Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Trustpilot's full year results. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will follow at that time. I will now hand over to Peter Holten Mühlmann, CEO and Founder, to open the presentation. Please proceed.
Good morning, and welcome to everyone joining us on this webcast and teleconference where we shall be discussing Trustpilot's full year 2021 results. I'm Peter Holten Mühlmann, the Founder and CEO, and joining me on the call today is our CFO, Hanno Damm. It's been an exciting year for Trustpilot, beginning with our successful IPO, and we're pleased to share our first full year results as a public company. We're very encouraged by the progress we've made, and now we'll take you through the financial, strategic, and operational highlights and the outlook for the current year. We are successfully becoming the universal symbol of trust for the internet economy. Our platform continues to get better. We've made it easier for all businesses to use Trustpilot. For example, through the integrations we announced in 2021. We've extended our in-product self-service upgrades.
We have introduced even more flexible pricing and packaging, and we've made operational improvements. We've been expanding internationally with new offices opened in Italy and in the Netherlands, and we made key new hires to our leadership team with a new COO and CMO. This progress is being rewarded by the significant increase in business and consumer activity on Trustpilot. In 2021, we saw the cumulative number of reviews on the Trustpilot platform rise by 39% to $167 million. More than 84,000 companies are now inviting and responding to reviews and displaying their TrustScores. We saw almost $100 billion annual TrustBox impressions running at a rate of $7.8 billion per month. That's an increase of 29%.
We saw an average of more than 48 million review invitations sent by businesses every month, an increase of more than 57% compared to a year ago, which is linked to the greater adoption of automated invitations. We're delivering against our vision to create the universal symbol of trust for the internet economy. Now Hanno will take you through the financial results. Over to you, Hanno.
Thank you, Peter, and good morning, everyone. I am Hanno Damm, Trustpilot's CFO, and I'm going to take you through our 2021 results in detail. Please note that for consistency throughout this presentation, all the growth rates I highlight are provided on a constant currency basis unless otherwise specified. As we indicated in our January trading update, our business grew substantially in 2021. We recorded almost $150 million in bookings, up 27%, and ended the year with $144 million in ARR, calculated on 12/31 spot exchange rates. The growth in bookings was supported by a strong improvement in our net dollar retention rates to 99% and resulted in $131 million in revenue, up 24%, which was slightly ahead of the guidance we had provided in September.
Post the IPO proceeds, we ended the year with a significantly strengthened balance sheet and a net cash position of $93 million and no debt. I will now spend a bit of time on regional bookings and revenue trends and the retention rate before going through the P&L and cost items. After that, I will provide a financial outlook before handing the call back over to Peter, who will walk you through the strategic and operational review. We saw strong performance in all regions. In North America, bookings growth was 15%, an acceleration from the 3% we reported in 2020. Revenue, which tends to lag bookings, was $31 million, an increase of 9% over the prior year, reflecting the very subdued 2020 bookings growth, which had been affected by the pandemic and cost-cutting measures we talked about before.
North America's regional growth continues to be slower than other regions. Partly, this is due to the retention rate in the region, which is on an upward trend but still catching up with the group average. When we look at adoption metrics in a moment, it is clear that we do have increasing momentum in the region. In our largest market, the U.K., we achieved another year of strong growth with bookings and revenue up 27%. The U.K. continues to be a great example of the strong network effects and unit economics that our business can achieve at scale. In Europe and the rest of the world, bookings grew by 35% to $55 million, and we reported $48 million in revenue, up 32% year-over-year.
We thought it would be helpful to take a more detailed look at this region, given the strong growth and massive opportunity there and as indicators for other up-and-coming markets. In the Europe and ROW region, almost 90% of bookings are derived directly from continental Europe, while the balance is from Australia and a mix of 50+ other countries. Within continental Europe, the markets contributing most significantly to bookings today are Denmark, France, Netherlands, Italy, Sweden and Germany. Together, these accounted for $38 million of bookings. These six economies have a combined GDP of over $10 trillion, three times the size of the U.K., and yet they currently only generate the equivalent of two-thirds of our bookings in the U.K. This should give you a sense of the tremendous potential that we see in these largely under-penetrated European markets.
