Pinterest, Inc. Q4 FY2024 Earnings Call

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Pinterest, Inc. Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Earnings Call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call, with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you'd like to queue for a question on today's call, you can do so by dialing star one on your telephone keypad. I'll now hand the call over to Andrew Somberg, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury, to begin. Andrew, you may proceed. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to Pinterest's earnings call for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2024. My name is Andrew Somberg, and I'm Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury for Pinterest. Joining me on today's call are Bill Ready, Pinterest CEO, and Julia Donnelly, our CFO. This conference call is being webcast, and we are also providing a slide presentation to accompany our commentary. Please refer to our Investor Relations website at investor.pinterest.com to find today's presentation, webcast, and earnings press release. Some statements we make today regarding our performance, operations, and outlook may be considered forward-looking and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Our results, trends, and outlook for Q1 2025 and beyond are preliminary and not an assurance of future performance. We're making these forward-looking statements based on information available as of today. We expressly disclaim any duty or obligation to update them later unless required by law. For more information about risks, uncertainties, and other factors affecting our results, please refer to our most recent Form 10-Ks filed with the SEC, available on our Investor Relations website. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release and presentation, which are available to the public through our Investor Relations website. Lastly, all growth rates discussed in today's prepared remarks should be noted. And now, I'll turn the call over to Bill.

