Good morning, and welcome to everyone joining us on this webcast and teleconference where we shall be discussing Trustpilot's H1 2022 results. I'm Peter Holten Mühlmann, I'm the Founder and CEO, and joining me on the call today is our CFO, Hanno Damm. We're pleased by the half-year results, which demonstrate the continued strength of our business, both financially and strategically. The momentum we're seeing in consumer and business engagement in each of the regions in which we operate has been particularly encouraging. Before we dive into the detail of today's results announcement, I'd like to take a moment to look at the factors that are driving our success and the global opportunity we're addressing.
Consumers and businesses are increasingly aware of the importance and value of independent, verified Trustpilot reviews. We've spoken in the past about the Trustpilot value proposition.
Consumers want to know whom they can trust and to help other consumers make better decisions. Businesses want to win and retain customers and build a trusted relationship with them. We've built a highly differentiated dual-sided platform to address the significant and growing market for trusted online reviews. This has resulted in network effects whereby consumer engagement results in more business adoption and vice versa, underpinning our organic growth. Today, we believe Trustpilot's scale, breadth, and depth are unmatched, and we've demonstrated profitability and shown the significant long-term operating leverage our business is capable of delivering. Importantly, we can fund our growth organically with a strong balance sheet, flexible operating model, and a target of adjusted EBITDA and cash flow breakeven in full-year 2024. Now, let me take you through the H1 highlights.
In the H1 of 2022, the group delivered revenue of $73 million, an increase of 18% year-over-year on a reported basis, or up 25% at constant currency. We ended June with annual recurring revenue of $149 million, up 23% at constant currency. Bookings increased to $87 million, up by 22% at constant currency. The continued strong bookings growth in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world was offset by lower growth in North America. Our performance there was affected by a challenging recruitment market, as well as some organizational change as we implemented a new go-to-market strategy. This strategy is already showing encouraging signs and is expected to help drive more efficient growth in the region in the future.
Growth in the adoption of Trustpilot by businesses and consumers continue to be strong in all regions, and we'll look at this in more detail in a moment. The group reported a loss for the period of $9 million. This is compared with a loss of $17 million a year ago when we incurred various one-off IPO costs. Our adjusted EBITDA loss of $5 million compared to a profit of $4 million a year ago as we stepped up our investments into business operations and took on various public company costs. We ended June with a strong balance sheet and a net cash balance of $73 million. Today, we've reiterated our revenue outlook for the current year and signaled that we expect to see higher than expected operating leverage in the H2 of the year.
We've maintained our outlook for a path to profitability for full year 2024. Hanno will cover this in more detail later on. Now, turning to the operational highlights for the H1 of the year. We've seen continued strong adoption of our platform among businesses and consumers in all regions, and we'll look at the strategic KPIs in more detail in a moment. We've successfully implemented a new, highly focused go-to-market strategy in the U.S., and the early signs are encouraging. We've seen a year-on-year reduction in the number of fake reviews detected and removed. It is getting harder to post fake reviews on Trustpilot. We've strengthened our leadership team with the appointment of a new chief commercial officer. The integrity of the content on Trustpilot is fundamental to our strategy and consequently, a significant competitive differentiator for us.
We aim to be the most trusted online reviews platform, and it's working. We stepped up our deterrence. Our detection capabilities have significantly improved to the extent that in the H1 of the year, we actually saw a reduction in the number of total flagged reviews and of fake reviews removed, both automatically and manually. Interestingly, though, the number of reviews flagged automatically increased, which is another good sign. There have even been posts on some online forums from review sellers complaining about how hard it is getting to manipulate reviews on Trustpilot. This has been made possible by improvements in accuracy and efficiency, and here we benefit from a data advantage. Also in H1, we announced a step up in our legal enforcement efforts, as well as the introduction of a new consumer verification tool.
We implemented a 2-hour delay to posting reviews that increases the friction for anyone seeking to manipulate the platform. This all represents a considerable barrier to entry for competitors, given the scale of our platform, the investments we already made, and the rapidly growing volume of data that flows through it each day. We've seen continued strength in adoption and engagement from both consumers and businesses in all regions. We achieved around 30% growth in the total number of cumulative reviews, the number of reviewed business domains and the number of monthly active domains that is, those that are actively displaying their TrustBox and/or inviting reviews each month. These could either be free or paying customers. The funnel is growing nicely, with a 35% increase in the number of free active domains.
