Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the YouGov's H1 FY24 presentation. I'm Steve Hatch, the CEO here at YouGov, and I'm gonna be joined in a second by Alex McIntosh. And just before that, a kind of big thank you to our panelists. As ever, you saw a few examples, and then the people enable us to really build brilliant products and help us fulfill our mission. If we could go to the agenda slide, please. Across the next hour, in addition to Q&A, I'll be covering financial and operational highlights, giving an update on the priority progress that I set out at the end of the FY23 presentation, back in October. I'm then gonna give an update on the transformative acquisition that we have in having the great colleagues and the business of CPS, the Consumer Panel Services Business, joining YouGov at the beginning of January.
Alex McIntosh, our Stifel, is gonna be taking us through a financial review, and then I'll summarize, and then we'll go, we'll go straight open into questions. Thanks again for joining us this morning. So our kind of highlights, kind of looking across this, half year, which has been a pretty busy one, for the organization on many levels. So from a financial perspective, these numbers obviously inclusive of kind of the CPS acquisition. We saw just over GBP 143 million in revenue, kind of 9% reported, 2% on an underlying basis, and I'll talk a little bit more to that in a second. Operating profit of just under GBP 30 million at GBP 27.9 million, at a 19% margin, 23% reported, 4% underlying, with a significant kind of investment that we've made in this first half of the year to set us up well.
An adjusted EPS of 20.4, so 4% reported there. I'm gonna go into more detail into these things, throughout the course of this morning, but to see, the investments that we've made in our products, and particularly our, optimization of our behavioral products and some innovation in our core flagship, data products and services, making sure that we're investing appropriately into our panel to meet client demand, and that demand is increasing ever more, kind of day after day. And using our platform basis to increase our member engagement, the vitality of our community of panelists, the interest that we have in our public platform, and I'll put out a couple of highlights we've had already so far in this half on that. And then where we're seeing kind of growth of new advertisers in our self-serve tool .
From a people perspective, one of the big highlights has been the appointment of a new Chief Commercial Officer. I'll be candid, I, I expected this when I came into the role to be an external, appointment. However, delighted that, Tom Fisher, has been appointed as our Chief Commercial Officer. Tom is somebody with over 30 years of experience in market research, and latterly, within his time at YouGov, has been the driving force behind our technology sector and our technology sector growth. So a very highly skilled individual in our sector, very, very kind of, commercially, sharp, and has also been one of the key drivers through behind some of our product innovation. So delighted to have Tom enrolled, and we're really seeing the impact that he is making.
And then the most transformative moment in YouGov's history in recent memory, which is the completion of the acquisition of CPS, and I'll touch in more detail. Whilst a smaller acquisition, the significant technology advantage that KnowledgeHound has brought to us, both of those occurring at the beginning of the year. So that's our overall summary. Looking at how the year has been flighted and a thought into the kind of second half as well, here are kind of numbers that we saw in 2022, 2023, and now as we are into 2024.
We had a pretty significant comp year on year, where, against kind of particularly the increase that we saw in the technology sector, making, as we've always said, our year will be backweighted, and that's proven, that's proven to be the case against a kind of near 30% kind of increase that we saw on the kind of previous years. Good news around that kind of particularly as we've increasingly seen, not only resilience, but also increased growth in our technology sector. So that momentum story is continuing quite consistently. We're also in the position now that we have 75% of our booked revenue for the entirety of the year, which, you know, again, gives us that ability to maintain our momentum and our kind of full thrust into the second half.
That's somewhat ahead of what we'd normally expect to see at this point in the year, where kind of previous years that would have been somewhere around kind of the high, the high 60s. Last year that was 68%. You'd have heard me talk as well at different points, either at kind of, this presentation kind of back in October about the need that I saw for increased commercial rigor, not just in Tom's appointment, but overall in the organization. And what we saw in, as when I came into the business was we were seeing a, a reduction, a kind of slowdown in our revenue in the second half of FY23. Obviously, that's something that I wanted to correct. And we've seen that occur, within the kind of first half of the year with increased sales momentum.
So our sales number within Q1 of this year was -1%, and we've seen that move significantly, a 13-point spread from Q1 into Q2 with 12% sales growth into Q2. So again, seeing the momentum, some of this is related to some of the economic backdrop, but I think we also gotta be very open and realistic that some of this is directly within our control. So it's great to see the kind of improvements that we're seeing both sales and forward-looking revenue security with the appointments of new people in place, new people in positions, and new processes brought into play. And I'll touch on those in a second as well. And just to remind everyone, you know, what are the moats in this business?
What are the things that make the overall proposition of YouGov kind of so compelling? Well, there are many, but if we had to boil them down to three, they would be these. The fact that we have a zero-party panelist relationship, the longstanding kind of data capabilities that we have are built on our panelists and how their willingness to kind of openly share in a very transparent way, their information, with us. Now, of course, that's always been valuable data. That's becoming increasingly important in the era of zero cookies, which we are about to enter, but also in the era of kind of AI and ML. There's great kind of data capabilities which help, and again, I'll touch on those as well.
Our brand, our brand recognition, and our brand reputation, you know, how being one of the few public-facing organizations, in our sector, we have a very strong B2C as well as a B2B brand, and how that creates a kind of great flywheel for our organization in enabling us to recruit panelists, at a substantially lower level, and pricing than we see, kind of widely in the market, but also customers, customers as well. And then thirdly, the kind of capabilities on product and technology, innovation. Again, back in October, you know, I talked about how I had a good understanding of the products and the data quality kind of coming into the company. What I didn't have as good an understanding is the very strong technology capability in the organization, in particular kind of strength in machine learning and data science.