Thanks, Andrew. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. My remarks today will cover the progress we made this past year and preview key initiatives for 2025 to drive continued execution of our long-term goals. 2024 was a transformative year for Pinterest. We reached record high global users, surpassing 550 million monthly active users (MAUs) globally, and 100 million in UCAN while more than doubling our full-year revenue growth rate from 2023. Simultaneously, we delivered over $1 billion in adjusted EBITDA, roughly a 50% increase as we continue to drive profitable growth. Our 2024 results are a testament that our long-term strategy is working. We've transformed our user experience to focus on why people come to Pinterest, investing in actionability, relevance, and curation, distinguishing ourselves as a positive place online. The user journey from inspiration to action maps directly to our advertiser funnel, allowing advertisers to reach users at every stage of their purchase journey. Proving performance is more important than ever in today's advertising environment. We have spent the last two and a half years building a suite of lower funnel tools that capture our users' inherent commercial intent. Our efforts are paying off. In Q4, we achieved our first $1 billion revenue quarter as we grew revenue 18% and drove a record number of clicks during the critical holiday season. Looking forward to 2025, we intend to double down on the multiyear initiatives that underpin our strategy. We will continue leveraging AI and our unique first-party signals to drive a more personalized and relevant experience for our users. At the same time, we'll invest in curation experiences and the shoppability of our platform, allowing users to move more seamlessly from inspiration to action. Finally, we'll continue to innovate and improve our lower funnel tools, enabling advertisers to successfully reach customers demonstrating high commercial intent. I want to highlight a few key AI-based initiatives, many informed by our taste graph, that have led to positive outcomes across the business. We've made a lot of progress incorporating more context on user history into our recommendation algorithms. In 2024, we leveraged cutting-edge machine learning techniques and increased the context window on user actions, such as saves and clicks, feeding into our AI-based models by over thirty-fold. More context on users and more powerful models mean a deeper understanding of the content they might enjoy. As a result, we saw approximately 250 basis points of lift in saves and a 150 basis point lift in outbound clicks across the platform. Furthermore, through our engineering team's deep technical expertise, we achieved this thirty-fold increase in signal ingestion with only a fractional increase in infrastructure spend. Our AI-powered whole-page optimization product allowed us to flex up relevant ad load to users in moments of high commercial intent, showing more ads during their lower funnel shopping journey while keeping ad load lighter during their upper funnel discovery phase. We've also made investments to maintain high relevance for our ads. In fact, ad relevance on our search surface has more than doubled for top ad slots over the past two years. Since our users come with commercial intent, these ads enhance the user journey. We're utilizing AI internally to promote employee productivity across our engineering team. Coding assistance helps our developers accelerate code production and enhance code quality. The majority of our engineering team uses this coding assistance, with 15% of our current code base generated through AI. Finally, I would be remiss not to highlight Performance Plus, which I'll discuss in more depth later in my remarks. Performance Plus is a key advancement in our lower funnel ad product suite utilizing AI to enhance performance and efficiency for our advertisers while automating much of the campaign setup process. I'd also like to discuss the user and engagement wins from Q4 and 2024. Throughout 2024, we focused heavily on improving user experience and the reasons users came to Pinterest in the first place. This involved investing in a better curation experience through boards and collages and increasing actionability across our core surfaces. In Q4, we deepened our efforts to show users how they could utilize Pinterest for shopping. Our holiday shopping efforts, which included gift guides and promotions, drove deeper, more actionable sessions, helping users find and buy the perfect gifts on Pinterest. We created gift guides spanning 27 categories from fashion and beauty to travel and gaming, collaborating with celebrities, creators, and brands to showcase nearly 40,000 of the best products from our catalog, a mix of expertly curated content and Pinterest-recommended content. We distributed these guides through personalized recommendation modules, highlighting the guides most relevant to a user's interests, past activity, and search queries. The click-through rates of products recommended through gift guides were over 40% higher than the average Product PIN. I'm pleased that our efforts to improve the actionability of our platform are paying off, leading to another quarter of record users. We reported our highest ever weekly active to monthly active user ratio of 62% in 2024, indicating users are returning more frequently as we continue to drive strong product-market fit and performance for advertisers. In fact, in Q4, we saw over 90% growth in clicks to advertisers, even after navigating last year's initial launch of direct links. Next, I want to mention one of my favorite annual reports, Pinterest Predicts. Using consumer insights and predictive analytics based on behavior like clicks, saves, and searches on Pinterest, we've identified 20 emerging trends we believe will hit the mainstream in 2025. Over the last five years, 80% of our predictions have come true. These trends reveal what people will shop, try, and buy next across all verticals. For instance, our trend 'cherry coated' predicts Gen Z and millennials will infuse cherries into their makeup, menus, and aesthetics this year, while 'peak travel' predicts mountain ranges will become the ultimate travel destination for Gen Z and Gen X. Pinterest Predicts will serve as a valuable lever for advertisers to reach customers by aligning company initiatives with emerging trends. Marriott Bonvoy embraced the peak travel trend, collaborating with Pinterest to create a pop-up concierge desk in New York City, surprising people with peak travel-themed giveaways. They will also sponsor the trend on the platform throughout 2025 with an exclusive predicts badge on various peak travel-related pins highlighting exciting Marriott