Welcome everyone to GoDaddy's 2022 Investor Day. I'm Christie Masoner, Senior Director of Investor Relations, and on behalf of the entire team here at GoDaddy, thank you for joining us today. Over the next couple of hours, you will hear from 6 of our senior leaders. The day is structured in two parts with three presentations, a 15-minute break, three more presentations, and a Q&A session at the end. Aman Bhutani, our Chief Executive Officer, will give more details about each speaker's presentation. If you'd like to ask a question on today's Q&A, please submit an email to investorday@godaddy.com or in the Q&A module on your screen. Today's presentation will reference both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results and operating metrics such as total bookings, unlevered free cash flow, normalized EBITDA, annualized recurring revenue or ARR, gross merchandise volume or GMV, and net debt.
A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations of our non-GAAP financial measures to their GAAP equivalents may be found in the presentation posted to our website at the conclusion of today's events. The matters we'll be discussing today include forward-looking statements, which include those related to our future financial results, our strategies or objectives with respect to future operations, including our approach to capital allocation, new product introductions and innovations, and our ability to integrate acquisitions and achieve desired synergies. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that are discussed in detail in our documents filed with the SEC. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements.
Any forward-looking statements that we make today on this event are based on assumptions as of today, February 11, 2022 , and except to the extent required by law, we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. Thank you, and let's get started. It's my pleasure to introduce Aman Bhutani.
Hello, and thank you for joining us today for GoDaddy's 2022 virtual Investor Day. My name is Aman Bhutani, and I'm the CEO of GoDaddy. Thank you for making time to be with us today. We are eager to share our view of GoDaddy, our strategy, and our outlook for our business. Let's quickly review the agenda and get started. It is hard to believe that I have already been at GoDaddy two and a half years. Today, I am more excited about the opportunity in front of us, our results, and the pace of execution than ever before. The innovation we are bringing to our customers will drive attractive shareholder value. Over the past two years, we have been embarking on three systematic changes to GoDaddy to build a track record of success.
first has been accelerating our pace of evolution through both experimentation and hardening of our operational muscle. The second has been about planting the seeds to pursue a strategy that we will lay out for you today. The third has been about attracting top talent to GoDaddy as we evolve to being a company focused on applications for our customers. We have many wins we can share with you today, and I can tell you that we have many wins that will manifest themselves over the upcoming quarters and years. I find myself having a déjà vu moment once in a while as I see the velocity of execution accelerating, and it reminds me of similar experiences in the past where improving the muscle led to strong financial results.
I will start the day by sharing how we evolved the thinking at the company and positioned it for the future. I am deeply involved with our evolution and excited to share it with you. You will also meet Roger Chen, who is a GoDaddy veteran, and we recently named him to the role of Chief Operating Officer. Roger rose through our operating units and has an exceptional track record of implementing operational improvements that show up in value for our customers, our shareholders through the top and bottom line, and our employees. Roger will cover our operational progress, both what we have delivered and what we see as further opportunities for the future. After Roger, Osama Bedier, our President of Commerce, will share his vision for our products and will dive deep into connected commerce.
With 20 years in the commerce and payment space, Osama's background and experience make him an expert in the space, and his positive energy and excitement are infectious. After Osama, Fara Howard, our Chief Marketing Officer, will share insights into marketing and how the GoDaddy brand continues to evolve as a competitive advantage. Fara joined GoDaddy three years ago from Amazon and brought deep expertise in this area and is excited to share how our increased capabilities lead to improved efficiencies in our marketing spend. Many of our investors have visited our GoDaddy care centers and met with August Coleman, our President of Care, who loves nothing more than to boast about our care experience during the tours.
In lieu of doing an in-person tour, I am excited to say that he will do a short cameo updating you on where we are with care. Finally, Mark McCaffrey, our CFO, will bring it all together with the financials. Mark joined GoDaddy nine months ago, and he will lay out our plan through 2024 in both our P&L and our capital deployment plans. Let me start by giving a bit of context and then we'll dig into the GoDaddy opportunity. Our vision and mission have never been more important. Entrepreneurship, online presence, and omni-commerce are secular trends, and more and more micro businesses and small businesses want to offer their products and services online and connect it to their offline experience as well.
Our vision clearly states that we are committed to micro and small businesses throughout the world, including underserved communities, and we continue to be focused on our customers. Our mission is to make the largest opportunity in the world, which is the combination of the Internet and commerce, more inclusive. This vision and mission attracted me to GoDaddy, and I continue to find that we attract a lot of amazing talent because of it. In the last two weeks alone, I talked to one senior engineering leader and one data science leader who are both wanting more than just a job. They wanted to work in a company that had a bold purpose. Doing meaningful work mattered to them, and the GoDaddy vision and mission is what attracted them. Our strategy statement provides clear direction on our highest level objectives to our teams.
We champion our customers, and the clear bottom line, literally, is to drive profitable revenue growth, something we have delivered consistently for years now. Notably, we are able to provide predictable revenue growth in a volatile world. The strategy statement also states our competitive advantages. First, GoDaddy has high global brand awareness. We champion the micro and small business customer. Second, sage guidance has been in our ethos from the very beginning and is best demonstrated by Care, which is a huge differentiator. Third, creating seamlessly intuitive experiences, working back from the customer's needs, which we did particularly well in 2021. Fourth, harnessing the power of our community of small businesses, professionals, domain investors, and app providers, where we remain in early days and see massive opportunity.
Our strategy is built on our competitive advantages, measured by our position and progression against a large and growing opportunity in front of us. We remain the global leader in domains. We are the largest website platform in the world, and we have made great progress in shifting our business to application experiences. In 2021, we rapidly launched new product capabilities in commerce that were immediately adopted by our customers. We create value for customers through our unique combination of assets, and our customer-inspired innovation means we are doing the job they asked us to do and truly partnering with them on their customer journey. Our signature is driving diverse, durable, double-digit revenue growth, coupled with attractive unit economics and disciplined capital allocation, resulting in attractive shareholder value creation with a particular focus on free cash flow per share growth.