To add some more perspective, on average each month in H1, an additional 16,000 business domains were added to Trustpilot, and during the period, an additional 23 million new consumer reviews were posted. Of course, some of these are very large numbers, which you need to consider when you look at the growth rates. For example, over 20% growth in the number of review invitations sent on average each month, up to 53 million per month in H1. We're about to hit 100 billion annual TrustBox impressions, up 10% year-on-year. We talk about the virality that exists between the consumer and the 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 in both cumulatively and the number of reviewed domains.
As you can see, this was the continuation of a trend that has been sustained over many years now. Ultimately, it's this dynamic that drives our future financial performance, which is why we're so encouraged by the continued growth and adoption by both businesses and consumers that we saw in the H1 of the year across all regions. When we think about our success, we're encouraged by the growth we're seeing across the funnel and the significant pipeline of opportunity this provides for us to monetize this over time. At the top, you can see the 190 million total cumulative reviews by the end of June, and now the number of websites that have been reviewed has exceeded 800,000. Note that this is still only a fraction of the total global market opportunity.
Over 600,000 businesses have now claimed their domain on the Trustpilot platform, and these are businesses that are taking the first step in engagement. Each month, more than 94,000 businesses are inviting consumers to leave reviews or feature their Trustpilot rating on their website or both. We have a number of initiatives underway to accelerate the time it takes for us to move businesses through the funnel, taking them from free active users to paying subscribers. We're constantly seeking to streamline and optimize our pricing plans and seeking to take friction out of the process through self-service. For example, in the U.S., the early signs for the new go-to-market strategy focus are encouraging, with an uplift in average deal sizes and shorter sales cycles as we convert users from free to paid more rapidly.
This chart illustrates Trustpilot's differentiated positioning compared to other online review platforms and solutions. Simply put, we emphasize trust and openness. We believe that this is a difficult thing for others to replicate. Our business model has not been built on enabling a business to handpick and 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 you can see, during the H1 of 2022, we put even further distance between us and other review companies.
We build a trusted consumer brand, as this chart shows. People are choosing to search for Trustpilot reviews because they place a higher value on independent, verified Trustpilot reviews than on other online reviews. As our customers display their TrustScore and invite reviews, they amplify our brand considerably.
We continue to develop and enhance the tools to help businesses to integrate their TrustScore across all of the marketing channels, and to do this with the greatest ease and achieve the highest impact. You can see some examples here that clearly demonstrate that Trustpilot is just as relevant in the offline world as we are in the online. As a result, in the H1 of the year, we saw an average of 8 billion monthly TrustBox impressions and around 53 million monthly review invitations. You'll appreciate that this creates a hugely valuable dynamic for us and fuels the network effect that supports our organic growth. Now let's look at a customer example. Scrum.org delivers training courses and certifications online.
They were looking for a way to leverage their online reviews from both a marketing perspective and as a way to understand and improve their students' experiences. They became a paying customer at the end of 2018 and began automating their review invitations. Today, Scrum reads all their Trustpilot reviews and responds to many directly on their Trustpilot profile and reaches out to customers to learn how to improve their experience in the future. Scrum also benefits from other Trustpilot features, displaying its TrustScore and embedding TrustBoxes on multiple web pages, and using Trustpilot's social integration tools to provide third-party validation across their social media and email marketing channels. What's the result? Within the first year of partnering with Trustpilot, the business saw an incredible 39% increase in website sessions and a 27% increase in conversions.
Now I'd like to hand over to our CFO, Hanno Damm.
Thank you, Peter, and good morning, everyone. I'm Hanno Damm, Trustpilot's CFO, and I'm going to take you through our H1 2022 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. In line with our July trading update, our business grew substantially in the H1 of 2022. We recorded almost GBP 87 million in bookings, up 22%, and ended the period with GBP 149 million in ARR calculated on the June 30 spot exchange rates. The growth in bookings was supported by a strong improvement in our net dollar retention rate to 100%, and we reported more than GBP 73 million in revenue, up 25% over the prior year.