Bonvoy properties in mountainous localities. Looking ahead to 2025, I'm excited about the evolution of our platform as we further enhance product features to grow users, deepen engagement, and increase revisitation. We will continue to invest in why users come to Pinterest and what makes our platform valuable to advertisers. This includes further investing in curation functionalities enabling users to identify and refine their taste and incorporating actionability to facilitate user shopping. I want to discuss our monetization improvements through increasing Pinterest's value and performance for advertisers. In 2024, we made impressive strides against our monetization priorities, particularly transforming our ad platform into a true lower funnel performance engine, resulting in 19% revenue growth in 2024 compared to 9% in 2023. Reflecting on some key lower funnel launches, we began with mobile deep linking and direct links, bringing users directly to an advertiser's web or mobile property, significantly increasing clicks. We complemented these efforts with the adoption of privacy-centric measurement tools to prove performance, providing advertisers the tools to accurately measure spend and maximize their investments. New formats, like promotion ads, will help retailers showcase special offers during key promotional periods. Advertisers who included promotions in their conversion campaigns during Q4 saw an 8% increase in conversion rates compared to similar ads without a promotion. Performance Plus is part of this transformation, enhancing the advertiser experience. Our Q4 achieved over $1 billion in revenue in a single quarter for the first time in our history, thanks to our ad platform's significant gains compared to last year and all the product innovations I mentioned. Looking into Q4, our advertisers enjoyed immense value creation with over 90% growth in clicks year over year, in addition to over 100% growth last Q4 as we lapped the initial rollout of Direct Links. This value creation also translated into significant value capture as retailers turned to Pinterest to drive results. We experienced the largest revenue volume ever during the Cyber Five holiday surge, decreasing cost per acquisition (CPA) by over 30% year over year. Our roadmap for 2025 is robust to ensure we continue delivering value to advertisers and capturing additional market share. Performance Plus is one key component. It's important to note that Performance Plus is just beginning its multiyear timeline. We will consistently release new features and functionalities while driving adoption and enhancing our offering. We're witnessing performance improvements, positive advertiser feedback on simplified campaign setup, and promising initial adoption of Performance Plus campaigns and features while recognizing that we're still in the early phases of rollout. Expanding our launch from last fall, we'll build enhanced bidding and creative functionality into Performance Plus, including return on ad spend (ROAS) bidding to maximize returns, anticipated to roll out to all eligible advertisers by the end of Q1. A large retailer with a significant product catalog leaned into this product, witnessing strong results with improved return on ad spend in their internal measurement system, leading them to increase their shopping budget in Q4 to leverage those results. We're focusing on enhancing Performance Plus creative tools in 2025, giving advertisers more control, which has shown a positive impact on performance. This includes automated cropping, brightness adjustments, and adding logo overlays, all expected to roll out in the first half of this year. Our commitment to improving conversion visibility and measurement complements our lower funnel product set, helping advertisers build stronger, accurate data foundations necessary to scale their budgets on Pinterest. Advertisers utilize various methods to monitor their spending. To accurately show up wherever an advertiser measures their spending, we aim to scale ways to connect our conversion data to third-party measurement sources of truth. Our lower funnel offering hinges on making ads relevant content for our users. When users come to Pinterest, they possess a mindset distinct from traditional social media, often invested in themselves, seeking inspiration, shopping, and taking action. The engagement with our three primary services—home feed, search, and related pins—demonstrates the purchase funnel, with one-third on the home feed and two-thirds from lower funnel search and related pins. Relevant ads can enhance user experience, delivering significant value to advertisers by efficiently reaching the right audience at the right time. This flywheel improves with intense signals feeding relevant content for users to shop and providing more intent signals. We have tangible evidence that this flywheel is functional. Monthly active users continue to grow double digits, consistently reaching all-time highs each quarter of 2024. Ad impressions are increasing while clicks to advertisers are growing faster than ad impressions, with ad relevance on our search surface doubling over the past two years as our models capture more signals and place ads efficiently. In 2025, we will leverage AI to increase ad load while growing users, improving relevance, and enhancing shopping and actionability on the platform. Finally, I'd like to address our monetization initiative, diversifying demand through partnerships and international growth. 2024 marked a year of scaling our first third-party demand partnerships with Amazon Ads and Google. We launched resellers in 30 markets in Q3, leading to accelerated revenue growth in the rest of the world during 2024. Reflecting on all we've accomplished in 2024 fills me with pride about our teams' work across strategic priorities, leaving me optimistic about the year ahead. More importantly, I'm proud of how we're building our business. We've shown that a business model based on positivity benefits our users, especially Gen Z who appreciate Pinterest as a space to manifest their dreams away from toxicity found elsewhere on social media, leading to better business outcomes. We have consistently invested in products and policies that align AI for positivity, helping users feel their best. For instance, body type ranges and skin tone and hair pattern searches allow users to see representation in the platform content. Users who search with these refinement tools save an average of 75% more pins than those who do not. Furthermore, our positivity-centric ethos is a unique value proposition for advertisers wishing to align their brands with a positive environment. With that said, I'll turn it over to Julia to further detail our Q4 financial performance.