The $126 billion opportunity in front of us is both tangible and within the capabilities we have today. We have chosen these markets prudently with a focus on direct adjacencies and on driving higher lifetime value for our customer. The unique assets GoDaddy has today makes this market readily accessible and allows us to approach them differently than our competition. No one else has this amazing set of assets together at such tremendous scale and a trusted partnership with their customers, which is a competitive advantage as customers are searching for solutions. We have over 21 million paying customers, more than any other similar software business out there. We have 55 global sites. 45% of our customer base and 1/3 of our revenue is outside of the U.S. Our customers value our suite of products.
Over 84 million domains, 12% of the application-built websites in the world, and over 10 million mailboxes, resulting in greater than 85% customer retention rates. Our email penetration rates continued to scale, reaching 25% of GoDaddy customers in 2021. Websites + Marketing has grown share by 40% in the last three years. Our relationship with our customers continues to deepen, with more customers buying more products from us. Our strategic position is durable and differentiated. We love connecting with our customers. Care is a huge differentiator for us, and it's something our competitors have tried unsuccessfully to replicate. Often in a moment where they are unsure, our customers call or message us, and our care guides create a human-guided moment that instills confidence. A function of 25 years of learning and building a customer-focused culture.
In 2021, there were 15 million-plus such moments where our customers engaged a human on the other end as they used our technology to further their business. With an NPS of 65+, our care is no doubt the best in the world. We have been telling you about the value we provide our customers, and this translates into an incredibly strong value proposition for our shareholders. We are creating long-term value by leveraging our unique assets to expand customer capabilities to drive higher lifetime value from our large and loyal customer base. We're fortunate to have high visibility into our future revenue due to the recurring nature of our existing cohorts. More than 85% of annual revenue is generated from our current customer base.
This is reinforced by our Care organization, which is a powerful retention tool that allows us to retain the average customer for seven to eight years. As a result, we expect over $10 billion in revenue from existing cohorts over the next three years. As we look to deliver at least 10% revenue CAGR through 2024, the dependability of our customer base only adds to our confidence. Mark will talk about the business in two revenue pillars, and the Applications and Commerce pillar is an area of high growth. As we provide more insight into this part of our business today, you will understand the exponential increase in the lifetime value of a customer who uses our commerce platform relative to buying a domain.
The combination of durability and growth on the top line allows us to expand margins and grow normalized EBITDA at a 15% or better CAGR, all while continuing to innovate and invest in capabilities that will deliver more value to our customers over time, so that we can sustain attractive growth rates over the long term. Rest assured that we're always thinking about that balance. As we continue to grow the top line, we are also committed to driving dollars to the bottom line. This brings us to a key bottom-line metric. We expect strong free cash flow per share growth of at least 20% CAGR, which we intend to support with $3 billion in share repurchases through 2024. These repurchases reflect our view that our stock is undervalued today, and that our strategy will create significant shareholder value over time.
Given our cash generation, we will also have the flexibility to invest in attractive ROI opportunities. I have conviction in our plan, and as you will see here today, there are some areas of our business where we are seeing exciting early success and market dynamics, and we are leaning into them. We are sharing more details on the work behind those, and as they materialize, they have potential to deliver upside to this plan. To summarize, our combination of durable growth, optionality, and free cash flow per share growth is unique and compelling, and we will continue to run the business so we can repeat this formula for years to come. Let's talk about the evolution of our business. Let's discuss GoDaddy's next chapter. For the last few years, we have talked about the entrepreneur's journey in phases, dream, create, and grow.
As powerful as this has been for us, the world is changing, our capabilities have evolved, and we're increasingly optimistic that customers are ready to adopt a different perspective. Our customers are increasingly taking a nonlinear view to how they start and scale their ventures, while also constantly revisiting these phases. Going back to first principles, the entrepreneur's journey is best understood as the entrepreneur's wheel that steers their ventures. These ventures into which they commit their heart and soul and every waking hour require that our entrepreneurs go through iterations, and with each iteration, they build more, evolve who they are, and make progress. The wheel is a great analogy for the environment our customers are in because like any circle, every point represents a new beginning.
We recognize that as the world has moved quickly, we needed to broaden our definitions of the key elements on the entrepreneur's wheel.
Those key elements for our customers are digital identity, ubiquitous presence, and connected commerce. From an investor's perspective, these are each markets we participate in, but to our customers, they are a continuum of needs that we serve. For GoDaddy, the core of the digital identity is the domain name. The use cases around the domain name are ripe for expansion. Digital identity with domains can mean so much more in the future, and we plan to take domains on that journey. Ubiquitous presence represents the need of our customers to present themselves to their customers through an ever-expanding set of options across social media, marketing channels, through email, on marketplaces, and of course, through their websites. Being able to seamlessly create and post content quickly is imperative to their world, and it doesn't stop there.
The online and offline worlds are colliding, and ubiquitous presence recognizes the customer's physical store as a key part of their presence. Connected commerce recognizes that our customers need commerce to work seamlessly for them, both offline and online. Our customers' customers' expectations are set by how they engage with enterprise-grade experiences, which means they now expect to be able to buy online and pick up at the store in a matter of minutes. A customer in the store expects to be recognized online seamlessly, while a customer online expects to transition to a store experience without hiccup. For a service commerce entrepreneur, their customers expect to find them online, to engage them through messaging, to book them digitally, and to settle up in person. We are truly entering the next phase of commerce, and we call this connected commerce.
We will share more details on these elements, but first, I want to describe one other phenomenon happening on the entrepreneur's wheel. Each of the elements are starting to be deeply interdependent, and the overlap is increasing. As the wheel converges, the opportunity gets larger as it allows us to drive better outcomes for our customers. Let's talk a bit about these areas of intersection. Where does identity end, and where does presence begin? An entrepreneur may start with a handle on social media, post content. Perhaps those posts link back to a buyer site or their website or drive traffic to their physical store. But where does presence end and commerce begin? At their online store? The posts if they become shoppable themselves or when they get an appointment?