We did see FX headwinds on translation as we report in U.S. dollars, which we'll discuss in more detail later on. We ended the period with a strong balance sheet and a net cash position of $73.5 million after an $8 million FX translation impact 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. Let me remind you that the bookings and revenue numbers we report are group numbers, and that we see differing levels of performance in the different countries and regions, depending on how we develop our market penetration and how developed our network effects are.
In North America, bookings growth was 8%. Revenue, which tends to lag bookings, was $17 million, an increase of 13% over the prior period.
North America's bookings growth continues to be slower than other regions. Partly, this is due to the retention rate, which is on an upward trend but still catching up with the group average. We also face a difficult labor market with higher attrition and a slower pace of hiring than we had planned for. You will recall us introducing a new North American go-to-market strategy at our Capital Markets Day. It is still early days, but we're starting to see some encouraging evidence that this new strategy is resulting in shorter sales cycles, higher average deal sizes, and less need for discounting in our target vertical markets. In our largest market, the UK, we achieved another period of strong growth with bookings and revenue both up 27%.
The UK continues to be a great example of the strong network effects and unit economics that our business can achieve at scale. In our Europe and rest of the world region, bookings grew by 27% to GBP 32 million, and we reported GBP 27 million in revenue, up 31% over the prior period. We saw strong growth across the board in the region. Now let's turn our attention to the net dollar retention rate. A large part of our revenue comes from a high returning customer base, many of whom have been with the business for multiple years.
As a result, we have high retention rates that support our visibility into future bookings and revenue. 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 saw a further improvement in the H1 of the year, achieving a net dollar retention rate of 100%. We are very encouraged by this as we continue towards driving the net dollar retention rate well above 100% for the group. You will recall that the retention rate is a group number and comprises different levels of retention in different markets. You should assume that in our more developed markets like the U.K. and Denmark, for example, we already exceed 100% net dollar retention rate for LTM H1 2022. Whereas in other markets where we have lower penetration, the retention is lower. This is the case in the U.S., for example. The group LTV to CAC ratio was 3.2 in the last twelve months.
This is a slight deterioration from FY 2021 and reflects the upfront investment into our planned discretionary brand marketing campaign due to begin in the latter part of H2, as well as labor cost inflation, among other factors. 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, G&A, and transaction expenses. A reconciliation to the IFRS financials is included in the appendix to these slides. Focusing on the H1 of 2022, we already talked about our revenue growth of 25% to $73 million. We enjoy good visibility over revenue in H2, as it largely reflects prior period bookings growth.
Sales and marketing expenses increased against the prior period, driven by a ramp-up in our sales headcount post-COVID, and by our investments in marketing to capture the exciting growth opportunities we see for the business. As we have commented on a number of occasions, we underspent in sales and marketing during 2021, and while we started to ramp up again in the Q4 of 2021, the real acceleration flowed through in the H1 of 2022. We intend to moderate our pace of hiring for the time being to reflect the macro environment, so we expect to add fewer heads in the remainder of the year than previously planned. Sales and marketing drives future bookings, but we incur the expense up front. Bookings and ultimately revenue then flow through the P&L at a high margin.
As we outlined during the Capital Markets Day, we're executing a discretionary brand marketing campaign in Italy in H2, again incurring costs up front with the commercial benefits to bookings and revenue over time. Our ongoing planned investments in the business, particularly into headcount, saw tech and content and G&A increase as a proportion of revenue during the H1 of 2022. In addition to our planned investments, we are continuing to see cost inflation as we spoke about during our FY 2021 results, and therefore, we saw tech and content and G&A costs increase as a percentage of revenue to 26% and 24% respectively. We now have the right team in place in G&A, so again, we will see a more modest pace of recruitment near term, providing the opportunity for increased operating leverage in H2.
Here, we're taking 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, provided $4 million of working capital, while other underlying working capital resulted in a $7.3 million net outflow, driven largely by labor accruals and prepayments. Labor accruals are impacted by seasonality, as we had an outflow related to our annual company bonus payout in March. The other 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 costs relating to facilities.