Thanks, Bill, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'll discuss our full-year and fourth-quarter 2024 financial results and provide an update on our preliminary first-quarter 2025 outlook. All financial metrics, except for revenue, will be discussed in non-GAAP terms unless specified, with all comparisons on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Before diving into details of the fourth quarter, I want to pause and reiterate Bill's comments about how transformative 2024 was for Pinterest. Last year, we generated $3.65 billion in revenue, representing 19% growth, more than doubling our growth rate from 2023. Importantly, this growth demonstrates the significant progress we've made towards becoming a true full funnel platform. We primarily grew revenue from our lower funnel clicks and conversions-based objectives, indicating our new lower funnel performance tools and strategy are working. We remained strategic about our investments, focusing on high ROI opportunities across users and monetization. This includes utilizing AI to enhance personalization and content recommendations, improving user experience and creating automation tools to drive better performance for advertisers. We've achieved this while continuing to exercise expense discipline. Our focus on profitable growth resulted in a roughly 50% year-over-year increase in adjusted EBITDA dollars for 2024, with margins expanding by 510 basis points. Additionally, we achieved a significant milestone by returning to GAAP profitability on a net income basis for the first time since 2021. Let’s take a look at the fourth quarter. We ended with 553 million global MAUs, an 11% growth, reaching another record high. Users continued to grow year-over-year across all geographic regions. In Q4, our US and Canada region had 101 million MAUs, growing 4%. Our Europe region had 145 million MAUs, growing 7%, while the rest of the world saw 307 million MAUs, growing 15%. Moving to revenue, in Q4, our global revenue was $1.154 billion, an 18% increase on a reported and constant currency basis. This quarter's revenue strength highlights how we are delivering value for advertisers across the full funnel, with particular strength from our lower funnel consideration objective, which optimizes for clicks. From a vertical perspective, we continued to see broad-based strength in retail, with emerging verticals like technology and financial services also showing strength. Growth was partially offset by softness within the food and beverage subsector of CPG. Additionally, as a reminder, unlike other platforms, we do not accept political advertising and therefore did not benefit from related spending in Q4. The majority of our growth came from our core first-party demand generated by our internal sales force, but we also saw revenue from third-party demand partnerships ramp in Q4, sequentially growing from the revenue base built in Q3 and helping round out gaps in our auction, complementing our growing first-party demand. For geographical breakouts in Q4, in the US and Canada, we generated $900 million in revenue, growing 6%. Our Europe revenue was $196 million, growing 21% on a reported basis and 20% on a constant currency basis, driven by retail strength. Revenue from the rest of the world reached $58 million, growing 44% on a reported basis and 53% in constant currency. In Q4, ad impressions grew 43%, while ad pricing declined 18% year-over-year. International markets have been accretive to net revenue. As we have begun to scale these initiatives, it naturally led to increased ad impressions growth, putting downward pressure on overall platform pricing due to this ongoing mix shift. In Q4, the cost of revenue was $191 million, a 10% increase year-over-year and up 5% compared to Q3 due to increased infrastructure spending related to user and engagement growth. Our non-GAAP operating expense was $496 million, increasing 12%. This increase was primarily due to R&D investments in headcount, combined with a smaller increase in sales and marketing. Our revenue strength and expense discipline led to another strong quarter of adjusted EBITDA, reaching $471 million with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 41%, an increase of 320 basis points over Q4 last year. In Q4, we also recorded a $1.6 billion income tax benefit, driven by the release of a valuation allowance against a significant portion of our US deferred tax assets due to our sustained profitability and forecasted continued income. Now I’d like to discuss our cash flow. Our ability to generate significant free cash flow, which we define as cash flow from operating activities plus purchases of property and equipment, speaks to our business's inherent profitability and asset-light nature. For the full year 2024, free cash flow increased 55% to $940 million compared to 2024 adjusted EBITDA of $1 billion, representing free cash flow conversion of 91%. Investors should analyze our free cash flow annually as quarterly free cash flow can fluctuate due to seasonality and other factors. We concluded the quarter with cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. At our Investor Day in fall 2023, we laid out our capital allocation framework's four pillars, which remain unchanged: investing in product and technology innovation, optimizing our balance sheet, managing dilution, and preserving flexibility for opportunistic and disciplined M&A. In Q4, we made progress mitigating dilution by allocating $100 million toward share repurchases, bringing our full-year share repurchases to $600 million, totaling 19.1 million shares. We also utilized $390 million of cash for net share settlements of equity awards. Combined for full-year 2024, these actions have driven an approximately 1.7% decline in year-over-year fully diluted share count. Now, let's cover our preliminary guidance for the first quarter. Starting this quarter, we will transition to providing adjusted EBITDA guidance and will no longer give an outlook for non-GAAP operating expenses. We expect Q1 revenue to be in the range of $837 million to $852 million, which represents 13% to 15% year-over-year growth, or 15% to 17% growth on a constant currency basis, assuming about two points of foreign exchange headwind based on current spot rates. Our guidance also reflects the effects of lapping changes in earlier Easter timing in Q1 2024. We anticipate Q1 adjusted EBITDA to range between $155 million and $170 million. We expect Q1 2025 non-GAAP costs to support our AI efforts and other product initiatives that enhance user experience and monetization. Last year, we made significant progress toward our margin expansion goals, growing our adjusted EBITDA margin in 2024 by 510 basis points year-over-year. We expect margin expansion again in 2025, though we anticipate that the rate will be lower than the outsized expansion seen in 2024 as we continue to invest in our initiatives and drive profitable growth. In closing, I'm extremely pleased with our team's performance in Q4 and full-year 2024. We've made significant progress against our strategic priorities, growing users and engagement, executing on our lower funnel opportunities, and driving profitable growth. With that, I'll hand it over to Bill for final words.