All of these things make us make the kind of YouGov proposition so incredibly kind of strong and robust. It's combining these things together that in our third strategic plan, we look to build this virtuous circle of what we call the YouGov platform. Our public platform where anybody with an internet connection or anywhere in the world is able to access millions and millions of data points for free to be able to make more informed decisions or just enjoy engaging into the conversation and the point of debate. That enables us to expand our public data, our member platform, so the community, as they call themselves, of our members that feel that kind of sense of participation in the wider debate in the world, and of course, having kind of like great rewards that they get from being kind of members of the YouGov panel.
Our client platform. So increasingly, we're seeing our clients access our services through kind of digital, kind of digital-first environments and new clients coming to us as we scale up on our data services piece, our self-serve tools. And when we were looking at the beginning of the year, kind of back in October, I highlighted five areas of focus for us over FY24, five priorities and five opportunities: panel quality and maintaining and increasing that, the bedrock of what the YouGov proposition is, product innovation that's fueled kind of YouGov success in the past and continuation of that, a new one, a commercial rigor, doubling down on our US expansion and the opportunity that represents there, and the continuing build of that flywheel that I just described of the YouGov platform.
To update you on the progress that we've made in the past six months, and it's been a pretty busy one for the team, so I'd just say again, kind of huge thanks to them for all of the effort and work that they've shown since I joined. On panel quality, for those who aren't following the industry as that closely, there's certainly been an absolute wake-up call across the sector around panel quality and panelist quality and whether there is and how legitimate kind of panelists and therefore how accurate and real the results of those panelists have been. This is unquestionably a tailwind for us as an organization, and we've taken a definitive market-leading position on panel quality and panel integrity.
For those of you interested, I encourage you to take a look at the white paper that we issued back in November, which outlines YouGov's approach to maintaining panel quality and data integrity. We believe this is market-leading, combined with multiple techniques to ensure that the data that we're sharing and the panelists that we have are representative. Again, we believe that the industry will benefit from adopting many of those approaches as industry standards. We've also looked to increase our key markets and our key demographics. There are some demographics that we genuinely cannot keep up with the client demand that we see, so increasing our kind of areas, particularly kind of in young men or underrepresented groups kind of in the US.
Back earlier in the year, we discussed and we predicted that while at this point, we hadn't seen panel quality and panel integrity become a big focus of client requests, we predicted that it will be. That's proven to be the case. It is very unusual now for clients wanting to really understand at a deep level panel integrity and the techniques and the processes that you have in place to provide that. So again, seeing that widely featured in RFP just shows the benefit of us being able to access and continue to invest in these areas. Of course, that all helps us build great products. On product innovation, we have launched our first innovation on our core brand index product called SectorView, in essence giving customers much deeper insight into their specific category.
We're starting in the U.S. with autos, and we'll roll more categories out, initially in the U.S. and then other markets as we go throughout the year as well. We launched our first, AI-focused client product, AI Qual Explorer, a way of combining together all of the qualitative comments that, the businesses get at the end of their surveys in process through large language models when they were then to access what are the key insights and the kind of key interests, taking something that was a curious kind of but not particularly kind of that useful, aspect because of the large number of volume of inputs for information, but what's actually the kind of insight within them. AI Qual Explorer answers that problem. We're already seeing kind of great traction from clients already. Expansion of our YouGov Behavioral , including YouGov Safe, going out into nine more markets.
And we have an app store approval awaiting on our mobile app development there. So again, kind of taken those into more user-friendly, more frictionless ways of people sharing their data. And, you know, in addition, the acquisition of KnowledgeHound has enabled us to do two things at speed. One is introduce the AI technique of vector search into our Crunch database. And vector search is a particular AI technique that's suitable for large-scale databases to cobuild and create very accessible, rapid associations and insights. And in addition, we're using the kind of great capabilities and talent in the KnowledgeHound team to refresh the overall user interface and user experience for our core data product, something that I think was a little overdue for us and something that I'm really glad we're now focusing on now.
On commercial rigor, I've already mentioned Tom's appointment. It's kind of great to see that. We've also realigned ourselves into more joined-up teams that are regionally focused. That's one of the reasons why we've been able to see that step change in momentum of a kind of the -1 to the +12 quarter-on-quarter in our, in our sales. We've introduced new technologies to sharpen our focus and help us understand our win-loss rates in much more granular detail and follow-up. We've signed our largest ever deal, as YouGov with, a multinational media agency using YouGov's data as the underpinning for the for their operating model and enabling them to develop new products alongside ours. We're beginning to see the first kind of green shoots of the, cross-sell, with our CPS, CPS colleagues.
And it perhaps wasn't the largest kind of sale that we ever had, but to have a kind of first omnibus survey from a previous kind of CPS client, it was, you know, a milestone for the company. And we're continuing to see large-scale interest on YouGov's insight products coming from CPS clients. And on the U.S., I'm very pleased to see that technology continues to be a kind of growth sector for us. I think that has countered somewhat to what we're seeing in the rest of the industry. The elections are beginning to build a momentum for us.
We perhaps unsurprisingly, but it, but it is true, we're now at a position where our YouGov Politics team in the U.S. have had a kind of, the, the today have had the totality of their revenues that they would have seen in the previous years. We're really beginning to see that ramp as we run up into November. To do that, we're making sure that we're increasing our panel capability to be ready for this kind of U.S., U.S. expansion. In fact, our kind of active panel capability in the U.S. is up 15% year-on-year. So really, really strengthening up into this core area where we know our kind of growth, where we want our growth momentum to continue.