Office relocations in New York and London provided a one-off benefits, which was offset by CapEx to build out our new space. The numbers here have been presented excluding exceptional items such as cash movements related to the IPO. A reconciliation to the IFRS cash flow can be found in the appendix. As mentioned in the beginning, we've seen some material FX movements year to date, the principal currency effects arising from the stronger U.S. dollar against sterling and euro. As a result, we've had significant headwinds on the top line on translation. We use average rates for bookings and revenue, where sterling and the euro have weakened against the U.S. Dollar by 7% and 9% respectively year- on- year. Hence, the 7 percentage point headwind to reported bookings and revenue growth in H1 compared to constant currency growth rates.
You will recall that we calculate ARR using the spot rate at period end, and here movements have been more material, leading to the 12 percentage point headwind to ARR growth we saw in H1. You should also note that we have a natural hedge on cost, with a significant portion of our costs located in the UK and Europe. Net-net in H1, there was a small overall benefit to the bottom line after taking into account the FX effect on the top line and costs. We are reiterating our revenue outlook for FY 2022. We have already discussed the good visibility we have into revenue given the lag effect from prior period bookings.
While we're not seeing any significant changes to overall customer demand in our end markets as a result of the uncertain global macroeconomic environment, we are monitoring the situation closely, and we think it is prudent and sensible for us to take a more cautious approach to our own assumptions on new business growth and retention near term. However, because of the flexibility we have in our operating model, we expect to see more operating leverage in H2 than previously anticipated. Now I'd like to hand it back over to Peter for his summary prior to opening up the call for Q&A.
To summarize, it's been an exciting start to the year. We extended our leadership and trust, and we're confident in our outlook. Independent, verified Trustpilot reviews are valuable to consumers, to businesses, and to society. We have a strong value proposition, particularly in uncertain times. We have a highly differentiated dual-sided platform that we believe will become the de facto standard for trust reviews worldwide. Our organic growth is underpinned by strong network effects, and we believe our scale, breadth, and depth are unmatched.
We demonstrated we can rapidly become profitable, and we've discussed the significant long-term operating leverage our business is capable of delivering through reference to our more developed markets where we're already achieving very attractive margins. Finally, we can fund our growth organically with a strong balance sheet and a pathway to adjusted EBITDA and cash flow breakeven in full year 2024.
Now I'd like to open up the call for questions. Operator, kindly begin the Q&A.
Question and answer session of the event. To ask a question on the phone line, please press star and one on your device. We will pause for a moment to assemble the queue. We'll take our first question from George Webb of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Morning, Peter and Hanno. Thank you for the presentation and for taking my questions. Firstly, just on your expectations for potentially a tougher outlook moving forward, just to confirm in the release it touches on there being no significant impacts or changes in customer demand in the H1 of the year. I think your wording in this presentation's been a bit more broad than that. Have you seen anything so far through the H2 of the year or in recent weeks to drive that incremental prudence, or is it much more about your expectation more broadly given the very visible headwinds out there in the macro outlook? Secondly, you've talked about the challenging hiring market in the U.S. Have you seen that start to improve at all, either on the attrition or on the hiring side? Thank you.
Yeah. Morning, George. Thank you. Let me take these. Look, I think we're benefiting from a flexible operating model, and we feel it's prudent to not sort of invest aggressively into a what seems to be a looming recession and a very challenging macro environment. Obviously we haven't seen anything broadly that on our side, on the customer side, that would give us reasons for concern. We also think that if predictions turn out to be true that
People are making like 22% inflation in the UK or a tough winter with potentially no gas. It seems like a macro environment where we wouldn't necessarily find a lot of customer demand if all those scenarios come through. We'd rather be prudent and keep our powder dry, invest less, reduce our pace of hiring, and that will then obviously also impact our internal outlook 'cause if we invest less into those functions and areas, it's ultimately gonna impact bookings growth rate to some degree. We're not seeing anything drastically on our side to any extent in this so far. On the hiring in the U.S., I think it's starting to feel a little bit less overheated as a labor market.
I think it's still a challenging environment regardless. I think the inflation and the recession seems to be more pronounced in Europe than it is feeling in the U.S. right now.
Very clear. Thank you. Next question is from Varun Rajwanshi of J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. A couple of follow-ups on the cost side. Can you give us some color on trends in OpEx by different buckets in the H2 of this year? Then a question more broadly, how are you thinking about balancing growth and margins in the current challenging macro environment? I guess a follow-up would be, what are the cost actions that you have in mind to protect your profitability should there be a prolonged downturn? Thank you.