The key thing is that all of these are coming together, and one thing that many may not appreciate is that commerce links back to identity. What is the meaning of this new link? We've been spending some time to think about it, and in just a few minutes, I'll share more of that thinking and how it's driving innovation. Before we go further with the entrepreneur's wheel, let's ground ourselves in the reality of the challenges our customers face. We are dealing with a ton of complexity. They are dealing with a ton of complexity to build and maintain their online presence. They probably started in a simple model with a domain and an email address, but soon after, they face the emergence of multiple engagement models, including social platforms and online marketplaces, Etsy, Amazon, Instagram, eBay, Twitter, Houzz, Facebook, and TikTok.
Many paths to market and sell for our customers. There are also preferences around browsers and app stores and search optimization, and mobile and iOS and Google and Bing and DuckDuckGo. You get the idea. Products help solve for this complexity, but products alone are not sufficient. Our customers also need guidance, which is best provided by our care organization. Being an entrepreneur is a highly emotional experience. Having a human to go to when they're unsure what they can do makes the difference between pressing on and falling short. Building a business is tough even when you have a great idea. I often say that the ultimate equalizer is time, and it's no different for our customers. In fact, they need products to help them maximize productivity and a trusted friend they can call. We consider it our privilege and mission to support them.
To help our customers succeed, we overlay all of this complexity with seamlessly intuitive products wrapped with our care. We partner with our customers at every point on the entrepreneur's wheel. We are the connective tissue that holds it all together. We talked about the convergence of the wheel, along with the broader definitions of identity, presence, and commerce. Now you see the customer needs and how they overlap and connect with each other. With our recent acquisitions and their quick and successful integrations, we own all the product capabilities needed to meet and exceed our customers' expectations. Now that I've given you a bit of a view on how we think about what our value proposition is, let me connect it to the areas of definitive progress we're making. Which objectives make the real difference as we make progress against this view, and how will we measure success?
At the company level, we align to a set of strategic objectives. Each objective includes a set of metrics used to measure progress against the goal. We track these metrics via our company-level scorecard. The objectives are clearly articulated across the company, and leaders are directly accountable for their success. I want to highlight three objectives today because they are critical to the path of creating shareholder value in the three-year plan and beyond. These objectives lead to higher attach, retention, and customer use, which show up for shareholders in our ARPU, LTV, and GPV. The first objective I want to highlight is redefine existing categories as we disruptively enter adjacencies. Let's come back to the link between digital identity and connected commerce. This creates a new space.
There is no other company in the world that has over 84 million domains under management, is an accomplished website provider hosting 12% of the world's application-built websites, and has the scale in commerce, processing $26 billion in GMV, and is in itself a payments facilitation platform. We have all of that, and we are bringing them together in a unique way. Domain is a core digital identity for our customers, and it is ready to transform into much more. Did you know that telephone numbers were first used in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1879? There was an epidemic. No, it wasn't the Spanish flu, it was measles. A physician, Dr. Moses Greeley Parker, proposed the phone number to make it easier for substitute operators to take over in case the trained operators fell ill.
His focus, no doubt, was continuity of service, and yet it established the standard we use for our phone system today. I doubt he imagined that phone numbers would be used one day to send text messages and videos and become our core identity on mobile. Core identities have gravity, and over time, their utility expands. In fact, the utility expands to commerce use cases because it is a core identity. No doubt, today, you can send someone money using their phone number. The same is true for the email address. From its initial use case to send messages and then becoming a primary identity to log in to services across the web, and eventually, you get to the commerce use case that you can pay a business using their email address.
Expanding into commerce use cases creates multiple opportunities to monetize through both payments, transactional revenue in the short term, and subscription revenue in the long term. Domain is a core identity. In fact, it represents the most powerful of digital identities and started as the address on the Internet. Came an additional use case, email, which also uses domain name service. It is time for the humble domain name to expand to additional use cases, and yes, take its rightful place in commerce use cases as well. Starting in Q2 this year, a GoDaddy domain customer will be able to take payments immediately. They will not have to buy anything else. They will not need to buy a website. We're calling it Payable Domains. GoDaddy has 84 million domains under management. My excitement when I think about our future, it's a frenzy when I think about this.
Imagine the change, the possibilities, the math. It's exponential. I just want to take a moment and think about that. We have other great ideas taking advantage of the convergence of the entrepreneur's wheel as well. We will bring some of those innovations to market this year. One example is around bio site. Shouldn't every domain just come with a bio site, and shouldn't every bio site be inherently transactional? This is not the first time we have innovated with domains. We have done it before. The aftermarket grew at a tremendous rate over the last few years, and we continue to be excited about our efforts there. Roger will share a bit more on this in his section. Our efforts to improve monetization of domains continue to deliver strong results, and with the addition of payments to a domain, we are starting a new and very exciting chapter.
The second objective we must achieve is to move upmarket. We do a fantastic job of serving the micro businesses, generally those who do up to $200,000 a year in payments volume. What we're building has massive meaning to customers that do up to $1 million in sales, which gives us an opportunity for both greater scale and leverage to drive shareholder value. We're being measured with the expansion of our customer scope, and we have a clear path to engage and serve customers upmarket of where we are today. Serving larger customers required us to uplevel our product and our go-to-market capabilities. Growing small business commerce customers need greater customization. They need loyalty programs, integration into accounting systems, and a lot more.
I am excited to share that with the integration of Poynt, we are ready to provide all these capabilities to small business customers. On the product side, WordPress is key to our longer-term aspirations to serve growing small business customers. We are on the cusp of launching a fantastic commerce experience for WordPress in 2022, and Osama will share more details about that in his section of today's presentation. The proof points are starting to come in. This is early encouraging data. For Websites + Marketing, the analyzed GPV per merchant continues to grow since the launch of GoDaddy Payments. We've also augmented our product capabilities upmarket through both Poynt, which serves over 100,000 merchants, and Pagely, which serves enterprise WordPress customers. Looking at our technology and features, we are ready to take this much further.