In fact, even though it's our largest geography already, we expect single country, I should say, in kind of Europe, we expect that the US, we predict that the US will also be our largest growth area, region when we get to FY at the end of FY 2024. Then finally, on platform, we see significant kind of upticks on the engagement in our public platforms just last couple of weeks in the UK. Ever whenever we see kind of YouGov mentioned in the wider kind of news media, we actually saw a 145% spike in kind of visits to our public platform, which also included 40,000 people reading the very technically deep article on MRP, which is the machine learning technique. So the appetite clearly out there for really understanding well is very, very high.
Of course, that has the advantage of us fulfilling our public mission, enabling us to acquire panelists through an organic source, and it raises our public profile. There've been more clients to become aware of YouGov, something we're particularly in the U.S., we know is a great advantage to us. We've seen increases in our member engagement on our member platform, and their satisfaction levels is just shy of the 87% goal that we've set ourselves for the year already. So good to see that be maintained. On our self-serve tool, we've 150 new advertisers come into the tool. Still early days here, still kind of relatively kind of small scale compared to the rest of the movie, but we are seeing kind of double-digit kind of increase in our revenues there. Some more work to do as we continue our self-serve journey.
But within that, and I've touched it only just once in this slide already, the most significant kind of moment for us in quite some time, which is the successful completion, and the joining of our near 1,000 colleagues, in CPS into the YouGov family. So just an update on where we are on that position. You've kind of clearly seen kind of, you know, the kind of financial outputs of that successful acquisition already, but there are much, much more of this to come.
For those that, the kind of snapshot of what CPS is, and just to pull back for a second, you know, the strategic rationale. If there are many, many reasons why this acquisition fitted so well with YouGov's strategy, but if we're boiling it down into one thing, it's the power of combining YouGov's attitudinal data, how people think and feel, with the incredible deep capabilities that CPS has in people's behavioral capability, what people are buying, and bringing these together into a single unit. This is what the market is demanding, and increasingly expecting. People understand the power of data, but they want that data to be more joined up than ever before in order to be actionable.
So understanding not only what people are thinking and feeling, but what they're buying and why is an incredible, incredible, powerful position. In and of itself, the CPS business is quite an extraordinary kind of organization with a level of scale, I've found increasingly as well, professionalism that isn't matched by anyone. So very glad to kind of have that team at the beginning of that journey. Also very pleased to say that integration is progressing very well. The things that we thought were true were turned out to be very, very much the case, the quality of the panel, the kind of strength of the team.
Perhaps kind of one of the pieces that it is often kind of understated in either integrations, whether that's through carve-outs or through acquisitions, is the importance of understanding the culture of the organizations and making sure that we have a kind of mutual respect as we develop this kind of joint process together. And there's no doubt that that's been a very kind of reassuring and great process, as well as bringing some new insights. You know, for example, on the product-client spectrum, YouGov is a very product-centric organization. CPS historically has been a very client-centric organization, how they drive their innovation. So bringing both those compatible skills together, I think, is no doubt going to make improvements for both parts of the organization.
So lots of work done up until February, more work to do, but by the end of the year, we expect to be in a very, very strong place. Also working directly with AlixPartners, the consultants, to help us develop jointly our new target operating model and bring those kind of synergies across the organizations, as well as the opportunities for us to build brand new, innovative products, to help disrupt the market, in a way that we know YouGov does very, very well. To give some sense of timeline, YouGov CPS has joined, a great moment in kind of a Nuremberg early on the year. We've concluded that kind of getting to know each other phase. We're collaborating on kind of quick wins and developing our kind of early commercial strategy.
We'll be launching in the middle of this calendar year and across kind of into Q1 and Q2 of our year, the future business, in its entirety. Then we really get to build new great things together. Overall, just very, very pleased to report that every single expectation we had has been met and exceeded on this, and that is progressing very, very well to date. Now, what this does mean is it gives us that moment to revise our strategic growth plan. Our organic, original strategic target, our SP3, again, that's our third strategic plan, was a target in the midterm of GBP 500 million in revenue and to increase our operating profit margin to 25%.
Now we have full ownership and understanding of the CPS business, pleased to revise to raise that target to maintaining that 25%, kind of ambitious and kind of strong 25% operating profit margin goal, but increasing our midterm 3-5-year revenue goal by an additional GBP 150 million from GBP 500 million to GBP 650 million. So thank you. It's been a very busy year, very kind of in the first half of the company. We've set ourselves up very strongly for the remaining half of the year. Now over to Alex for the full detail on the financial review. Thanks, Alex.
Thank you, Steve. And good morning, everybody. We have flagged this, for a few reporting cycles now, but this financial year, we are changing our divisional reporting structure, to reflect how we now organize, the group internally. Clearly, we also now have a, a significant addition to the group in CPS, which, Steve has just updated on. So we'll now be looking at the group, within three segments. We've got data products, research, and CPS. Just a point on CPS, we are very much cognizant this is a high-quality asset. This is a carve-out that's coming out from a, a much larger group. So the first year, we'll be really careful, careful work around making sure we've, we've adequately separated, the, the group. We will be under TSAs, Transitional Service Agreements, with GfK for the provision of some services for up to 12 months.