This is also evident from the level of activity by country, and as a simple benchmark, we have given the number of cumulative reviews for each of these markets, which you can view relative to the U.K. You may notice that we have more reviews in Denmark than in France and more in the Netherlands than in Germany, for example. A lot still to come. The balance of our activity in Europe, slightly over 10 million in bookings, is largely concentrated in Spain, Belgium, Ireland and Norway. We are confident that over time, we will see all of our European markets reach the relative scale and unit economics we see in the U.K. today. With the exception of Germany, we started out by selling into continental Europe from our Copenhagen office, but in 2021, we opened new offices in the Netherlands and in Italy.
This allows us to double down in those markets, bringing local expertise to accelerate growth. Over time, we expect to open more offices in local domestic markets as we continue to gain traction. I'd also like to emphasize that we have no material bookings from Russia, Belarus or Ukraine, and as a reaction to the Russian invasion in Ukraine, as well as the imposed sanctions, we have terminated all customer contracts with Russian and Belarusian customers. Furthermore, we're offering our service free of charge to our existing Ukrainian customers. In total, this would have amounted to less than $50,000 in lost revenue in 2021. North America remains the largest opportunity for us, with a market eight times the size of the U.K. in terms of GDP. We're very pleased with the progress we've made in North America since the pandemic and the levels of activities we're seeing.
In 2021, total cumulative reviews and free monthly active domains increased by nearly 40%. TrustBox impressions rose by around 30%, and we saw a 22% increase in the number of paying customers. These are all very encouraging lead indicators of future growth, and this is the traction that lies behind the re-acceleration of bookings growth we're seeing in the region. As you know, we track the proportion of businesses that already have existing unprompted reviews when they become customers for the first time. We see this as a barometer of consumer adoption, and it indicates a path to a stronger inbound sales model over time in each of our markets. Focusing on this measure alone, while the U.S. is clearly a number of years behind the U.K., it is on a similar path, which is very encouraging.
Having recently concluded a detailed analysis of our market opportunity in the U.S., we're now in the process of adopting a highly segmented go-to-market strategy, and we're looking forward to sharing more about this at our Capital Markets Day in June. Now let's talk a bit about the net dollar retention rate. A large part of our revenue comes from a high returning customer base, many of whom have been with us for multiple years. As a result, we have high retention rates that support our strong unit economics. With the exception of 2020, which was negatively affected by the pandemic, we have consistently improved our retention rates over time, both by reducing gross churn and by improving net account expansion. We believe we can drive the net dollar retention rate above 100% for the group.
Already today, our more established markets with strong network effects are operating at these levels. Of course, this further supports this long-term growth outlook in the U.K., for example. Switching now to the income statement. To better illustrate true underlying performance, we will be discussing the management view of the P&L, which excludes stock-based compensation, D&A, and transaction expenses. A reconciliation to the IFRS financials is included in the appendix to these slides. Focusing on the full year, we already talked about revenue growing 24% to GBP 131.4 million, which was ahead of the guidance on the back of strong bookings growth.
Our cost of sales, which includes the cost to support, onboard, retain, and upsell our customers, as well as the cost to host our websites and provision the software, increased slightly ahead of revenue growth as we invested into our customer success teams, which was rewarded by the meaningful improvement in our net dollar retention rate that we just discussed. Consequently, our gross margin contracted slightly to 81% from 82% in the prior year. Sales and marketing expenses are the costs incurred to acquire new customers. As a percent of revenue, they decreased slightly from 38% to 35% in 2021, as we were slower to ramp up investments into sales capacity.
This was not in line with our original plans for 2021, nor our initial guidance, and we only managed to reverse that trend somewhat in Q4 of last year, as you can see in the H2 financials. On the marketing side, our new CMO, Alicia, arrived in the fall, and with her on board, we're now able to define the right strategy to drive investments to accelerate growth. More on that at the Capital Markets Day. For reference, our sales and marketing expense amounted to 56% of revenue in 2019, as you may recall from our IPO. In 2021, we also continued to invest into our technology and content capabilities. Here, we aggregate the costs for the product and technology teams, as well as the teams that ensure the integrity of content on the platform.
