Matt Goldberg: Yes, Steven. It’s Matt. And I just wanted to add the reason I wanted to share those particular examples is because I wanted to give an update on the strategy, we set out for Tripadvisor and really convey that we’re executing against that strategy. We’re on track and it’s flowing into the way we’re leveraging data. And you know, that data is so fundamental to where we’re going to go with this strategy. We can see the impact in our user experience and then we can see the way that we’re able to accelerate this stuff. It does connect very nicely to Viator. And of course, Viator is fundamentally focused on making sure that more people know about the category come to Viator when they come in, we want that experience of booking to be easy, enjoyable.
We want them to come back to us, download our app. And finally, we want to make sure that that demand is delivering the kind of value that we expect to deliver to the supply side and the way that we are aligning the two to work together, we’re enthusiastic about the advantage that it creates. So that’s why I wanted to share those with you today.
Operator: Your next question comes from Nat Schindler from Bank of America.
Nat Schindler: Yes, hi. Just a bit of clarity. You’re saying that you were expecting adjusted EBITDA margins to be similar to what they were last year. Just under 20% is where you were, and if you look at this quarter, a little under where you were last year because of excess spend on growing Viator. Totally understandable. Next quarter, though, you’re calling for both Core, Viator and TheFork, all to be quite a bit lower than last year for, as you said, various reasons, including some COVID payments. Does that mean the back half is quite a bit higher? Like a lot higher?
Mike Noonan: Yes, I’ll take that. No, we don’t think it’s a lot higher, right. I think, first of all, I would say this year it’s slightly more weighted to the back half. Not tremendously different from last year, but a little bit more weighted, I think, on a consolidated basis. A few things driving that, right. One is that you’re going to have both expectations around Fork and Fork and Viator of having margin improvement, right. So I think that’s a big driver in that, particularly TheFork in that kind of second half kind of margin improvement. Then secondly, I would say just on Core, we are, that’s really not around an auction story, but it’s really around some of our higher margin businesses expectations to continue to make progress as we move through the year.
That being media, b2b. So we don’t see that this is a dramatic shift versus last year versus first half, second half of last year. But there are some slight moving pieces there that do make it slightly more weighted to the second half.
Operator: The next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth of J.P. Morgan.
Unidentified Analyst : Great. Good morning. This is Dan for Doug. Thanks for taking the questions. We have a follow up question on Viator brand investment. So do you have any early learnings that you can share around the effectiveness of this brand spend and how do you feel about your brand spend currently? Is it at an adequate level or do you anticipate additional ramp going forward? And as a follow up, high project for EBITDA, is there any way you guys could frame like when you expect that to become just EBITDA profitable? Thank you.
Mike Noonan: Okay. Yes, I’ll take at least start both those and Matt can chime in where need to. So on the Viator brand spend, I think we’re looking at this as a very, on a very disciplined basis. And we look at brand spend across a lot of different dimensions very much kind of at the micro and macro level. At a macro level, we clearly are investing to drive awareness. And that is, we’re constantly measuring that, right. And those are things you can do through unaided and aided brand awareness surveys, which we do. We like what those metrics are telling us. From the more of a micro level and thinking about effectives of brand spend, we look at a lot of different metrics because brand spend is an investment today that does help future periods, right.
And we should see over time, improved conversion rates, which we’re seeing. We should be seeing increased brand SEO or brand searches which we’ve seen. So there are a lot of different metrics which we use to evaluate effectiveness of the brand spend. And we use all these tools at our disposal to do this, because we do recognize brand spend is tricky. So, again, along those dimensions, we continue to like what we see and we’ll continue to deploy brand spend. Again, we started this in the second half of last year. We are expecting to continue to campaign this year based on, again, what we’re seeing there. The second question, which is around long term margin, our long term margin or I guess your question was really more on when to expect profitability.
I would say last year we were profitable in the kind of the second half of the year or the third quarter of the year. And as we said, just to reiterate some of the points we made in our call in February, as we think about this brand, first and foremost, we think it’s a great opportunity for us and a huge market. And we do think that scale matters, as I said earlier. And we’ll continue to look at customer acquisition to build a very large repeat customer base. And that is what scale will ultimately drive very profitable business for us. And we do think that this business should have very healthy long term margins when we achieve scale. I think what’s going to dictate that is as long as we continue to see healthy unit economics and we’ve already reviewed all the things we look at these around that.
We’re going to continue to kind of invest in that area, but we’re going to manage it with a line of sight towards profitability. And as we said in our call in February, we’re expecting the Viator margin to be approximately flat. And I think that aligns with how we’re managing this, which we think is again, capturing customers with the proper unit economics, but then also having an eye towards that profitability level.
Matt Goldberg: And I would just add our strategy is to be a winner in these very meaningful experiences category. And we believe that these investments are optimizing long term shareholder value. We have the scale in this business right now and frankly, improving unit economics, where profitability does become a choice. We want to make sure that in an environment where the consumer is becoming aware that this category exists and is leaning into it, we’re there to capture that demand, to grow our market share and to be a long term winner that we think will be very valuable.
Operator: The next question comes from Ron Josie from Citi.
James Michael: Hi, there. This is James Michael on for Ron. Just one for me. Could you talk a little bit more about the enhancements you’re making across the home screen and maybe how the core user experience is involving, what features are most incremental, what engagement benefits are you seeing? And any quantification on the click through or bounce rates would be very helpful. Thank you.
Matt Goldberg: Yes. And so, again, we’re doing a rigorous amount of testing as we roll out these enhancements. The idea here is to start with the consumer and to think about what is the consumer experience we want to deliver when they arrive on our site. So we’ve made some changes to the app homepage to make it more effective and bring users into the experience. Elevating the search bar being more deliberate about driving qualified traffic. Because in the end, it’s really about giving the consumer that experience that translates to engagement that will deliver a highly qualified traveler to our partners and really drive monetization. This is just the beginning of the work that we’re doing there, and we’re excited that we think our mobile product can be an essential in destination companion to help travelers make the most of our trips.
And so what I would say about quantification is, while I don’t want to put numbers out there earlier, every category that I talked about where we’re seeing changes was meaningful. And areas that we think we can lean into and drive for long term improvement. We’re seeing some stuff in our shopping experience as well, both experiences and hotels. Where we’re also, we did some changes to the hotels product detail page, which were some of the most significant changes we did in the last five years. And again, we saw increased user engagement with the page and that really meant a more qualified hotel shopper, which makes that traffic even more interesting to our partners. And again, that’ll play through meta media and the kinds of marketplaces that we want to put in place.
And then of course, in experiences shopping, some of the changes that we did to the product detail page made it a richer, more comprehensive page and we saw meaningful improvements there. And so when we see increased investment and again, decreased bounce rates, we’re really excited. Now, the one thing I will say, and maybe quantify just a little bit, we’re still very focused on users wanting to come to our pages and leave reviews. And so we made improvements to our writer review form to drive more review and photo submissions and the change and what we did with those pages and rolled out with both hotels and restaurants, we actually saw double digit increases in both review completion rates and photo uploads for both hotels and restaurants.
And so these are big, meaningful improvements that go right to the heart of our strategy. So we’re really excited about it, and we’re going to lean into that and share more as we go forward.
Operator: You the next question comes from the line of Kevin Kopelman of TD Cowen.