Yeah. Let me take that also. On the OpEx side, I think what we specifically called out was gonna be specifically more operating leverage on G&A in particular. G&A in the H1 of the year was definitely impacted by our very aggressive hiring plans. If we pull back on the hiring in the back half of the year, we'll definitely see some savings there as we don't spend so much on recruiting and agency fees, et cetera, et cetera. I think overall we're just looking to be a little bit more prudent and add fewer costs.
We continue, for example, to invest into the brand campaign that we laid out at the Capital Markets Day, where we're testing this in Italy, and so that's gonna be part of the sales and marketing expense in the H2 of the year. Overall, I think you'll see better operating leverage in the P&L and then obviously higher profitability than in the H1 of the year. I mean, I don't think we can speculate on sort of how in a hypothetical we would change the shape of the P&L in a severe downturn, but we're very much committed to the breakeven on free cash flow and adjusted EBITDA in FY 2024.
I think we've modeled this out in any scenario you can think of in terms of downside, upside. We have multiple pathways to get there. Overall, we've always maintained a pretty prudent approach and trade-off between growth and margins. In a scenario like the current one, I think we're erring more on the side of margin rather than growth. Hopefully, when the world becomes more receptive again in coming out of this recession and the challenging macro headwinds, we'll be able to invest into growth again.
That's clear. Thanks, Hanno.
We'll take the next question from Jessica Pok of Peel Hunt. Please go ahead.
Hi. Morning, everyone. I've just got a couple of questions, please. The first is, Hanno, you've mentioned it'll be G&A, where some of the headcounts will come out. I'm expecting, is there a possibility that the sales and marketing will also come down? If so, which regions the headcounts that you've assumed at the start of the year will be reduced? The second is, can you talk a bit about brand marketing and how that's going so far? Have you seen any improvements in KPIs in Italy? Any color would be helpful. Just the third one, you've mentioned about modeling the different scenarios.
If you've guided to a certain level of investment for this year, if we assume kind of a constant level of investment, what do you expect can be a sustained level of bookings growth going into next year? Thanks. If macro doesn't worsen. Thanks.
Why don't I take these as well, Jessica? G&A, yes, we expect operating leverage in G&A. We're not looking to reduce sales and marketing, and I just mentioned we are looking actually to continue to do the brand campaign, which will flow through the marketing expense line obviously in H2. I think if you recall at the Capital Markets Day, we laid out that we're gonna launch this campaign in Italy in the H2 of the year, and I think it's slated to actually kick off in October, so it's too early to give you any update on KPIs 'cause it hasn't launched yet. We're currently in production, in the final phase of production. We're very optimistic.
We remain very optimistic, but we haven't launched it yet, so I think you gotta bear with us on that one. That would then impact bookings growth in 2023. I think beyond that, we're not in a position to give you sort of guidance on 2023 bookings at this point, so unfortunately, I don't have a more detailed answer for you on your third question.
Okay, thanks. We'll take our next question from Paul ssen of Danske Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you for taking the question. Question about the ambition you still have to do break even by 2024, and now you're giving guidance for 2022. The bridge towards 2024, should we see that versus earlier on lower revenue and then a lower cost base? Or should we see you accelerating the cost in 2023 if the economy improves and therefore then you would have a higher loss in 2023 before getting break even? What kind of profile are you working with here?
Yeah. Hi, Paul. Good morning. I think it's a little early for us to give you guidance on 2023 cost. I think there's gonna be a number of factors that are gonna be influencing that. It's gonna be the overall macro environment and then sort of our strategic planning process that we're going through right now. I think we'll give you more details on that in early next year when we have finalized those plans. What I would say is sort of the goalpost for us is 2024 break even. I think next year's revenue is gonna be a function of this year's bookings growth largely. That gives you sort of an idea for the top line.
Obviously we're very optimistic that the brand campaign that we're executing this year is gonna drive positive results into bookings next year. If so, we would definitely look to continue on that path for driving growth if the macro environment is right, if we can demonstrate the ROI, and if we can make the investments. What the exact shape of the P&L and the path towards profitability in 2024 looks like, I think that's unfortunately a little early for us to give you guidance on today.