In 2021, we further built our teams in Edinburgh, in Vilnius, as well as our Copenhagen office. On the content integrity side specifically, our investments focus primarily on building capacity in terms of internal and flexible third-party resources to respond to reported reviews. We have also invested in increasing our fraud and investigations team and in technological tools and systems to scale our automated approach to tackling fake reviews. As a result, we improved metrics such as the percentage of automatically detected fake reviews and automated consumer warnings on the platform. You will learn more about these in our upcoming annual transparency report. Overall, tech and content costs grew largely in line with sales and were at 23% of revenue after the impact of capitalizing certain software development costs.
As guided at IPO, G&A costs increased meaningfully, mainly as the result of the reintroduction of certain admin costs in connection with the reopening of offices, as well as public company costs that we will annualize going into 2022. As previously discussed, our HR and recruiting costs, which are also captured in G&A, were artificially low in 2020, and as we ramp up hiring again in 2021, they have started to increase, so we overall saw a strong increase in G&A as we build out the corporate back end. Importantly, if you look at the second half of the year, tech and content and G&A were running at 25% and 20% of revenue respectively. When we look at the guidance in a moment, you will see that we're expecting a broadly similar run rate as a proportion of revenue in the current year.
Adjusted EBITDA decreased from $6 million in 2020 to $4 million for the full year. Adjusted EBITDA excludes stock-based compensation and transaction costs related to the IPO to the extent not offset against equity, and in 2020, restructuring costs incurred in connection with the headcount reduction we implemented in response to the pandemic. Once again, a reconciliation to our audited financials can be found in the appendix. Let's take a look at underlying cash flow. As a result of the nature of our customer contracts, which tend to be annual and on average get paid six months in advance, Trustpilot is operating a very capital-efficient business.
Deferred revenue, effectively prepayments from customers, increased by $6.4 million in the period, while other underlying working capital contributed to a $1.2 million net outflow, driven largely by offsetting movements in trade receivables and payables, as well as labor accruals and prepayments. In the prior year, we had a one-time benefit from changing the bonus payout frequency, as well as payroll tax deferral in reaction to the COVID crisis, partially offset by a lease deposit in, for the London office, which makes the year-over-year less comparable. The main cash outflows were related to lease payments, which in the statutory cash flow are split between operating and financing cash flow, as well as CapEx, which consists largely of capitalized software development costs and about $400,000 for facilities. The increase in lease payments is due primarily to free rent expiring in New York and London.
The numbers here have been presented excluding exceptional items such as cash movements related to the IPO. A further reconciliation can be found in the appendix. We're encouraged by the significant progress we made during 2021, and the board remains confident in the strategy and outlook for the business. With the successful financial result and strong bookings performance we achieved in 2021, including a 26% increase in ARR, we expect to deliver constant currency revenue growth in line with current management expectations in 2022. Sales and marketing expenses declined as a percentage of revenue in each of the last two years. As previously guided, we intend to meaningfully re-accelerate investments in sales and marketing to capture the exciting growth opportunities we see for the business and to accelerate bookings growth in 2023 and beyond.
In fact, I should remind you of the comments we made at the time of the half-year report. We underspent in sales and marketing during 2021. We started to ramp up again in Q4, but the real acceleration comes this year and in particular in H2. To that point, when you think about sales and marketing, you should remember that we're investing to drive new bookings. We take the expense up front, bookings grow, and the revenue comes later at high gross margin. Our ongoing planned investments in the business saw tech and content and G&A increase as a proportion of revenue during the second half of 2021. In addition to our planned investments, we're seeing cost inflation, and therefore we expect these expenses to remain at broadly similar percentages of revenue throughout the current year, with overhead leverage to come thereafter.