With the capabilities we added, we are ready to serve micro and small business commerce customers, and we have millions of customers in our base already, and we are eager to put our capabilities in front of both existing and new customers. This third objective is about maximizing our customers' success, which for us is particularly about how our customers can present themselves to their customers and drive commercial success. Within presence, let me touch briefly on websites as it's the largest category for us today. Over the last 10 years, no-code application build websites have taken share from custom code build sites. Our own product, Websites + Marketing, has done phenomenally well with these tailwinds, growing its market share by over 40% over the past three` years .
During that same time, WordPress has taken share even more aggressively and is larger today than all the other website applications combined. WordPress is important for GoDaddy and recent acquisitions of SkyVerge and Pagely. We are stepping up our support of the community and the ecosystem. We have had a Managed WordPress offering for many years and still have more WordPress sites on our unmanaged hosting environment than our Managed WordPress plans. In the market, there is a clear shift where sophisticated small businesses and website designers and developers are moving to Managed WordPress. As their preference set increasingly shifts to managed experiences, we want to provide them with the best offering. This is an area of investment for us, but it is clear looking at the share of WordPress that it will continue to be an area of opportunity for GoDaddy.
In commerce, we now demonstrably know that customers want and trust GoDaddy to be their payments provider because we launched GoDaddy Payments in mid-2021 and experienced a rapid increase in GPV. Of course, this is early data, and we have a lot more to do to continue to bend this curve upwards, but there is no doubt that our brand has the right to provide this capability to our customers. Most promising is that even with the more expansive choices in payments platforms, we're seeing more than 60% of Websites + Marketing customers in the e-commerce tier choose GoDaddy Payments over established payments brands. Inside WordPress, GoDaddy customers using our WooCommerce experience have access to over 140 payments options, and yet already nearly a quarter of our WooCommerce customers have adopted GoDaddy's payment solution.
This level of attach is showing that our solutions are resonating with our customers, and they have a strong appetite for this offering from us, and we are delighted to be able to deliver it for them. Having given you the overview of where we are today and what an exceptional business that I believe GoDaddy is, I'll close my section by saying that we are excited about the large and growing opportunity in front of us. As a company, we have differentiated assets, and as they come together, we are bringing unique solutions to market that serve the needs of our customers in a way our competitors cannot. We are a trusted partner to our large customer base, which looks to us for multiple needs, confirming the value of our competitive differentiation with our brand, customer guidance, and seamlessly intuitive experiences.
All of this results in attractive shareholder value creation, and our highly profitable model continues to scale. Hopefully, you are as excited as I am about the incredible opportunity in front of us and the value we are working to create for customers and shareholders. As John Doerr said, "Execution is everything." Up next is Roger, who will share more about our operational progress. Thank you.
Thank you, Aman. Hello, I'm Roger Chen, GoDaddy's newly appointed Chief Operating Officer. Before this role, I led our domains business, and I'm proud of our achievements as we continue to drive steady, profitable growth in this durable recurring business. I truly enjoy being a pragmatic operator, accountable for P&Ls, leading teams to focus on delivering repeatable growth in our results through scalable execution. I believe in an approach of simplifying and focusing on the most impactful changes is critical. Generally, that means do less things and do them better. Let's begin by talking about the operating principles that guide our execution. These are our north stars, and they work together. First, it's about velocity and impact. This really means that we bias towards more experiments and bigger outcomes. We use data to drive our actions.
It means more coding, less meetings, more testing, less slides, and we're equally focused on the size of impact of these experiments, which often comes with positive financial outcomes. That takes me to the second operating principle, which is about delivering a great customer experience on top of the first principle. It's an and. We cannot simply just go fast, monetize, and disregard the customer experience. While we gain velocity and impact, we seek to provide customer delight and increase their willingness to pay too. That leads to higher customer satisfaction, higher retention, and higher renewal rates. Third is about scaling effectively, which is about unlocking new areas which we can apply the first two principles to while gaining synergy. By growing our muscles to simplify, we can accelerate our efforts effectively in areas such as our digital care and acquisitions integration.
Let me take you through some of these examples. We've invested significantly in our tech platforms to increase velocity, and the results speak for themselves. We've increased the number of conclusive experience by six times since 2019. We've also hardened our core operations to create rapid iterations of our experience while increasing yield on customer intent. Here's another successful proof point in the velocity and impact of our experimentation wins. In our core purchase flows, the total lift of conversion rate is almost 10% over the last 12 months. The size of this increase is something that we have never seen before, and we did this through a number of experiments this year that all added up to this impressive lift. Fara will walk you through one of these experiments later. Moving on to domains. It's well known that GoDaddy is a leader in domains.
We don't simply focus on any market share. We focus on quality, profitable market share that is durable. We purposefully target high-intent customers with high-quality registrations that generate recurring long-term value and result in customer retention and consistent renewals. This has lasting impact in the durability of the market share GoDaddy currently enjoys, reinforcing the strength in our customer base while building high-quality relationships for the future. Our continued investments, innovations, and experimentations in the core domain search path, aftermarket buying experience, and domain investor selling experience drove increasingly higher monetization per domain under management over the past two years. This resulted in higher bookings, revenue, and conversion in primary registrations, including alternative domain extensions, aftermarket sales, and domain add-on services. As a key durable customer on-ramp, finding a domain name from GoDaddy is often the first step in an everyday entrepreneur's journey.
Our investment in search algorithm gives us an advantage by focusing on presenting quality options to customers. This surface area allows ample opportunities for innovation and experimentation. We run hundreds of experiments to optimize and continually improve, making the domain search more relevant, more contextualized, and more personalized. Opposite from the search engine software many of us use every day, GoDaddy is solving for what does not exist and generate alternatives that are impactful, relevant, and meaningful for small businesses to begin their ventures on top of. When the exact domain a customer searches for is available to register, not only can they register the domain, we offer the opportunity to build onto their online journey via prepackaged solutions, such as our professional email and full domain protection bundle right in the initial search results.