I have two more questions. Looking at the rest of world, and by that I mean Europe, outside the UK, could you give a little more flavor on where you get the best traction right now? Is it Germany, France, or where are you having the best performance?
Yeah. The performance actually was pretty strong across the board. I think Germany was really strong. France was strong. Italy was strong. There's a number of European countries that we're seeing really good traction. Also the Netherlands, where we're feeling that they're all gonna move towards that unit economics and scale that we're having achieved in the UK. There wasn't necessarily a breakout country that we would like to call out. It's been really a pretty consistent and pretty strong performance across the board.
Thank you. The final one that's on your risk section. You have three which you highlight, which are trending upward on the risk. I was thinking about the regulatory landscape. Could you put a little more flavor on. Are there any changes there or how should we see that?
Yeah. Why don't I take this? What we're seeing on the regulatory landscape is that all governments and consumer agencies are increasingly looking at content integrity and review validity on the internet in order to protect consumers and in order to protect the marketplace. We see that as a positive because we believe that we are, with a wide margin, the leader in providing trusted reviews, and so we have aligned interests there, and we are ahead of other platforms in this area.
When you see risk trending up, then your view for you, it's actually.
There's always risk in this. I mean, for example, if you look at the GDPR legislation, that has good and bad things. By the very definition, when you see government bodies looking at this, there is risk involved. I think there's more opportunity than risk.
Thank you.
We'll take our next question from Kieran Donnelly of Liberum. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Yeah, three from myself, please. Just one, in terms of your comments on the increased macro uncertainty, could you help us kinda think about what retention rates are gonna do? Is there gonna be any impact, from your perspective, on retention rates going forward? Or do you think you can continue to deliver kind of the 100% mark through the next kinda 12-18 months? Two, just on the fall in LTV to CAC, I assume it's increased acquisition cost, but could you just give some detail into the drivers around that, any changes around LTV? Three, just kind of, I guess, a more overarching strategic question.
In terms of, I guess, your internal discussions around how you kind of decide to manage the business through increased macro uncertainty in the kind of context of perhaps
There being a first mover advantage in lots of these markets, how do you balance between investing in being that number one player in the market going forward versus managing the cost base relative to the opportunity? It'd be interesting to hear kind of how you guys debate that internally and how it led to the decision to kind of, let's say, take a more managed approach on the cost side. Thanks.
Yeah. Thank you. On the macro uncertainty and retention rates, I think we're pretty optimistic that overall the business is resilient. It provides a demonstrable ROI to our customers. Unless the customers go out of business, we're pretty optimistic that we'll see continued strong retention rates. I'm not gonna give you a sort of a point guidance on 100% retention rate for the next 18 months. Keep in mind, the net dollar retention rate is a function of the gross renewals and then upsells, so maybe we'll see some pressure on upsells near term. We're obviously working really hard on continuing to drive that number up long term. I mean, our stated goal is to drive it above 100%.
We've already achieved that in the more mature markets like the UK, for example. As we laid out at the Capital Markets Day, we're working really hard on driving the retention rate up in the U.S. We're looking at pricing in the back half of this year, as another lever to continue to drive it. But there's headwinds, and we're also gonna be realistic that there is the outlook or the forward visibility, I think, is a little less clear than it was maybe a year ago, where the environment was less uncertain. It's just harder for us to give you a good estimate in this environment. You're right on the LTV to CAC.
If you think about the components of gross margin, gross churn, gross retention rate, and CAC, the customer acquisition cost has increased or the spend has increased partially because we're investing into that brand campaign, that is obviously not driving bookings right now. That is gonna purely mathematically drive that calculation down. If you were to strip this out, I think the trends continue to be really strong and the unit economics continue to be really strong. We're expecting obviously increased bookings in 2023 from that brand campaign, so we believe it's a worthwhile investment. Lastly, on the strategic point around the first mover advantage, obviously it's a consideration and that's why we're very careful and prudent in managing through this.
We're not yanking out costs. We're just slowing the pace of hiring, and are a little bit more deliberate in where we're adding right now. We'll continue to invest in all our markets. We'll continue to be very focused on winning the U.S., and conquering that market. We're making obviously, as you've seen in the numbers also, really good progress in many European countries. Overall, I think we're continuing to execute on the strategy. We're just a little bit more prudent on where we're adding incremental headcount right now.