Given we're investing for growth and also in geographical expansion, it is sometimes challenging to ascertain the long-term margin potential of the business. Fundamentally, this is a software business with high gross margins. You can see that we have invested into sales and marketing to drive growth and into technology to streamline and improve the platform. In addition, we have invested more into G&A, largely in connection with going public and to support our ramp-up in hiring. Over the long term, we expect meaningful operating leverage and higher underlying margins. To support this long-term outlook, we intend to provide a more detailed look into regional profitability at the Capital Markets Day in June. For now, I'll hand it back to Peter.
Thank you, Hanno. I want to begin by reminding you of Trustpilot's value proposition for consumers. Trust is the foundation on which commerce is built. Consumers want to know who they can trust, and they want to help others. This helps them make better, more informed decisions. By reviewing a business and sharing their experience, people can help other people. In providing their feedback, consumers also help businesses to improve their products and services. We help to ignite trust between the two, and we help improve trust online. Trustpilot is highly differentiated because we are built on trust. Consumers are able to leave reviews at any time, and businesses can always respond.
This is supported by the recognition of our brand, the depth and breadth of the consumer reviews available, our continued investment in protecting the integrity of our platform, and ongoing innovation to improve the platform for consumers and businesses. Our mission is to be the most trusted and used consumer review platform. This is fundamental to our strategy and a significant competitive differentiator for Trustpilot. There are always going to be a minority who try to manipulate the platform, given the significant value placed on reviews by consumers. However, we protect the platform using technology and experts to ensure the integrity of the platform and to stay ahead of the evolving landscape. Our bespoke automated fraud detection software has been developed over many years, and we continue to innovate in this area.
In 2021, these systems automatically detected and removed almost 20% more fake reviews than in the prior year. This increase is a result of improvements in the accuracy and performance of our existing systems, assisted by the increasing volume of data we can access to detect reliable patterns, as well as the release of new automated systems targeting specific patterns of misbehavior. This has enabled us to also increase the volume of action we take against those that try to manipulate the platform. Again, we'll be sharing more about this in the upcoming transparency report. We're constantly looking at ways the Trustpilot platform can enhance the trust between consumers and businesses. This led to our development of an industry-leading consumer verification tool alongside the release of business verification. There are two crucial aspects that differentiate us.
One is our emphasis on trust and the integrity of the platform. The other is the fact that consumers can go to Trustpilot and review any business. During 2021, we put even further distance between us and other review companies. On this chart, we've included several companies that provide the capability for businesses to collect and display reviews. What separates Trustpilot from those other companies is that they don't have a consumer-facing component. They only exist as a B2B service, meaning consumers cannot research businesses. Trustpilot also doesn't allow businesses to handpick reviewers or edit their reviews, which many other review platforms do. Due to the narrow focus of these other companies or methods of review collection, there is no depth and breadth in the review content or an accurate, holistic reflection of the businesses. We are building a trusted consumer brand, as this chart shows.
People are choosing to search for Trustpilot reviews because we are building a trusted platform, and the gulf that separates us from the others is getting wider. This is difficult for others to replicate. Our business model has not been built on enabling a business to handpick or edit their reviews, but on differentiating over time based on trust, enabling consumers and businesses to build that trusted relationship and enabling consumers to help others. As a result, we are one of the most visited websites in the world. We just covered why consumers are choosing Trustpilot as a symbol of trust and the platform to go to leave feedback and discover full holistic information about a business. Consumers increasingly rely on reviews and specifically look for Trustpilot ratings and reviews, and businesses know this. Trustpilot helps businesses to attract and retain customers.
By gathering reviews on an independent, trusted platform like Trustpilot, they're able to build a trusted brand by engaging with their customers and showing that they care. Businesses are able to understand customer feedback and improve their products and services. They can showcase the reviews and TrustScores, and they can enhance all their marketing channels and grow efficiently. Our differentiation is built on our relentless focus on trust and transparency for businesses on the platform, as well as for consumers. This is combined with our improvement on the B2B product experience with even more features and insights that we introduced in 2021 to provide greater value to our customers.