When not available, our machine learning algorithm will offer the next best options to our customers.
Not only do we offer a vast selection of alternate domain extensions, we also provide access to our domain brokerage team who are trained to work on behalf of the buyer to inquire and negotiate the best price for domains that are already registered. Our brokerage team is the largest in the world and benefits from deep industry expertise and a global footprint. I'd like to share more about the demand side of our marketplace. Although the aftermarket is often perceived as a niche space between domain investors, 80% of retail aftermarket domains are actually sold to non-investors or everyday entrepreneurial buyers who are willing to spend more on the perfect domain to launch or improve their online brand. When a business needs the perfect brand, they've shown increasing willingness to utilize our domain buyer broker service, which offers an exceptional experience in acquiring unlisted domains.
Businesses that buy directly from our search algorithms or hire one of our brokers come in all sizes, ranging from garage startups to Fortune 100. These companies are acquiring aftermarket domains for their intrinsic brand value. They're often concise, brandable, easy to remember with desirable keywords in recognizable domain extensions. The buyers expect to pay a premium over an available domain registration due to its scarcity. We're well-positioned to enable buyers to quickly and securely purchase that premium aftermarket domain for their brand. These are high-quality leads as the buyers typically pay $99 just to start the engagement process. Beyond the exact match surface area, our search results page offers even more room for alternative domain options to a .com. The recommendations we show are derived via machine learning, where we experiment and optimize both before and after the dot.
GoDaddy's proprietary algorithm generates high-quality options by spinning derivatives of the search term keywords and appending common prefixes and suffixes and applying against our vast domain extensions and our aftermarket listings. In addition, we also offer advertising opportunities for registry partners to increase awareness and discoverability of their domain extensions through paid placements. This ad marketplace is an area for further innovation and experimentations as we look to scale the media solution program. As demand increases with more of the world coming online, it becomes harder to secure the ideal domain name with a primary registration. When that perfect domain for a business is already registered, buyers can still try to buy it in the secondary market directly from the owner.
GoDaddy has invested heavily to grow our leadership in the domains aftermarket, employing over 100 dedicated sales brokers and operational specialists as the demand for our services has grown dramatically throughout the years. Complementing the sales team is our leading sales distribution tech platform, which powers aftermarket search results on most of the top 10 global registrars. The powerful network effects of our listing service provide exceptional distribution to sellers in what we believe is the largest selection of premium domains to buyers globally. Aftermarket has been a durable growth driver, with big increases in units sold year on year, and mostly from transactions under $10,000. Compounding on the units increase is a steady growth in average sales price, contributing to our strong financial results in 2021.
While domains are clearly the foundation on which a GoDaddy customer builds their digital identity, once the customer gets the domain, we're able to customize our product offerings to drive upsell and cross-sell relative to their unique situation. Through continuous experimentation in placement and attach motions, we provide a seamless experience that increases engagement and more attach. A good example is our email products, where the percentage of the base that connects to our email product has increased steadily over the past three years. Earlier, I talked about our second operating principle of investing in a great customer experience. Our investments continue to deliver as we see stronger and growing customer renewal rates in all of our primary products, from domains, to productivity, to presence, to hosting.
Our satisfied customers are renewing more, showing a propensity to continue to increase their spend with GoDaddy, and this gives visibility into our future revenue due to the recurring nature of existing cohorts. When I talk about great customer experience, of course it includes our exceptional Care. 85% of our annual revenue was generated from our existing customer base in 2021, which is guided and supported throughout all stages of the entrepreneur's digital journey by our Care team. Customers who engage with Care show huge increase in lifetime value and MRR. Care is such a powerful retention tool that allows us to retain the average customer for 7+ years. You will hear more from Auguste Goldman, our fearless Care leader, to talk about our secret sauce. This leads us to the third operating principle of scaling effectively. Care is a great example.
Care is GoDaddy's core strength and a major source of customer delight. How do we scale Care effectively? We have to make our experiences even better while continuing to keep our costs in check. Going from voice to digital is an irreversible trend as cost per contact for voice is five times digital, and we have to shift mix while increasing NPS. We continue to innovate and invest in AI, call routing, automation, and experiment. Our outcomes so far is that we have doubled digital Care engagements, moderated Care expenses while increasing NPS. We will continue to iterate and accelerate our progress here. Another good example of scaling efficiently is growing our muscle in integrating acquisitions.
In the case of GoDaddy Registry, we have quickly integrated the latest acquisitions of MMX, .Club, and .Design, which leads to faster realization of incremental new domains bookings growth that will drive renewals in the future, and improve our margin profile by growing the portfolio of domain extensions offered through GoDaddy Registry. Beyond integrating core registry registration capabilities, the acquisitions have also provided additional brand protection product capabilities, offering another area of growth. The integration of the Poynt acquisition is another great example of scale effectively. We revamped our integration playbook for velocity and impact, and in just seven months, we've integrated 400 people with more than 35 products and major features launched. This is a huge launch and likely the fastest integration at scale that we have done in our history.
As you'll learn throughout today, GoDaddy has a unique business with a combination of durable assets and large growth opportunities. Given our proven model of operational excellence, customer satisfaction, and a culture of innovation, GoDaddy is best positioned to partner with entrepreneurs in their online venture, and as you'll hear throughout the day, the next era of connected commerce. My goal as COO is to ensure we're capitalizing on these opportunities in the best way possible. My job is to ensure the success of GoDaddy's go-to-market strategy across sales, marketing, and customer care organizations, and I'm incredibly excited about leading this team. Now let me hand over to Osama to talk about product vision.
Hello, everyone. My name is Osama Bedier. I'm the President of Commerce here at GoDaddy. I joined about a year ago as part of the Poynt acquisition, which I founded seven years prior. Before that, I founded Google Wallet, built PayPal's core business, and helped scale eBay at a time when the tech for it wasn't available. I've spent my career building the future of digital commerce since its dawn. Today, I'm excited to share our product vision for the next few years. I'll share my thoughts on where we are in the evolution of digital commerce, why GoDaddy is so well-positioned to play in this space, and how this leads to deeper customer relationships and more strategic options down the road.