Thanks, Julia. I want to thank our teams at Pinterest, our advertising partners, and all the people that come to Pinterest to find inspiration and shop. With that, we can now open the call for questions.

Thank you. The first question is from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. You may proceed.

Thanks so much for taking the question. And thanks for all the details in the prepared remarks. Bill, I wanted to know what your key takeaways are from 2024 in terms of how the platform evolved and, with an eye forward, what are the two or three biggest strategic priorities you're setting up to execute against based on those learnings in 2024 as we proceed deeper into 2025. Thank you.

Thanks, Eric. Taking a step back, 2024 was a transformative year for our business. We more than doubled our revenue growth rate, increasing from 9% growth in 2023 to 19% in 2024. We brought on a record number of users while deepening engagement, evidenced by our highest weekly active to monthly active ratio. Finishing Q4 with an 18% revenue growth and guiding Q1 for 15% to 17% constant currency growth reflects considerable progress in our longer-term goals, and we feel positive about the sustainability of our revenue growth. Therefore, we're doubling down on our strategy, identifying multiple initiatives for balanced execution in driving growth in 2025 and beyond. First, we will continue to grow our user base, deepening engagement and encouraging users to return more frequently through our actionability and curation efforts. Relevant ads can enhance user content and complement their experience, particularly in commercial contexts, hence we see potential for further ad load growth, especially in high intent verticals. Secondly, we will drive improved performance for advertisers through lower funnel product innovation and ad platform efficiencies. Performance Plus, which we rolled out late last year, will be enhanced with features like ROAS bidding and Performance Plus Creative. We expect Performance Plus to steadily build over a multiyear product and adoption cycle rather than experiencing rapid growth in one specific quarter. Finally, we will continue complementing our strong growing first-party business with new demand sources, as evidenced by our launch of resellers and third-party partners, and will continually optimize and test incremental demand sources over time.

To add a bit more color from a vertical standpoint, retail has been strong for us in 2024, and we certainly see further opportunities for growth in 2025. We can capture value from the high volume of clicks we are driving, especially as we roll out Performance Plus alongside our lower funnel tools, allowing advertisers to effectively bid on a broader range of their catalog. Emerging verticals, including technology and financial services, hold strength while we navigate category-specific headwinds in the food and beverage subsector of CPG. In 2025, we will begin to anniversarily address those weaker trends while early indicators suggest green shoots in Q1, though it's too soon to declare the headwind is fully behind us. We have multiple initiatives with strong execution to ensure sustainability in our trajectory and ongoing execution of our plans.

The next question is from Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Thanks for taking the question. This is Matt on for Brian. Can you talk about the GPU-enabled machine learning in JetAI areas that you think may be the most material drivers for further platform improvement in 2025? Thank you.

Certainly. Thanks for the question. As a visual search platform, AI is a core competency at Pinterest. Every pin and product shown results from our cutting-edge AI techniques and recommendation algorithms that ingest hundreds of billions of user actions to understand user interests. Those unique user actions occur only on Pinterest, where users curate and associate products, driving significant improvements in the relevance of our recommendations. Our strategy remains steadfast: we will continue to invest in AI that enhances user experiences and performance for our advertisers. This includes switching from CPU to GPU serving to leverage larger models that improve organic and ad serving; integrating LLM technology into our AI for user experiences like guided search; utilizing computer vision technology for experiences like shop to look; and employing Cognos to help engineers accelerate code production while improving code test coverage and quality. Our coding assistance is widely adopted within our engineering teams, with roughly 50% of our code base generated through AI. We see clear results reflected in our top-line numbers, with our WOW to MAU ratio at an all-time high, achieving record user numbers, and continued strong clicks to advertisers, despite those high user numbers. AI is indeed a crucial component of our platform, and with what we anticipate from AI, we expect to drive significant advancements for user experience and advertising performance.