So we will be running it as a standalone division, certainly for the next 12 months. But as Steve highlighted, you'll start to see some of the synergy benefits coming through fairly quickly because of the work that AlixPartners is doing. Just as a reminder, data products, this includes the majority of the products we had previously in the definition of this. It's BrandIndex. It's our behavioral products in Safe. It's Profiles. In research, this is what was the old data services and custom segments brought together. There's a few things that have moved between what were incubators before. So it's not a one, it's not one plus one, but it isn't, it's nearly there.
Really, this is to bring together those two teams, which had been run as very separate entities before separate divisions previously, now coming together to really help service our clients in a more comprehensive way. As Steve mentioned, there's been some tough macro, but also some of the things within our control in terms of improving our performance going into the second half. It has been a challenging macro environment. We're very pleased to be reporting growth on an underlying basis. A lot of that is driven by some good work that the custom teams are doing, particularly in the UK. That's the sort of the positives.
One of the things that has been difficult, and Steve has already gone through that explanation, quite a difficult comparative period in the prior year to do with technology clients spending quite a lot in our November and December 2022, which is our H1 2023. We have seen a slowdown in growth in data products, in part driven by just a lack of focus and commercial rigor that we've been mentioning. We used to have dedicated sales teams really driving data product sales. It's now in the portfolio of sales teams. So there has been a little bit of a not as core focus as we've had in the past. We've made some remedial actions around that.
But I think it is fair to say this is one area, particularly in new clients coming on. We are seeing clients take longer to make decisions. We are seeing some non-renewals in December, where clients are saying, "This wasn't nice to have." That has been a little bit of a shift. We haven't seen that kind of behavior before in the past. I think where we're very pleased is our core clients that have been long-term subscribers continue to have this data very embedded into their workflow, and we have seen strong renewals from tenured clients. Pleased to see renewals are picking up into the new year. We are seeing budgets improving slightly with our clients. It's still early for the majority of our clients to have a first of January year-end.
A huge focus for us will be increasing our sales into the second half, driven by the launch of SectorView, which is a version of BrandIndex that allows clients to buy a package of BrandIndex. And we seek to use that as a way of also getting into larger subscriptions. The research division and just to remind you, this is in part data services, where it's fast tactical work and Custom Research, which is long-term strategic projects. Really, what we're seeing is the mix has continued to shift in the types of projects clients are doing. We're seeing an increasing amount of opportunity to pitch for large custom trackers, where clients are looking for high-quality data, understanding where that provenance comes from.
Very important for them, particularly as the industry is having quality issues around panel. But what we aren't seeing is a return to that fast turnaround work. That is an area where clients seem to be not spending money on discretionary projects. So the growth here is primarily driven by what is traditionally our custom business. Very pleased to see the UK is driving a lot of that growth, testament to fantastic performance from the team here in the UK. The US is stable, but that is beginning to pick up as we come into the tail end of Q2. And that is in part because of the different comparisons with the technology clients. CPS is now in our numbers. We closed the deal on the 9th of January.
So this is 20-odd days of revenue that we have in the group. So obviously, no trends to draw from yet. But we're very pleased to have closed the deal early in the year and really been able to kick off the calendar year with great momentum, and a lot of fantastic collaboration that's already happening now that we own the asset out. You'll see in our sector splits, we've seen an increase in technology spent. We had pointed this out in October when we came out with our full year results. We have seen an increased opportunity across all of our big tech clients. And we're pleased to see that spend is continuing. We've also seen some progress in our media agencies, our agency group.
Just as a reminder, the revenue that we generate from agencies is not directly linked to marketing activities. This is a lot of subscriptions, which are long-term contracts. Whether clients their clients are slowing spend or increasing spend doesn't affect their decision to renew, to keep using our products. But we have seen some of our agencies actually expand, going into new countries. And, as Steve mentioned, we have a very large holding company that has signed a substantial contract with us, which includes a combination of data products and custom trackers. We've had a couple lowlights in our sectors.
Esports and gaming are two sectors where we've seen our clients go through reorganization, a little bit like what we had seen in the year before with technology clients where through COVID, they just extended themselves a little bit too much. So there's a bit of softness in those two sectors, but we continue to be very well diversified across a number of sectors. Just to preempt some questions, given that the majority of our polling work will probably happen in the second half of the calendar year, we're not seeing an uptick in our polling revenue yet in these numbers. And it's unlikely it will be a significant contributor in the second half, but it's definitely going to be useful in building our brand and building momentum going into FY25.
We're pleased to report an increase in profit margin, due to bringing in the CPS business. Important to note, the CPS division is a very high-quality asset, very cash-generative, and operates at a very high margin. That is masking some underlying sort of margin decrease in our core business, in part due to a little bit of gross margin pressure. We've had some pricing pressure around data products. We've also had to use a little bit more external sample in a couple of countries where we're running big trackers for clients. Ordinarily, that would have been absorbed easily within the revenue growth, but this sort of the slowing down of our data products business has meant, obviously, we're not able to absorb as much of that as we would have liked. We're also capitalizing less.
We have increased the amount of development spend we are incurring. We are capitalizing less as a proportion of the overall technology spend. Obviously, that has an impact on OpEx. That's just a shift from that balance sheet to the P&L. And we have increased headcount in the period, in part to reflect increasing investment in products, making sure that we're building for sustainable growth into the next financial years. And so, with a sort of slowdown in revenue growth in the first half, that's obviously impacted the overall margins for the first half. But obviously, we expect to see that improving in the second half of the move into building. Good cash generation for the period. We end the period with GBP 53.4 million of cash in the bank compared to GBP 41.4 million last year.