It's easy to look at the last thirty years of e-commerce and think, "Wow, we've come a long way." Having had a front row seat, I saw chapters of mass consumer behavior shift, forcing us to step back and look at the problem differently. The pandemic kicked off a new chapter. Being forced to stay at home, consumers forgot the line between online and offline ever existed. As digital media consumption exploded, so did the scale of new transactional channels. TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, even buying through SMS and VR went through the roof. I hear people talk about these new channels the same way they did about the web in the nineties. Will people ever really buy there? Those new channels drove even more online to offline activity. Buy online, pick up in store, or BOPIS, became table stakes nearly overnight for many verticals, especially services.
Did the need to get orders right when customers show up or they just went elsewhere. Of all major retailers, almost half now offer this service, up from just 7% in 2019. They've continued to offer it because consumers love it so much. Even the physical store is quickly becoming connected to enable richer, personalized experiences, as shown here at McDonald's, where you no longer need to order at the counter. In our own numbers, NFC or tap and pay, which was less than 10% before the pandemic, reached nearly half of all transactions last quarter. The end of the plastic credit card is finally in sight, and along with it, a significant increase in smarter point-of-sale technology investment, which is expected to triple over the next five years. Consumer behavior shift is the catalyst for technology disruption.
We've seen more behavior change last year than at any other time in the history of the Internet, ushering in a new chapter of connected commerce. Like similar chapters before it's another reset button where the most prepared players get a much greater piece of the pie. To catch up with consumer expectations, delivering an always connected experience is no longer optional for businesses. Consumers just won't show up online or in store. The internet is moving from a mostly content and information source to a transactional internet. It's becoming the infrastructure for commerce across all channels, including the physical store. Transactions can start and complete anywhere on any device, and businesses have to keep up or die. Small businesses, in particular, are struggling to keep up. There are lots of amazing new cloud services, but they're not always interoperable.
Even the best technology providers are built on a foundation that is dominant in one channel and weak in the others, leaving their customers to figure out how to patch solutions together. Multiple copies of inventory, catalog, orders that don't sync. Constantly cutting and pasting, reconciling, and losing a lot of time in the process. Oftentimes, the best customers in one channel appear anonymous in others. In many cases, they can't even download their own customer list, feel like hostage to their tech. Most importantly, they don't know who to call when things go wrong. Our customers keep telling us they simply want one thing, a one-stop shop to manage their business and sell everywhere that matters. We feel that challenge will reshape all of commerce.
While the $5 trillion already digitized over the past 30 years is big, it will pale in comparison to the impact and reshuffling of connected commerce on all consumer spending as businesses adjust and embrace a new normal. Some existing players will extend their gains in the shift, but history has shown that many more new players will emerge. It's early days of a massive opportunity for GoDaddy and our customers, everyday entrepreneurs. How prepared is GoDaddy for this opportunity? We have an amazing set of assets and a great track record of enabling our customers with adjacent products. More than 84 million domains, almost a quarter of the Internet. One out of eight application-built websites, one of the world's top WordPress hosting brands, one of the top branded email providers in the world, and of course, our 21 million paying customers.
Let me tell you why we win across these areas. In website building, it's quickly moving away from custom code towards a no-code or app-driven development model. Our Websites and Marketing product came in with the simplest alternative in this space, hyper-focused on getting businesses off the ground with real outcomes like traffic, orders, and bookings. The results have been huge, with Websites and Marketing growing its share by over 40% over the past three years. WordPress is the largest CMS, and GoDaddy is one of the top global WordPress hosts. The richness and momentum of this web ecosystem is unmatched. In email, with over 10 million mailboxes, no one provides more branded email than GoDaddy. As soon as a domain is purchased, we offer instant access to start using it.
It also gives a window into the deeper funnel connections between our customers and their customers, with opportunities to strengthen every connection point. In domains, GoDaddy has done an amazing job maintaining market leadership. As Aman pointed out at the top, we've only just begun to scratch the surface on what domains, the largest identity asset on the Internet, can do. I decided to bring my company, Poynt, to GoDaddy because I was struck by the amazing set of assets under the GoDaddy roof and the opportunity to put them all to work on commerce as it evolves.
GoDaddy's vision is to radically shift the global economy toward life-fulfilling independent ventures. What does that mean day-to-day in our diverse communities?
WordPress hosting brands, one of the top branded email providers in the world, and of course, our 21 million paying customers. Let me tell you why we win across these areas. In website building, it's quickly moving away from custom code towards a no-code or app-driven development model. Our Websites and Marketing product came in with the simplest alternative in this space, hyper-focused on getting businesses off the ground with real outcomes like traffic, orders, and bookings. The results have been huge, with Websites and Marketing growing its share by over 40% over the past three years. WordPress is the largest CMS, and GoDaddy is one of the top global WordPress hosts. The richness and momentum of this web ecosystem is unmatched. In email, with over 10 million mailboxes, no one provides more branded email than GoDaddy.
As soon as a domain is purchased, we offer instant access to start using it. It also gives a window into the deeper funnel connections between our customers and their customers, with opportunities to strengthen every connection point. In domains, GoDaddy has done an amazing job maintaining market leadership. As Aman pointed out at the top, we've only just begun to scratch the surface on what domains, the largest identity asset on the Internet, can do. I decided to bring my company, Poynt, to GoDaddy because I was struck by the amazing set of assets under the GoDaddy roof and the opportunity to put them all to work on commerce as it evolves, especially in our own backyard of 21 million customers. We believe there's at least $1 trillion of GMV in our customer base alone.