The next question is from John Blackledge with TD Securities. Your line is now open.

Great. Thank you. On the Q1 2025 guidance, could you discuss the quarter-to-date advertising trends that you're observing? What factors contributed to the Q1 2025 revenue outlook?

Thanks, John. We finished Q4 with revenue growth of 18% and guided Q1 for 15% to 17% on a constant currency basis. Analyzing Q1 on a two-year stack basis illustrates our guidance implies sequential acceleration for this quarter. In Q1, we will continue driving performance across both the lower and upper funnel. Our new lower funnel toolset has driven improved value for advertisers, evidenced by the over 90% increase in clicks to advertisers year over year in Q4. There is additional value to capture from advertisers' performance. We are witnessing solid adoption of newer ad formats and capabilities, including the ongoing growth of spotlight ads and the adoption of more granular bidding capabilities, empowering advertisers with more bidding control across their catalogs. As Bill mentioned, we are in the early stages of a multiyear product cycle for Performance Plus. While we are seeing good early results, more opportunities lie ahead as we roll out features and functionality across multiple quarters and years. Although challenges remain within the food and beverage sector, we are now entering the phases of recovering from the softness that began in December 2023, with slight signs of improvement indicating potential recovery.

Thank you. The next question is from Mark Kelly with Stifel. Your line is now open.

Thank you very much. I wanted to ask about the contribution from the third-party partnerships. Would you characterize them as in line with expectations, better, or perhaps a little slower? How much can we expect them to contribute this year?

Thanks, Mark. From the outset, we've conveyed that our efforts to integrate new demand, encompassing third-party demand and resellers, aimed to fill gaps in our auction, focusing on improving shoppability as a complement to first-party sales. We've seen excellent progress across multiple dimensions. Our platform has become more shoppable than ever, evident in our strong holiday shopping performance. We have made significant strides in closing gaps in our auction with first-party relationships leading the way, and our new demand efforts complementing these trends. As we solidify our position as a true lower funnel platform, we're driving strong first-party demand. Our capacity to ingest demand from many sources, such as resellers and various third-party demand partners, has advanced significantly, allowing us to respond flexibly to shifting demand patterns. We will continue optimizing and enhancing this area moving forward. Julia, anything to add there?

I would add that we have consistently stated that we will not break out revenue from third-party partners or resellers separately. We see these initiatives ramping sequentially as they began to scale in 2024, so we will continue testing and optimizing as we move forward. Notably, we have numerous levers for growth in 2025, including increasing user engagement, enhancing ad load on high intent surfaces, improving ad relevance, and continuing full funnel ad product innovation. We also plan to capitalize on opportunities in retail and emerging categories like financial services and technology.

Thank you. The next question is from Rich Greenfield with Lightshed Partners. Your line is now open.

Thanks for taking the question. Bill and Julia, in the release, there's a quote: 'People are coming to Pinterest more often.' You've discussed a few times the improvement in weekly to monthly active users. Can you help us understand engagement better? US MAUs are up 4%. Should we interpret the growing weekly active users as high single digits or double digits? How should we conceptualize the domestic TAM for your business?

Regarding our weekly active to monthly active ratio, it's at an all-time high for the platform, standing at 62% for our global user base. This indicates deepening engagement, even at record user numbers we previously discussed. It's typical for large volumes of new users to dilute overall engagement, yet we achieved record highs in the weekly to monthly user ratios. When evaluating segregated markets, our weekly user growth is strongest in our mature regions like UCAN and Europe. I have consistently stated that, particularly in mature markets, focusing on deepening engagement per user is critical over chasing new users. The dynamics are favorable, with robust engagement across the platform and a significant MAU trajectory. Our strategy, which prioritizes actionability, shopping, and curation, resonates particularly well with our fastest-growing audience—Gen Z. This deepened actionability drives user engagement and encourages higher clicks to advertisers, which grew over 90% year over year in Q4, even after lapping the initial impact of direct links introduced in Q4 of last year, where clicks increased over 100% year on year. So we’re effectively seeing a positive dynamic of strong user growth, increased engagement, and monetizable user activity.

The next question is from Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research. Your line is now open.