We have spent a considerable amount of money on deal fees to get the CPS acquisition completed. And so when we're looking at our cash conversion, we're adding that back out back into normalizing it. There's been a small decrease in overall cash conversion from 87%-81%. In part, that's to do with lower revenue mix coming from data products growth. As a reminder, if you're not familiar, data products, we typically invoice upfront. And so it has a very good cash generation profile. We'll obviously seek to increase that cash conversion ratio as we focus more on data products in the second half. For the half, we have kept CAPEX broadly flat, but you've seen there's a shift in the amount of money we're spending on panel augmentation.
That's decreased down to 3.4 million, compared to 4.8 last year. But we are spending more on technology. Now, in part, some of that technology spend is helping reduce our panel acquisition costs, in part making the platform much easier for people to join organically, really driving more around retention. We're seeing some of the benefits of technology investment, reducing our requirement to spend as much money on external panel building. As part of the CPS acquisition, we took out a loan with an RCF. And the details of this, the group has a €280 million facility that is signed. We have currently drawn down £216 million. So our net debt amount is £162.7 million. We are going to try de-lever our operating gearing, sorry, our gearing ratio by half a turn every year. We're currently at 1.6 times EBITDA.
We've given you a profile of what our repayments are, underneath. But clearly, we are fairly comfortable in servicing this debt. Debt is new for YouGov. We haven't had this level before. But we are comfortably under our covenants for interest cover and gearing. And just to recap, it has been a very busy year. We've had a slow start, as Steve points out, but the order book is looking very robust. I want to make this point again. Our growth rate in Q2 in sales was 12%, having been flat or slight decline in Q1. That's coming from a number of areas. But it is continuing to be our large tech clients that are leading the way on that.
It is, I make the point, we're getting invited to pitch for ever-increasingly larger custom research projects, which have a tracking component, which are for us, have a great margin profile. So, feel really confident going into the second half of the year. Still a lot to do. We are very busy with the CPS acquisition, but really pleased to report that's also trading in line with expectation. Huge thank you to the CPS team. Very difficult to be going through the uncertainty of a carve-out, running a sales process, but still delivering on the business. And, huge testament to their skills and being able to handle quite a lot of ambiguity throughout that sale process. But most importantly, continue to support clients and support the teams.
As we expected, we will see a back-end-weighted full year, where we see growth in our revenue coming through in the second half, as we consolidate on a lot of the momentum that has been building over the last three months. In terms of the balance sheet, we will continue to be prudent in where we invest. We are seeking to improve margins. We would like to keep strong cash balances. That's very important. We want to make sure that we still have optionality, looking for opportunities that are in the market, particularly with acquisitions that could continue to drive our strategic objectives. But also, we would be looking to pay down debt in a very rapid fashion as well.
At this moment in time, we will be keeping our CAPEX broadly in line with in FY24 compared to FY23, but make that point. We've had a little bit of a shift, spending more on technology. We've made this point in the past. The more that we've invested in technology, the more that that helps drive our, our future revenue growth. So we will continue to be highly cash-generative. And I make this point again, looking to de-lever our gearing ratio by half a turn each year. So, thank you for sticking with us, so far. Looking forward to answering your questions in a second. But just to summarize where we are, there's been significant kind of progress on our five-pillar operational priorities in the first half of the year. And we've had all the success we could have expected to have from the CPS integration.
And that's trading, as Alex said, kind of very well, truly resilient, brilliant team there. And it's great to have them as part of YouGov. Of course, we also have the kind of KnowledgeHound kind of acquisition, which has brought technology capability and talent capability into the organization, enabling us to advance our AI capabilities and improve our kind of overall UX. Alex just mentioned, but we've got a very strong, forward-looking, revenue commitments ahead of where we were this year by, at this point last year, by some, yeah, about five by some five to six points. And that's good to see that step change, that's occurring. But we're being laser-focused, continuing to really kind of push that commercial rigor.
Very pleased to announce our revised target now, as a combined entity, increasing our mid-range revenue objective from GBP 500 million to GBP 650 million over the next three to five years. Lots of work to do, but lots of work done. To just conclude, a reminder of, you know, what really makes this company so impressive and so special. It is the great products.
It is the great products that we build based on the brilliance of the panelists that we have, an aspect of our organization that's becoming increasingly valued to clients and enabling us to really drive our platform, our public platform, with an election cycle that's rapidly taking hold across the world, our member platform, enabling them to have greater engagement and understanding of the work that they're providing, and our client platform, enabling them to access our services more digitally. And of course, at the heart of this, the brilliant YouGovers that are here. And I'd just like to end by saying kind of an enormous thank you to them for all of their hard work in this first half of the year, my first half in the company. And, yeah, we've got a lot of work to do over the next six months as well.
But, yeah, couldn't want to be doing it with a better team than we have now. So, thank you. And, I think, well, we'll go over to Hannah and your questions. Thanks, Hannah.
Thanks. Your first question comes from Steve at Numis. On 2Q like-for-like revenue, is 12% a realistic run rate going into the second half, or is there any reason for this to change in the third and fourth quarter?
No, there's no reason for it to change. Just the quirks of when companies have their year-ends, we do typically have a strong revenue Q4, as we sort of push through and try to get as much projects through. So, I think there's no reason to see a substantial change in client behavior. Obviously, we may have an event that causes clients to pause. But I think the most important part is this is a new budget year for the majority of our clients. And so the trends that we're seeing early in the year, certainly comfortable seeing them extending for the next four or five months.