Not to mention the millions of new customers we add every year who have less switching friction, high attach rates, and an affinity for one-stop shop. Not only is this opportunity big, but we already know our customers want us to do this job. Within 100 days of closing, we were already piloting GoDaddy Payments on Websites and Marketing, and found that more than 60% of new Websites and Marketing customers in the commerce tier chose GoDaddy over the biggest names in payments, proving that if we make it fast and easy, small businesses prefer us as a one-stop shop. We launched in late September, and since then, the number of customers asking for GoDaddy Payments has accelerated for both online and offline. We're now adding 5,000 businesses a month, and we've shipped over 1,000 devices in the first quarter alone.
These are very promising early results, and the potential behind this opportunity when we get it right is much greater than all our existing services combined. That's why commerce is important. For every small business customer we enable with connected commerce, we've added on average $1,000 of annual revenue per user. That's 83 times the lifetime value of a domain-only customer, making it the biggest monetization opportunity for GoDaddy yet. Best of all, because payments is a new take rate-based revenue model, the more successful the business, the more revenue we make. We're aligned. How does this connected commerce strategy unfold? The idea is to simplify and do a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes. First, our goal is to enable every single new GoDaddy identity with payments acceptance by default and give them more reasons to use it at the top of our funnel.
For larger customers who need more, the connected commerce platform we launched last year with seamless support for any channel no matter where they start. Finally, an open ecosystem that enables customer choice, unlimited flexibility, and the scale so the business is not limited to the features on our roadmap. Our aim is a one-stop shop connected commerce solution that can support our smallest dreamer, and as they grow, we grow with them. Let's dive a little deeper. Payments is the most important utility in commerce. Like plumbing in a house, it should just come out of the box, allowing every user to immediately transact. As Aman mentioned, we've built a massive base of identities at GoDaddy. Every time someone comes to us for a domain, they also create an account. Enabling that account with a payments option as they're naming their venture just makes sense.
They can skip the hassle of finding a provider and begin accepting payments immediately. Every successful marketplace in history adopted this model to the delight of their users. Domains happens to be one of the broadest surfaces on the Internet. Think about it. What a powerful concept. Instead of a 404 page, an under construction or DNS error, a new domain that allows the user to get paid immediately after it's registered. We call this Payable Domains, and we plan to launch it later this year to all of our new customers. We've leveraged decades of digital risk management experience to create the easiest payment acceptance application in history. There isn't one. We do all the heavy lifting in the background to filter out bad actors and instantly enable customers to transact.
That same capability stays with the customer no matter what they wanna do with that domain. Let me show you a quick demo. We're also doing this at a very disruptive price point. Whether in person or online, we are by far the lowest cost provider, 20% less on average. Mostly because we believe there's room to do this job better without taking as much, leaving more room in our customers' pockets. The larger a small business, the more this matters to them. With GoDaddy Payments available by default, integrated into all products, and available across all channels, the lowest price in the industry makes this a no-brainer for our customers. Our customers also want online and offline to just work. One solution. Last September, we completed an audacious effort to launch 30+ products that make up our connected commerce solution.
One cloud-native platform built to be just as effective selling in person as anywhere online, with a seamlessly intuitive commerce hub experience. All customers, catalogs, inventory, orders, payments, employees managed under one GoDaddy account without hassles. We help our customers use their data to run their business better, expand to the right channels, and grow sales in just a few clicks. That's where we're forging ahead to create the best one-stop shop for our customers. To do this, we leverage the collective advances of organic and acquired products across GoDaddy integrated into one solution that just works. Poynt for platform foundation, payments, and point of sale hardware. Websites and Marketing for easy websites and stores. Pagely and SkyVerge for advanced stores and enterprise-level hosting. Sellbrite to list inventory and manage orders across all channels. Reamaze to help customers communicate and transact across a growing number of messaging platforms.
Best of all, as a platform, we have a plug-and-play architecture to quickly extend as additional needs evolve. Now, GMV grows exponentially with seller size, but so does business complexity. The long tail of micro-businesses are often happy with a one-size-fits-all solution. But as you move up towards small businesses with multiple channels, the needs become a lot more specific to the vertical. A by-the-weight frozen yogurt shop needs something very different than a motel or a dentist office. The same is true across geographies and markets. No single player can do all the customization themselves. This requires an ecosystem approach where millions of third-party developers collaborate to extend the platform. WordPress is an amazing ecosystem. It started as an open source blogging platform, but its community used it to power much of the web.
It runs 2/3 of all content management system-based websites, nearly half of the top 10 million. Millions of developers, tens of thousands of plugins and themes, hundreds of hosts localized to almost every geography in the world. It is extremely powerful and flexible, but it has one major drawback. It's not easy to get started. To more quickly address our large SMB customer needs, we see WordPress as central to our ecosystem strategy. As I mentioned, GoDaddy is one of the largest providers of WordPress. We've been doing it for a very long time. We already have millions of sites and customers. Historically, though, we focused on low-cost options without frills. Going forward, we plan to integrate our commerce platform seamlessly into an upmarket offering of Managed WordPress by default. Later this year, we expect to launch GoDaddy's WordPress commerce solution, WooSaaS.
It will combine the ease of Websites and Marketing without sacrificing the power and flexibility of WordPress to get a business up and running in 90 seconds. A high-performance, vertical-specific sample store that includes payments, shipping, tax, and much more. You can simply upload your inventory and start selling or go back and edit it to your liking. Our aim is nothing less than the best possible WordPress commerce solution in the world. Longer term, our plan is to make the Connected Commerce platform available to third-party developers, including the WordPress community, and partner with them to extend it to every vertical and geography. We're passionate about open source, empowering businesses with more choices, and helping the ecosystem better monetize their efforts. Done well, this should create a flywheel of value with unmatched network effects that benefits all our customers and the Internet at large.
With that, I'll take you back to our starting point. The pandemic shifted consumer behavior and created a massive opportunity in small business commerce solutions. GoDaddy already serves over 21 million customers, almost one-third of the U.S. small business space, with an amazing set of assets. We wanna make those assets transactional with much higher annual revenue per user and economics. Our massive customer base, proven ability to attach products, and our one-stop shop approach positions us really well for the future. We've already made huge strides and are seeing promising early results. Again, our customers want us to do this job. As we roll out our platform, we will invest in the WordPress offering and ecosystem to move upmarket, extend our opportunity to additional markets, and accelerate growth.
