voice. And that slowly starts to tip in favor of a lower and lower cost on the care side.

Trevor Young: Great. Thank you both.

Christie Masoner: Our next question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney from Evercore ISI. Mark, please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst: Hi, there. This is actually Jian [ph] for Mark. Thanks for taking the question. So a couple of ones. First, on the margin guidance again for ’24. You mentioned kind of kind of greater leverage from tech and dev. How should we — I guess — maybe first, like where is the additional leverage coming from? Like what are you cutting? And how should we think about maybe a steady-state tech and dev level? And then the second question is on — I think you mentioned very quickly on accelerating revenue in ’24 as well. If you kind of talk through the puts and takes on that. What should we think about — like how much of that is from easy comps versus your confidence in organic growth? [Indiscernible].

Mark McCaffrey: Great. Thanks, Jian, and good talking to you. On the normalized EBITDA puts and takes. We’re coming — we started talking about this in the first half of the year, and we were taking actions around integrating some of our core GoDaddy platforms into one technology stack. We took some restructuring actions. We talked about how the benefit of those would start to show up in the second half of the year. We saw some of that accelerate into Q3 based on our, I would say, hitting the timetables and milestones around getting workloads into the cloud. So we can see that momentum continuing going the year, allowing us to drive a lot of efficiencies within our tech and dev. The other part of it is application of commerce.

From a segment margin perspective, as that continues to grow at an accelerated pace, that provides us even more leverage into our normalized EBITDA margin. So we’ll get to a little bit more of the puts and takes and run rate and what we think is normalized when we get into next year and talk in more detail around 2024. But that’s a high-level good way to think about where we’re going to continue to see them and our ability to drive that leverage in our normalized EBITDA margin.

Aman Bhutani: And then I think the second part of the question was around growth in 2024. And of course, there are some comps at play here, Jian. But the key piece that we’re highlighting today is the growth in applications and commerce. And a couple of the data points, and I know our investors are interested in our path to growth in A&C. So we shared a couple of data points today in terms of the 12% bookings growth in Application & Commerce in Q3 and actually shared the data point for October as well with applications and commerce to mid-teens. And all of the components of applications and commerce — and as you’re probably aware, we have three core components, productivity, presence and commerce, and all of those are growing at healthy rates, which is what is pushing us into the teens there. And we expect that to continue into next year as well. Hello?

Christie Masoner: Our next question comes from the line of Matt Pfau from William Blair. Matt, please go ahead.