Linked to that, the margin in core YouGov for the first half, what are the moving parts between the first and the second half?
Well, some of that is just recognizing we increased headcount in the first half. And obviously, as we generate more revenue in the second half, we've got people who are now becoming, you know, more effective, as they're getting embedded into the business. We're also looking to increase the amount of revenue we're generating from data products. I want to make the point, it is harder, the further you go into the financial year, to generate significant revenues from that because of the revenue recognition profile. But there are a number of things that we have that are very high margin, in particular the more that we can drive in our behavioral data sales, which is a very high margin product. SectorView, it will have very high margins attached to it as well.
Because it's a versioning of existing data that we have, part of that revenue, sorry, part of the margin increase will be driven by just a change in mix. And I want to also make the point, the increasing amount of tracking work that we're going for, as it sort of replaces a lot of the data services, as a percentage of revenue we're generating in research, also helps with that margin. We do generate significant amounts of margin compared to ad hoc project work when we're doing tracking studies for clients.
Linked to that, Steve asks, what is the customized tracker as a percentage of revenue and research for the first half?
Yeah, for the first half, it is about 50%.
Then, on data products margin, you talk about gross margin pressure. Why is that happening? Is that temporary or a new norm?
I think it is temporary. We have seen a bit of pricing pressure, and that is in part we have one competitor into our Profiles product and one competitor to BrandIndex, who have both raised significant amounts of money in 2021, 2022. And, yeah, what we're seeing is they're reducing their prices pretty dramatically as they're trying to trade through those valuations. And that, of course, is impacting us. We are seeing clients looking in at getting better at comparing prices between the two. What we do see, if we lose out to those other competitors, is actually clients do come back later on when they understand the difference in quality.
It's often a very difficult thing for clients to understand when you're assessing a new product is what is the actual underlying quality when you start using it, in earnest. Are you getting the insights that you would be expecting? And we do have strong confidence that our products continue to be the highest quality in the market.
Thanks. Moving on, there is a question from Paul Richards. Will you be able to link potentially on an anonymized basis data from YouGov panelists and data from CPS panelists?
Yeah, I'll check out them. Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you for the question, Paul. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, our goal is to have one YouGov panel, and for us to be able to do exactly that. And we also one of the kind of key aspects I found kind of coming into the company, and that's true with this process as well, is the transparency that we have with our panelists in and around their data. You know, but YouGov sits at this, cultural intersection of people wanting more and more control over their data, but at the same time, wanting more value from their data as well. So we sit right at the intersection of those two points.
So this is how it's about migrating onto a kind of single YouGov panel in its totality, for us to do exactly that, so to be able to combine together those different data sources. So we very much see the potential of having the kind of single perspective that enables us to take existing set of CPS data, match that against the historic kind of data that we've got against YouGov, to be able to combine both the quantitative, attitudinal data sets that we have together with the sales data sets, going forward. So, our goal is to always do that with our panelists, as well.
So you hit exactly the heart of the benefit that we see of the acquisition and bringing single data sets together to make sure clients have even better information than they've ever had.
Thanks, Steve. Your next question comes from Andrew Ripper . Alex, can you explain how the Q1 of -1% and Q2 of +12% relates to the organic growth in the first half?
Oh, and yeah, okay. Yeah, well, it because on one hand, we're talking about sales. And so the increase in sales that we've had in Q2, we won't have seen the benefit of the revenue coming through from that yet. That's why we're making the point, growth will be back-weighted. It's the nature of the products that we're selling, products and services that we're selling. So if we've got an increased commitment from our tech clients, for example, on running more trackers, and those sales being recognized in January and February, some revenue will be generated from those sales in the month as we get those products up and running. But the majority will come in the months coming after.
It depends if we're doing a quarterly tracker or an annual tracker in terms of what that profile of revenue recognition looks like. So there is a bit of a lagging effect of increasing sales means we will be generating the revenue in the coming months rather than being able to drive a lot in months. I make that point because that's where we're seeing this distinction between the mix in our research department is going more to strategic projects, which are longer in nature. We aren't seeing that very fast turnaround work where we would generate sales and then be able to generate the revenue associated with those sales rapidly. That's that business, the what was the old data services business, there's just not as much of that work coming in as we've had in previous years.
So, this is and come back to Steve's point about the flywheel. This is why building this momentum is very important for us. It's giving us this better visibility on our forward revenues, and shifting into a model where we can be much more predictable, you know, in terms of what projects are coming in and how we win them.
Thanks. Another question from Andrew on CPS. How should we interpret the CPS's 20-day contribution of GBP 14 million of sales in the first half? And what does that imply for an annualized run rate and what's driven the better-than-expected sales?
Yeah, so, I'll go with better-than-expected trading performance, because that's a step back. CPS is still on a 1st of January, 31st of December year-end. Yeah, and so we were in the process of shifting that. Where they've seen better trading performance is once we were announced as the preferred bidder, that gave their clients some comfort in what was happening with the asset. They had seen clients having a little bit of a let's wait and see what happens as part of the sales of the divestiture process. So just having clarity on where the asset was going meant clients were then committing to CPS. And in fact, there was a little bit of pent-up demand because they've been holding back a bit.