I guess just one follow-up. Would you say that the internal ROI hurdle rate has increased as a function of the increased macro uncertainty?
Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. Yeah.
Okay. Thanks.
The next question is coming from Patrick O'Donnell of Goodbody. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks very much. Just a couple of questions from me. Firstly, just on the overall conversion, in terms of customer conversion, you've added about 14%, in terms of subscribing customers relative to sort of 22% bookings growth. Just kinda looking to see sort of like, the kind of overall trends on conversions, relative to the kind of free channel, that you're using. Is it still about capturing market share on the customer side and the overall conversion would then come? Second question, really is just on the U.S. Obviously you've outlined the acquisition or the sort of strategy, and you've given some details that you're seeing higher average order size and a lower sales cycle, et cetera.
Are you seeing any distinguishing impact from that on the bookings growth for this year in the U.S.? To what extent kind of do you see some early signs of visibility in those sectors heading into next year as well? Thanks.
Thanks, Patrick. I think your first question on conversion was it about the deceleration so the customer from 22% bookings growth to 40% customer growth?
Yeah. It's just also the actual level of growth that you're seeing on the free platform relative to the subscription growth essentially.
So as you know, I mean, the free platform has always grown a little faster than bookings growth and actual customer growth. The funnel becomes wider, and that's part of the virality, right? You have more and more consumers that are leaving reviews either organically or because they're invited by our paying customers and by the active free customers to leave reviews. Those consumers will review other businesses that is gonna sort of continue to expand the funnel at the top and continue to drive brand awareness. We're very excited about actually the growth in those metrics across the board. I think the through the funnel conversion is something we're working on internally to optimize continuously.
We're not at a level yet where we are in any way content with the achievements. I think we can do over time a lot better in this area. I think there was a report out earlier this year about how there's willingness to pay and a lot of those customers that are free users currently that we haven't converted yet. It's certainly a big opportunity for us to continue to convert more of our free customers to paying customers over time. That's one of the areas we're working on internally on the investment side for tech and product and marketing to optimize that funnel going forward. In the U.S., like I think we were somewhat disappointed with the 8% bookings growth in the H1 of the year.
I think if you factor in the tough labor market and the change in the go-to-market strategy, that led to some execution challenges there, and we feel better about it now. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we are seeing higher average ACV, higher shorter sales cycles, especially in those target verticals. We believe the early signs are that that strategy is the right strategy. It's working, and it should lead to sequential bookings growth, and acceleration of bookings growth.
Okay. Thank you.
The next question, we'll take from Bharath Nagaraj of Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you. Out of questions here, most of my questions have been asked, but just a couple from me, please. With regards to the pricing optimization that you mentioned, could you give us an example of how that's come through, how that's helped you accelerate growth? The second question would be around the consumer verification that you said you have rolled out and has had good traction. Is that going to be mandatory going forward? How is that going to prevent or get more consumers to automatically review on an organic basis? Will they still come by and do that given that you have to mandatorily do consumer verification, or is that not gonna be mandatory? Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you. Let me start with the pricing question. I mentioned that's something we're constantly looking at internally. We haven't rolled out anything, but we're looking to roll out a price increase in the H2 of the year. That should come through in the H2 year bookings. It's not something that we've done in the H1 of the year. We did some bundling in the U.S. To make it easier sort of to bridge from the standard platform and modules to the enterprise suite. I think that is helping. We haven't really sort of revamped the pricing or made any major changes in the H1 of the year on the pricing side yet.
We're constantly looking at it.
Yeah.
Okay. Thank you.
On the verification, we don't plan to make it mandatory because this is one of many ways to ensure the integrity of the reviews. We've been positively surprised by the uptake in it, and we do see that users that have verified are much more active than users that have not verified. They're returning to the site more often. They're contributing with more content, and so we think that this is something we can push to even more users than have currently verified.
Okay. All right. Good. Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time. That concludes the question and answer session. I will now hand back to Peter Holten Mühlmann with closing remarks.
Thank you for your time and attention. As I said in the prepared statement, we feel very good about the outlook of the business despite a challenging macro environment, and we look forward to meeting all the investors in the next couple of days.