As you heard from Hanno, this is showing up in our improving retention rate with lower churn and existing customers expanding their use of Trustpilot and purchasing more of our solutions. As you will see, the value we deliver to customers is differentiated and is measurable. In 2021, we continued to benefit from the powerful amplification of our brand as our customers displayed their Trustpilot TrustScores and sent review invitations to consumers. During the year, we saw even more innovative examples of how businesses are integrating our brand across all of their marketing channels. We continue to develop and enhance the tools to help them do this with the greatest ease and impact. Businesses generated close to 8 billion monthly TrustBox impressions. On average, each month, Trustpilot sent 49 million review invitations on behalf of our customers.
You can see some examples here that clearly demonstrates that Trustpilot is just as relevant in the offline world as we are in the online world. This kind of visibility and brand awareness others would dream of. Trustpilot's marketing and branding is amplified by 84,000 companies. Trustpilot's ratings and reviews deliver measurable ROI for businesses in all our markets. In 2021, we commissioned third-party research to measure the impact on a business when they integrate the various components of their Trustpilot ratings and reviews into their own ads. The results are very impressive. For example, simply showing a Trustpilot customer review in your ad provides 3x the normal customer click-through rate in the U.K. In the U.S., it provides an 88% increase in click-through. In Europe, the increase is 58%. Now business is getting more traffic.
What is really interesting is the effect Trustpilot content has on the consumer's propensity to actually buy something. In the U.K., 77% of consumers agree that if they see a good Trustpilot score, it makes them more likely to buy from a business. In Europe, it's 62%, and in the U.S., it's 61%. These are very measurable results. On this slide, we show this in action. Trustpilot delivers higher click-through rates, increased conversion, and really positive outcomes in terms of the measurable value we deliver to our business customers. Now, we often talk about the virality that exists between the consumer and business sides of our platform, where one drives and reinforces the other, fueling Trustpilot's growth. The charts here show this in action with the exciting growth we saw on both total reviews and the number of reviewed domains on Trustpilot.
As you can see, this was the continuation of a trend that has been sustained over many years now. Many of you will also have seen our funnel diagram before. At the top, you can see the 167 million total reviews that we had at the end of the year. We have over 714,000 websites reviewed on Trustpilot, a number that's still only scratching the surface of our total opportunity. Over 500,000 of these are by businesses who have claimed their domain on the Trustpilot platform. As I said before, more than 84,000 businesses are brand promoters for us each month, either by inviting customers to leave reviews, by featuring their Trustpilot ratings on their website, or both. In 2021, we were focused on improving and streamlining the journey through this funnel.
For example, through raising brand awareness and adding to the depth and breadth of our strategic partnerships. We made a number of improvements to help the consumer, including providing more information on the business profile pages, and we provided great content and personalization to drive consumer engagement. There will be much more to come on this in 2022. We streamlined our self-service options for businesses and delivered new integrations. We're always looking at ways in which we can optimize our pricing. We introduced new flexible options to encourage even more SMEs to become customers. Here's how we think about our partnership strategy and the benefits it can bring as we continue to grow and as we enter new markets. In 2021, we developed new partnerships with e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce and Square.
We deepened existing relationships, putting more marketing dollars to work with the likes of Adobe. Partners are building integrations to enhance the Trustpilot platform. For example, Gorgias, which is enabling businesses to offer more personalized support for consumers via the reviews they leave on Trustpilot, and ReviewTrackers, which adds a deeper level of intelligence for businesses to understand the reviews they get on Trustpilot. Trustpilot is a very purpose-led business, and in 2021, we undertook a materiality assessment to let us take a thorough look at the ESG issues that matter most to all of our stakeholders. On the back of that materiality assessment, we are building a future ESG strategy with measurable targets and goals.
What we saw through the assessment is that our stakeholders prioritize the areas that fit very naturally with the purpose of our organization, such as areas relating to people and our reputation.