They've seen clients come and be more interested in other things that might be coming down the pipe at CPS now that they're owned by a strategic, which will be giving more investment and more thought to how they improve services. Obviously, different to private equity ownership. CPS has a different revenue recognition profile than we do. So, the majority of its business is providing reporting to clients. It provides those reports on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. So the cost base is they're collecting data continuously. Obviously, they employ all the staff continuously. But they have seasonality in their revenue recognition in the revenue profile. They have a peak in January, and they have a peak in July.
That's because you're getting monthly reporting, you get the quarterly reporting, and you're getting half-year reporting to clients that will be happening within that month. We recognize that, and raced to close the deal as early as we could in January to capture as much of that margin as possible. But what that means is the revenue expectations for February and March are definitely going to be much lower than that. So, it's not something that you can then just straight line out in the way that we could do with our data products business and say, "This is what the run rate looks like for the rest of the year." When we get to the half here, that growth rate will be in the mid- to high-single digits, in terms of expected growth rate.
For the most part, that's because we're still running CPS as it was, making sure that we're continuing to support the teams, making sure that we're handling the integration, as responsibly as possible. It's a very high-quality asset. We do not want to disrupt it. And so, yeah, as we point out, we need some work with Target Operating Model models in order to look at what does this new combined group look like. But for the most part, in the short term, the revenue profile will be the same as it has been historically.
Thanks, Alex. Next question comes from Jess at Peel Hunt . How meaningful can political revenue be in FY25 and any insight from previous elections?
Yeah, thanks for the question, Jess. Just a bit of context here, like, typically, we see our public revenues, that includes both government work and political work, are roughly kind of 5% of our overall business. Alex shared earlier, that's increased by a point or two. We should expect to probably see it kind of maintain around those levels in FY 2024. We do believe there's room for a bit more optimism into FY 2025 in this, not least of all because we've seen some of the technology applications that we've been, you know, developing and have been developing our expertise on, such as MRP, gain more and more traction, kind of into that world. So we're not putting a number kind of on this one into FY 2025 yet.
But clearly, the kind of August through to November opportunity that the U.S. represents is a pretty big one for us. I do just want to stress, so when we talk about revenue, with specifically how it relates to politics rather than government, we're principally talking about the U.S. There is some opportunity there in the U.K., but it's, it's, which, and from a politics perspective, but predominantly, this is, this is U.S.-based. Strong capabilities in the team. We're also gearing up for our, in fact, we've already started, our election coverage. So you will see many noted YouGivers, not least of all, our Chief Scientist, being involved in multiple kind of press interviews. And all these things kind of help the flywheel of not only helping us increase our political revenue, but grow our brand.
And, yeah, as I mentioned earlier, that's a great source of organic growth on our panelists. But it's also a great source of our, of our commercial revenue. The reason being is the spontaneous brand recall is one of the key decision-making factors for organizations and marketeers when selecting who to send that one RFP to. In the U.K., we're top three in spontaneous recall. In the U.S., we're top three in prompted recall, but not spontaneous. Now, the reason that's valuable is the, the you, you effectively become default for RFP requests with the higher level of kind of visibility and awareness that you have. So there's a the combination both of the politics, politics revenue, Jess, and also the additional uplift we get from increased brand awareness and kind of and, and reputational awareness for us.
Finally, on this one, we do think there's more to have in the academic sector here for us as well over time. We are the highest-ranked polling company in the very prestigious kind of FiveThirtyEight rankings just recently. In fact, I think we're the only one in the top five outside of the university. So very, very kind of clear positioning for us as being, you know, the definitive and, from the academic perspective, the most accurate pollster that's there.
Thanks. Your next question comes from Kiran at Berenberg. In terms of operating margin in research, is any of the uplift function of clients going to a digital sales journey, or is it too early to see that benefit?
Yeah, I'd say it's too early on that one. We're still building this as a way. I think the industry is learning how to do this. We're learning how to do this at an accelerated rate. But for sure, kind of longer term, we see the potential of a digitally driven sales journey as being one that, of course, we will be margin-enhancing to us. Of course, what we do also see is the great role of our scaled operations that we see in our CenX centers around the world. Again, that helps us to maintain our top margins in our omnibus service data services provision. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Kiran. That's the journey. Not quite there yet, but certainly, that's the destination we're headed for.
Thanks. Next question from Brad at CFO. You have signaled pricing pressure in data products. What share of data products are renegotiated each year? And do you expect to continue to see pricing pressure?
What share is that? That's a good question, Brad. You never looked at that, that, from that perspective. I, I guess one way to look at it is, is what is the renewal rate? And so typically, we have, about a 15%-20% of our clients, churn out of data products. Quite often, it's clients that have used it only for one year, and haven't quite been able to embed it into their workflow. And so that's why I make the distinction when you have tenured, customers, they, they do stick around for a very long time. So it's probably in the 15%-20% where you're having a real sort of conversation around, do they want to take it? And within that, you're going to get people who go somewhere else. You're going to have people who just, yeah, don't, don't do anything in that space.
So, it's going to be, I would estimate, probably 10%-15% where you're having a conversation at the renewal stage where external pricing is coming to bear as being part of that conversation. I would say it impacts us more on new clients, new subscriptions. That's where we're seeing some very aggressive pricing coming through from competitors. And that's where they're using that pricing to try to differentiate themselves. And I do make that distinction. Once you're already using the product and you're getting a lot of value out of it, the price is not something that's going to necessarily move you away. Being already aware with what the data looks like, how that works for you is just as important to clients.
Thanks. Question from follow-up question from Jess on Q3 trading. How have sales been in Q3 so far? It's been similar to Q2 or has it moderated?
