Earnings Labs

Marchex, Inc. (MCHX)

Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, Nov 5, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day. My name is Victoria and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Marchex third quarter conference call. [Operator Instructions]. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Ethan Caldwell, General Counsel. Sir, you may begin.

Ethan Caldwell

Analyst

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to Marchex's Business Update and Third Quarter 2015 Conference Call. Joining us today are Peter Christothoulou and Michael Arends. Before we get started, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, including with respect to our financial and operational performance and actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's earnings press release and in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and we undertake no obligation to update these statements for subsequent events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The earnings press release is available on the Investor Relations section of our website at Marchex.com. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Pete Christothoulou.

Pete Christothoulou

Analyst

Thanks, Ethan. And thank you, everyone, for joining us for our third quarter conference call. As I've highlighted on our calls throughout the year, everything we do is focused on establishing Marchex as the world's leading mobile advertising analytics company. Providing marketers with 360 degree view of what happens after consumers click on mobile ads is a very large opportunity. Given the vast adoption of mobile and the fact that mobile devices now exceed desktop computers, we believe this opportunity is more significant than traditional web analytics. Right now, marketers are hungry for visibility into the mobile consumer journey. They want to measure the online to offline purchase path including the ability to understand what happens when consumers click to call and go offline into a call center or directly interact with their retail store front. With mobile calls to businesses expected to nearly double to over 160 billion by 2019, the need to understand what happens in a live dialogue has never been greater. And so we're moving quickly against our goal to lead mobile advertising analytics and we expect our momentum to continue into 2016. Global enterprise customers are looking for solutions to help them solve their measurement and attribution needs. In the past few months our pace of innovation has accelerated to meet that need and we have delivered new solutions to solve client pain points. We've also expanded our international footprint to support new and existing clients and we have recruited industry experts to join our executive team. This has helped us attract the largest and most sophisticated marketers to a growing base of enterprise clients such as Windham Hotels and Resorts and Verizon Wireless. In my conversations with clients and prospects I hear a consistent theme. Mobile measurement and attribution is critical to expanding mobile…

Mike Arends

Analyst

Thanks, Pete. For the third quarter, call-driven and other related revenues were $36.1 million while total revenue from continuing operations was $36.9 million. I'd like to start out by mentioning we're making progress in our business across a number of fronts, including adding new enterprise customer relationships, expanding existing customers, adding new strategic partnerships and developing new products like display analytics. All of these initiatives will continue to support our long-term growth profile and our building momentum in the enterprise channel. As we mentioned last quarter, we know some investors track our growth without YP and Allstate. So, to help their models with this framework in mind, call-driven and related revenue in the third quarter grew 31% compared to the same period in 2014. We're in the midst of the budgeting process for our customers for next year and we feel good about our customer and product pipeline as we build towards the future. For the third quarter, Archeo revenue from continuing operations was approximately $700,000. Excluding stock-based compensation, total operating costs were $34.4 million. Looking at additional details on the P&L service costs as a percentage of call-driven revenue were largely consistent quarter over quarter. Sales and marketing was $3.9 million which was also largely consistent quarter over quarter though this is an area where we expect to increase investment over time as we expand our sales footprint and marketing initiatives. Product development was $7.1 million, down modestly quarter over quarter, mostly due to the timing of our product pushes and other initiatives. Longer-term this will continue to be an area of focus for Marchex as we invest to support our market leadership position in mobile advertising analytics. Moving to adjusted operating income before amortization and EBITDA, call drive adjusted OIBA and EBITDA were $2.2 million and $3.1 million…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. And we have a question from Rohit Kulkarni.

Dillon Culhane

Analyst

This Dillon on behalf of Rohit. Can you comment some more on how the partnership with Light Reaction has gone so far and how agency relations are trending overall? And then can you just comment on how we should expect seasonality in the business to trend going forward in 2016? Thank you.

Pete Christothoulou

Analyst

With regards to the agency relationships, particularly with the GroupM companies, it's going very well. We're well into our training stages and client education stages. I think the main thing for you and others to understand is your clients are facing a real problem in mobile. They have a massive blind spot in mobile measurement attribution. And GroupM and Xaxis and Light Reaction are utilizing Marchex as the mobile performance product regarding our analytics and our call marketplace and bringing us into several customer conversations. Our pipeline is very robust right now and growing quickly, including internationally. So, we feel very good about where we're in the context of that relationship. Importantly we're focused on extending obviously that relationship as well as working with other agencies in the coming periods.

Mike Arends

Analyst

To address your seasonality question, think about the call volume dropping substantially in the latter part of December and also for service-based businesses, generally in the fourth quarter there is some drop-off in terms of their advertising or their budget spend. But if you look at the first quarter of this year, if you look at the metric that some folks have asked us about previously without the YP level and you look on a year over year basis and the first quarter year over year we grew 24%, similarly 24% year over year growth in the second quarter and in the third quarter it accelerated to 31%. But if you think about those ranges on a year over year comparative basis, the forecast and the guidance that we put out there puts us in that general 20% to 30% range for the fourth quarter and hopefully with some of the progress that we're seeing, one with the products, with the call analytics for search and the releases that we've had there as well as just this recent introduction of the beta version that's coming to market of the display analytics and some of the customer progress that we're seeing as well as the channel partnership relationships that are in incubation stage but hopefully are going to be rolled out more in 2016. I think we can see progress ahead of us as some of things that we're feeling.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. And there are currently no questions.

Pete Christothoulou

Analyst

Great, everybody. Thank you for joining us for our third quarter call. We look forward to updating you on our next Q4 call in the coming year. Thank you.