I'm personally very excited to see the culmination of this work in a detailed strategy in the near term. The purpose that drives us as an organization is ambitious, it's challenging, but we also know that it is inherently worthwhile. Our strategy here will only support us in our purpose overall. To summarize, it's been an exciting year. We delivered a successful financial result ahead of where we thought we'd be at the time of our IPO a year ago tomorrow. In 2021, we saw good momentum across our business. We extended our leadership and trust, and we are confident in our outlook. The need for trust online was clearly evident during the pandemic, and this seems to become more and more the case every day as consumers are increasingly exposed to uncertainty and risk in the world we live in, both offline and online.
They are increasingly looking to Trustpilot as a source of information they can rely upon and where they can come to help others to do the same. Of course, businesses know this and also want to come to Trustpilot to understand performance and to engage with their customers. Finally, this gets back to our purpose. We are creating trust for the internet economy. This has never been more important, and we're doing so in an increasingly uncertain world, making Trustpilot more relevant than ever. If you think about it, this benefits consumers, it benefits businesses, it benefits economies, and it benefits society. Now I'd like to open the call for questions. Thank you for listening.
Now we will take our first question from Adam Wood from Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.
Hi. Good morning, and thanks very much for taking the question. I've got two, please. The first one is really just to dig in a little bit, specifically on the acceleration on the sales and marketing side. I wonder if you could just give us a little bit of background on, you know, the rationale for doing this now. You know, is there any competitive pressure that you're seeing? Is it more that you're, as you alluded to in the presentation, seeing some of these key European countries, you know, really starting that journey towards the U.K. and Denmark? Are there any kind of metrics or numbers that you could give us to help us with what informed that decision?
If there is any help you could give us on, you know, the paybacks that you think you could get, would be really helpful on that decision. Secondly, just on North America, I mean, you've obviously seen a nice acceleration on the revenues and the bookings year on year. The bookings, though, did slow a little bit in the second half of last year. I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit about the dynamics underneath that. Is there a difference between, you know, price and volume and strategies that you're using to try to accelerate the adoption of the platform in that market? That'd be very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Adam. Why don't I take these? Maybe starting with North America. I think there was just a little bit of seasonality in that sort of bookings slowdown in the second half of the year. Overall, we are very pleased with the unit growth, as we pointed out. There wasn't a meaningful difference between the first and second half in sort of unit acceleration. I think they were broadly similar in that we've kind of focused more on adoption. I think in the back half we saw a slightly higher amount of discounting than we saw in the first half. We recently appointed the leader there, the senior director of sales to be heading up the office for us.
We got a leadership team in place now. I mentioned the segmentation analysis that we concluded that we're gonna be talking a lot more about at the Capital Markets Day. Overall, we feel like we've now got the plan and the strategic framework in place to execute on to really continue to drive growth there. With respect to sales and marketing, look, I think we always look for ways to accelerate growth and invest into sales and marketing. We actually guided this year to be ahead of last year in percentage of revenue. Last year we spent 38%, and we fell short of that this year.
We only spent 35% of revenue as sales and marketing expense because we weren't able to retain and attract enough salespeople and sales talent this year, 2021, I should say. We didn't really see the opportunities on the marketing side, but we have now hired a CMO. She came on board in the fall, and she's working on helping us formulate a strategic framework, how we could potentially step up marketing investment meaningfully. That's what we guided to, that we're looking at ways to invest largely in the second half of the year on the brand side, potentially on marketing and marketing spend in general.
If you look at our unit economics and the high retention rates that we're achieving and we're looking to further improve, we believe it'll provide a great return. We will also only do it if we see the return. As you can see this year, where we even though we guided towards higher spend, when we didn't find ways to deploy it with efficient returns, we didn't deploy it. I think the overarching message here is we would love to accelerate growth. We have tremendous opportunities in all of our markets, and if we find good ways to deploy it, we will really accelerate on the marketing side.
You'll also hear us talk a lot more about how we measure the return and what we're gonna expect in terms of return before we actually pull the trigger.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. Please go ahead. Your line is open now.