We haven't finished the quarter. So as much as I can say, yeah, I think we saw definitely a continuation of that into February. We have very unusual Q1 queues. So we're like, 1st of August to end of October is our Q1. So the 1st of February was the beginning of our Q3. We did have a really strong push in January. January was a record sales month for us. And we saw, you know, compared to February last year, we saw similar levels of double-digit growth in the month. Now, clearly, we've still got the rest of the quarter to finish. But we have seen a continuation of that.
Thanks. We've got a couple of questions on CPS and the rollout into new geographies, from different people. So the combination of YouGov and CPS is hugely powerful. How would you look to replicate this offering in geographies where CPS doesn't operate? And how far you've got with the planned rollout of CPS into the U.S.?
Yeah, I'll tell the US question last. But in terms of the, our planned rollout into non-existing geographies for us, definitely see a kind of role for build, definitely see a role for JVs, and definitely see a role for acquisition. In fact, we're looking at kind of all of these areas. Again, just to go back to the original strategic rationale, by far the biggest challenge in investing into new territories is panel. Now, that's one thing we, of course, already have. The second thing clients want to see is historic data. So, yeah, you actually kind of have to prove yourself in a way for a year to then grow out. So we're looking kind of at initially, how do we bulk out in the areas that we're already double operating in? So YouGov plus kind of CPS within EMEA specifically.
Then the areas that exist within EMEA where we can, and then it's the US. Now, we do believe that the US offers a big opportunity for us. However, we also believe that in order to really make the most of that, we need a differentiated product. So this is about not just saying we've got a MeToo version relative to others, but a product that is the combination of the attitudinal data and the purchase data for us to take into the US. And our strategy, the way we've kind of operated previously where that's been growing, kind of panel or indeed specific products is to have effectively a kind of anchor client, a sponsor client that understands the value of the proposition, gets quite excited about it, wants to replicate that into other markets.
So, expect just to so that our plan is, yeah, we'll look to kind of partner to we'll strengthen our existing geographies. We'll expand out into other EMEA geographies through a combination of potential acquisitions in kind of smaller markets, but continuing some of the JVs that are there as well. And then for the US, developing a whole new side proposition, and with our goal of finding the right client that's going to build that with us.
Thanks. Question from Dan at HSBC. Can you update on the rollout of the self-serve tool, any incremental revenue, user growth, anything to talk about?
Yeah, sure. So, as I mentioned there, we saw 150 net new advertisers. That's net new to YouGov, by the way, not net new to, to the self-serve part of YouGov. So it's definitely working to attract in, because we are seeing growth rates that are kind of, you know, kind of understandably kind of ahead of in double digits and are kind of ahead of what we're seeing elsewhere. But again, I would stress it's still relatively small in the business. We haven't had that kind of hockey stick moment just there. But we're working through that. And we've seen kind of like good momentum in January and into February as well.
Thank you. We're slightly over. So last question, from Kiran at Berenberg. In terms of the updated targets, can you clarify that the increase in revenue target is purely from the contribution of CPS? And can you talk us through the drivers of increasing the margin to 25%?
Yeah, well, I'll take the first part of that. Maybe, Alex, we want to finish on the second. So the first part of that is yes. So we're not planning any additional kind of, acquisition, kind of into this. If we do have a significant acquisition, it's not our current plan. But again, you know, if an extraordinary value unicorn like CPS arrives, we wouldn't rule it out. You know, we'll, yeah, kind of ambitions are pretty big. However, I can confirm that, you know, that is that additional is existing YouGov organic goal, GBP 500 million plus the CPS, goal, GBP 150 million gives us our new revised target of GBP 650 million revenue.
Yeah, just a couple of points on the margin. We are anticipating to lift the CPS margin. So that's the driver of that will be increasing the depth of data they can go to in countries where they currently are operating. We do that using the existing YouGov panel assets. So that broadens out the potential universe of clients they can sell to, but also being able to support geographic rollout as well. So, there's a piece there of using existing YouGov assets much more effectively as part of the CPS rollout.
Now, in terms of the YouGov sort of core business, it's going to be a combination of increasing the driving sales through those digital sales channels, but also driving sales through to data products, whether they be data slices, behavioral data where we have really large, you know, sort of dropthrough in terms of sort of operating leverage, going for increasing amount of custom projects where we're doing that multi in multi countries. There's a multiplier effect that we get in those types of projects, which we can benefit from using our panel, using our technology. And then the third part of that, which links to technology, is looking at ways of being more efficient, so increased amounts of automation, being able to use technology to do different types of things in the data. Stephan, sorry, Steve talked about vector search.
That's going to be a very powerful analytics tool for our clients to use our products and our large custom trackers much more intensively. And you know, we'll be able to drive incremental revenues off of that. There will be some opportunity for AI. Yeah, we aren't sort of baking that in too heavily. We're definitely at the early stages of assessing what do we use AI for and where does that sit within our technology stack? But there's some clear opportunities for us to increase some efficiencies there using AI-enabled products and services, to make it easier for panelists to interact with us, to make it easier for clients to get to their data, to make it easier for ourselves to process increasingly large amounts of information as well.
Thank you.
Great. Well, thank you, Hannah, for that. And thank you all for joining us this morning and your continued interest in YouGov. As I say, it's been a yeah, in many ways, kind of transformative half and a very busy half. But it's only other half. So we know we've got lots of work to do. And again, thank you to all of the YouGovers out there. And again, thanks for your interest and the time this morning. Look forward to continuing updating in six months' time. Thank you all. Bye-bye.