Thanks for taking my question. Bill, regarding ad products and features, how should we assess the impact of all this product innovation in the next one to three years, especially with Performance Plus, spotlight ads, new bidding capabilities, increasing ad load, and deep linking? What are you most excited about in terms of magnitude, and how should we forecast the impact from these various initiatives?

Thanks for the question. As I mentioned earlier, 2024 was transformative, more than doubling our revenue growth rate. Our lower funnel objectives were the strongest. We've been on a journey for the past two and a half years, striving to transform Pinterest into a true performance advertising platform. The developments we've made shouldn't be seen as one-time launches; they possess compounding effects spanning not just multiple quarters, but years. We created immense value for advertisers through lower funnel innovation, including direct links, mobile deep linking, and conversion API, leading to a 90% increase in clicks during Q4, following a preceding 100% click growth the prior year. We've doubled the ad relevance on our search platform, culminating in a 19% revenue growth from 2024 compared to 2023, marking a historic first billion-dollar quarter in Q4. All these launches compound, and we anticipate this trend to persist. Although we're not altering our strategy, we feel strongly that there remains much potential for yield from these efforts as they mature. Performance Plus is in its early stages, having been generally released only in October. Projects similar to these typically initiate long-term adoption cycles. History reveals comparable platforms continue enhancing these products three to four years post-launch. We perceive this evolution similarly. There are substantial benefits yet to be realized as we roll out new features into Performance Plus. Advertiser testing indicates a 20% improvement in CPA on campaigns utilizing Performance Plus, who also require 50% fewer inputs for campaign creation. Early adopters of the Performance Plus product are showing promising engagement. Collectively, we see it as a multiyear product development cycle after a steady build, continuous execution on these initiatives—this isn't a fleeting moment. We have major opportunities ahead.

The next question is from Ron Josey with Citigroup. Your line is now open.

Thank you for the question, Bill. I appreciate your earlier comments about compounding effects rather than one-time launches. With a year into direct links, we note outbound clicks growing by 90%. Can you share how advertiser adoption of direct links is progressing and the sales process? Also, what can we expect around this realized bidding available soon?

Regarding our compounding impact and effectiveness of direct links and mobile deep linking, we launched these in Q4 of 2023, initially prioritizing value creation and subsequently focusing on value capture. The launch of direct links and deep links aimed at incentivizing advertisers to implement measurement tools as more advertisers adopted privacy-safe measurement, evidence confirmed they were seeing significant value, incentivizing them to increase their spending with us. We noticed this value creation translated into compelling returns, shifting more budgets toward us. Our indicators show that we're excelling with large advertisers, with lower funnel revenue objectives now comprising over 80% of their Pinterest spend—substantially up from previous years. In the last year, we endeavored to pivot Pinterest into a performance advertising platform for prominent advertisers, where we're capturing a growing share of their ad budgets. Recent insights indicate that some of our major advertisers are allocating 10% or more of their total digital ad budgets to us. The enhanced shoppability of our platform has led to increased user engagement and action. This trend reinforces our optimism regarding our future performance. On bidding, we remain on schedule to launch new bidding capabilities for Performance Plus, targeting the end of this quarter. This launch will enhance advertisers' functionalities in optimizing their ad spend.

The last question is from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

Thanks for taking the question. In the quarter, you observed sequential improvements in both US and Europe MAUs. How should we approach MAU growth for this year? What further improvements do you foresee in the DAU to MAU ratio after the advance in 2024?

We don’t provide guidance on user numbers, so I won't give an exact answer on that. However, as I’ve shared earlier, we see a positive trajectory, with improved recommendations driving user engagement on the platform, including actionable shopping experiences facilitating user decision-making. Engagement levels are positively influencing our MAU growth, indicated by our record highs in weekly active to monthly active user ratios. Users are leveraging AI uniquely on our platform to curate personalized recommendations. Despite not guiding to user levels, we have strong indications that engagement drivers are sustainable, given the unique aspect of our platform. As we pursue actionable experiences in shopping, our efforts will continually strive to enhance user engagement from our audience, notably as the market for shopping continues to expand. Thus, while we don’t provide user guidance, we believe the underlying factors driving growth are durable, and we will continue to expand our initiatives. Thank you all for joining the call, and for your questions. We look forward to continuing this dialogue and hope you enjoy the rest of your day. This concludes today's conference call.

Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.