Hi. Morning, everyone, hopefully you can hear me. I've just got three questions if that's okay. So the first one, with the kind of acceleration in sales and marketing and some of the other cost lines, can we expect bookings growth kind of from 2023 to accelerate higher than your historical norm of 30%? Can it push through that boundary? Are you expecting it to? Second, you mentioned the flexible pricing for customers. Is that a change to the historical productization you talked about, or you were mentioning, you know, that the productization was what you were referring to?
Just the last question is, the apps that you've launched on the e-commerce platforms, can you give some more color as to how, those are going, how they're being received and, whether they are making a meaningful impact right now? Thanks.
Maybe starting with the bookings growth questions, I think the answer is it will have to be. I mean, we wouldn't be spending an extra $10 million-$50 million in sales and marketing if we wouldn't expect some sort of return and acceleration of growth in 2023 and beyond. I think we'll work through the exact timing of when marketing spend will lead to bookings growth and then revenue growth, and we'll give you more guidance on that throughout the year as we refine our models and forecasts because there will be some sort of lag that is probably somewhat more prolonged than what we'll see with investment into sales capacity initially.
Of course, our own expectation would be we would only make that investment if it drives return and therefore accelerated bookings growth. Sorry, the second question was, Jessica, can you just briefly remind me of the second question?
Pricing, I think.
Pricing, yes. Thank you. No, it's been an evolution on the productization or the sort of unbundling of the product. We've just been playing around with the entry price point in the U.S. in particular to see if lowering the price point drives more adoption or an easier sale. We'll continue to iterate around price points as well as pricing for modules over time.
I think we're very pleased with the impact we've gotten from the unbundling and the revised pricing and packaging that we launched in 2020, and it's been a big driver of the retention rate, in particular first year retention rate, by allowing us to sell someone, for example, just the standard platform and a module, and then throughout their first year as a customer, they actively engage with the product and collect reviews, and then we'll sell them additional modules. The core dynamics have really changed, which gives us the confidence that we'll be able to drive retention rate up over the long term. Peter, do you wanna take the-
Yeah. On the partnerships, that's something that we're very happy with the progress. We're seeing growth, partially in the number of businesses that are actively collecting and displaying reviews. I think that's really important because I think this is a race where it's the winner that takes most. We think there are 10 million companies out there that should be working with Trustpilot. We would really love them to start working with us and not a potential future other player. We don't yet see huge conversions into the quantum of paid customers from that channel.
Where we do see very strong economic upside is and also on adoption is that we've really pushed the percentage of businesses that are collecting reviews automatically. That's partially important because that means that more people are being invited to share their opinions of businesses and thus it's widening the brand awareness for Trustpilot. Also we know that if businesses are using Trustpilot, they are more likely to renew. Some of that increase in the retention rate is also due to that. We are continuing to deepen the integrations. You should also be aware that this is not just within you would say the classic definition of e-commerce, but this is online retail.
The internet economy really goes much beyond that and so does our partnership strategy. You should expect that we will increase the awareness we're getting on these platforms in 2022.
Great. Thanks.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Stacy Pollard from JPMorgan. Please proceed. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you very much. Just if I look at your, maybe how much of your increased cost is due to inflation? I know you sort of hinted at that. Then to what degree are you able to pass on, inflation to your own customers through price increases, if that's built into contracts or how does that work? The second question, you know, how much of the extra marketing spend is going into the U.S., and how is that market different than the U.K. or Europe in terms of go-to-market or your approach to penetrating that much larger market?
Yeah. Thank you. On the inflation piece, I mean, we've seen cost inflation and particular wage inflation quite meaningfully impact us. I think retaining and attracting talent has been a challenge throughout last year, and as we mentioned, we fell kind of short of investing in certain areas, in particular sales and marketing last year, as we weren't able to really attract all the people we wanted to hire to drive growth. We've also seen this in particular in the tech and product areas. As you know, and you probably heard from other companies you're covering, that this is a very competitive environment. What we've done is we've really made a conscious decision to invest in our workforce.
