Yesterday Yelp announced its Q4 and full year results for 2014. The headline was: Yelp achieves profitability. On the earnings call CFO Rob Krolik said that Yelp would be able to achieve and maintain long-term EBITDA margins of between 35 and 40 percent.
Total revenue for the quarter was roughly $110 million and $377.5 million for the year. The company slightly beat Wall Street estimates. However slowing growth caused a number of financial analysts to downgrade the stock.
There were a number of interesting data points that received only passing mention or were not discussed during the earnings call. Among them were the following:
Traffic/search:
- Desktop visitors: 78 million approx.
- Mobile visitors: 72 million approx.
- International: 30 million approx.
- Mobile search volume: 65%
Revenue distribution:
- Total Revenue: $109.9 million
- Local Revenue: $93.1 million
- Brand Revenue: $8.6 million
- Other: $8.1 million
- International: $3.3 million
Revenues by category:
- Home & Local: 26%
- Restaurants: 15%
- Beauty & Fitness: 13%
- Shopping: 11%
- Health: 11%
- Other: 24%
Local business metrics:
- Claimed business locations: 2 million (approx.)
- Active local business accounts: 93.7 thousand
- Local advertising accounts: 84 thousand
- Mobile ad impressions: 56% (of total)
- Repeat rate (defined as % of existing customers from which Yelp recognizes revenue in the immediately preceding 12-month period): 75%
The data above suggest a fairly low churn rate for Yelp, which is somewhat surprising given some of the criticism of Yelp ad rates and vocal anti-Yelp sentiment among some SMBs.
Other interesting information from the call included:
- Roughly 32% of local advertisers on the site are buying “packaged CPC.”
- Average advertiser spending is between $300 to $500 per month.
- Yelp Platform program drove “approximately 350,000 transactions” in Q4. The company also reported that “more than 60,000 businesses [are] integrated into Yelp Platform through 12 partners.”