This is reflected in higher salaries for employees that were just sort of approved for this year. Higher salary bands that will impact so the cost of new hires. Investments into the G&A in terms of a world-class HR function. That is then reflected in the guidance in terms of inflation. Our contracts don't typically have built-in price accelerators based on inflation. As you look at the net dollar retention rate and the breakout, you can see there is a meaningful impact. There's a meaningful component of expansion of accounts in there over and above gross retention rate.
Given the strength of the product and the brand in the markets, in particular in markets like the U.K., we're confident we'll be able to continue to improve our net dollar retention rates by further expanding accounts, i.e. passing some of that on, which should sort of drive long-term growth.
The U.S. market.
The U.S. market is obviously different. It's much larger. It's a much bigger opportunity, but it's also harder to penetrate broadly, and therefore, we've embarked on this really very specified, segmented go-to-market strategy that we just concluded a strategic review of and that we're now adopting. We'll talk a lot more about that at the Capital Markets Day. I think as we think about the acceleration of sales and marketing, it's sort of broadly across the existing markets. Then we're looking at an additional sort of brand spend component over and above that that will. We're not entirely defined yet how much, what the quantum is, and that's why we gave sort of a range in terms of guidance. Then also where exactly we're gonna deploy it.
I think in terms of sequencing, we may deploy it in Europe first and then in the U.S. just to get it sort of tested in a smaller market and then deploy it on a larger scale in the U.S. while we're at the same time defining the right verticals in the U.S. first and build a sort of campaigns around that, rather than starting with the U.S. I think we wanna make sure that we test it out in a smaller market, see results, know it works, and then deploy it on a larger scale in the U.S. afterwards.
Thank you.
Thank you. The last question is coming from Patrick O'Donnell from Goodbody. Please press star to-
Thanks very much. Thank you very much. Just a couple of questions from me. First one will be back to the U.S. and sort of looking to see sort of where the wins have been. If you can give any highlights on certain sectors and how you've kind of obviously moved from a flat to a 15% bookings growth. Is some of that more inbound than outbound on the sales side now? Just in light of, sort of, is the brand getting more recognition in the U.S.? The other question I have is on the tech and content side, is there any opportunities to scale via tactical bolt-on acquisitions that might you know improve the technology platform effectively? Thanks.
Yeah. I mean, what we're really excited about is the product traction and the consumer adoption. We have the slide in the deck where you can see the number of customers with existing unprompted reviews in North America prior to us selling to them. That's basically consumers will have reviewed a business, and we then reach out to that business and say, "Hey, look, you've got a bunch of reviews on Trustpilot." Or to your point, on the inbound side, the businesses reach out to us and say, "Hey, I'm on Trustpilot. I wanna try the free product," or, "I wanna claim my domain.
I wanna start using it and actually become a paying customer." That share has really started to pick up in sort of 2020 and then further in 2021, where it's now 56%, up from 43% in 2020. Which incidentally is very similar to the sort of step up we saw from 2017 to 2018 in the U.K. from 46% to 57%. We feel like we're on a very similar trajectory here. Then obviously in the U.K., the model has become, in the last few years, highly efficient with more and more inbounds. We're in early days there in the U.S., but it's moving in the right direction. We're very encouraged by that.
In terms of verticals, I mean, we will talk a lot more about sort of the specific verticals at the Capital Markets Day. I think financial services has been, for example, a really strong vertical for us with wins and customers using us in their TV advertising even. But it continues to be pretty broad-based and the consumer adoption is just really great to see across the board. Did you wanna take the,
Yes, thank you very much.
What was the second question?
Yeah.
Yes.
Just on the opportunity M&A within tech and content.
Oh, M&A and tech and content. You know, conceptually, for sure it's not something we're actively looking at right now. It's yeah. Conceptually, yes, there would be definitely the opportunity to look at this over time.
Okay. Yeah. Look, very, very good. Thank you.
Thank you. Just a quick reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please key star then one. If there are no more further questions, then I would like to hand it back to Peter Holten Mühlmann for closing remarks.
Yeah. No, thank you very much for listening and thank you for all the questions. We're very encouraged by the prospects of our future, and we're looking forward to meeting a lot of investors in person this week and speaking with you on Zoom also. See you soon.