This is Jay. He owns the Prana in Practice yoga studio. He came to GoDaddy to claim a name, but he ended up with more, way more. Now his business is really moving, and he's moving outdoors too, taking it virtually everywhere. Don't worry, he keeps his clients updated. He's taking on more customers. More ways to work and more ways to get paid. Like this pay link right here, which he can create and share with clients instantly, so he can keep moving. Meet Anne. She makes and sells luxurious handcrafted soaps. This year, she's doing more yoga with Jay, really focusing on her health, her creations, her brand, and exploring new frontiers from the comfort of her new faux leather couch.
Which she feels good about splurging on because she's been getting more customers, closing more sales, and thanks to the lowest fees in the industry, keeping more of what she makes. She's also been saving loads of time and making things super simple for her customers, so they do more of this and this, and she can do more of what she does best. Eric owns a shoe boutique, and he's really into Anne's soaps. Oh, that's lovely. He's loving this super fast checkout too, because he's got a lot to get done today. Those new models just came in. His website is ready for review. Perfect. Customers are dropping by for pickup. Well, that's helpful. What's next? See how those product shots came out. Looks good on here. Oh, looks good on him too. Okay, back to reality. Where were we?
Getting this customer checked out and on our way. He's right back to his day-to-day routine.
Thank you very much. Now Fara will talk about our marketing strategy and engaging our customers.
Thank you, Osama. I'm Fara Howard, GoDaddy's Chief Marketing Officer, and I have the privilege of helping entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life and grow their business with GoDaddy. As a lifelong marketer, I always start with our customers. Our collective job is to enable their growth, and my team's job is to engage our customers in ways that clearly communicate our promise while generating strong returns. Earlier today, Aman shared GoDaddy's customer promise. Our promise drives everything we do and everything we say. Our customers need seamless ways to build their business online and offline, and that is our promise to our current and future customers. My team and I relentlessly focus on bringing these solutions to entrepreneurs around the world through our marketing activities, and we do so with disciplined investments.
Our competitive advantages, which I'll go through in a bit, enable us to be more disciplined in our investment approach than the competition. Our sales and marketing investment represents 13% of revenue, as compared to our key competitors at 28%-30%. Diving deeper into our 2021 results, the $504 million that we invested in marketing and advertising had a significant impact on our bookings and growth to the tune of $0.90 in incremental bookings and $0.57 in incremental gross profit. This represents a 6% increase in incremental bookings and a 27% increase in incremental gross profit for every marketing dollar spent in 2020. Let's talk about how we do this. GoDaddy's competitive differentiation and our focused execution drives GoDaddy's marketing returns, all of which build on each other. GoDaddy has a long-standing history.
In fact, a 25-year history of supporting entrepreneurs. Customers and prospects alike know the GoDaddy brand, and we are the benefactor of very high brand and product awareness. As a result, our marketing investments work harder for us, and this allows GoDaddy to grow our international footprint quickly. In fact, in the span of 10 years, we have expanded our international business to over 55 countries. Our customer base, as you've heard throughout today, is large, loyal, and growing. Our team of world-class GoDaddy Guides, they provide customers around the world with exceptional guidance to help our entrepreneurs grow. I'm excited that I get to introduce you to Auguste Goldman, who leads our care organization. He'll walk you through GoDaddy's empathetic approach to how we serve customers.
Hi, I am Auguste Goldman, and I lead the 6,000-strong that bring GoDaddy Care to life. 75,000 times a day across five continents and in 15 languages, something very special happens when a local entrepreneur connects with a GoDaddy Guide. We call this special connection Wow. This is not an acronym. It doesn't mean something else. This is literally what we want our customers to say when they talk with us. "Wow, I wasn't expecting that. Wow, I didn't know I needed an advocate today. I didn't know I needed someone to say, 'You got this, and here is the plan to get us there.'" We use the word us very deliberately because that is how we feel. We are their partner, their guide, their confidant in the world of online. They know their business. We know how to make it a bigger business.
Care is our strategic weapon for growing a small business idea with GoDaddy. We use our exceptional guides to transition conversations from, "How can I do this?" to "Here is what we need to build together." We share this guidance as lighthearted provocateurs. We will tell you, "No. Heck no, you don't need that product. We are going to start here." This trust, this special relationship with our customers, sets us apart. We earn this trust over many years, over many conversations of being exactly what our customers need exactly when they need it. Not only experts in our solutions, not only experts on the build of an online business, we are experts in people, in entrepreneurship, in the journey and discovery, in pride and joy of building your business. We get it. We know it. Nobody can guide entrepreneurs like GoDaddy.
We have a few sayings in Care, a few mottos we live by. The first is, you can hear a smile on the phone. You can hear it, the energy and passion and genuine excitement for our entrepreneurs. All 21 million of them now and millions more we are ready to serve. Ready to succeed online with GoDaddy, with our solutions, with our guidance, with our expertise. That smile, that passion, you can actually hear it. Even when we are messaging with our entrepreneurs, you can feel it. Another motto is, you are stronger today because you got me. This is the core of who we are. You are stronger today because you got me. You may not have called in because your site is suboptimal on mobile, but be assured we are going to talk about it.
You may not have called in because you need to connect your brand to social media. You need to sell products everywhere. Be assured, we are going to talk about it with a smile, with our sage guidance, with our authentic selves. Our moment together will make you stronger because you got me. Then you will say, "Wow, I didn't expect that, but it was exactly what I needed." That is GoDaddy Care, and that sets us apart.
All of these strengths rest on a foundational focus of rigorous experimentation to improve our experience and our returns every day. Let's go through these strengths in detail. We have a 25-year history of supporting entrepreneurs, and our mission to empower millions of customers around the world to start and grow their business fuels us. Two years ago, we introduced many of you to Sarah Small, the founder of Wicker Goddess, as she built her presence with GoDaddy. She's a perfect example of GoDaddy's promise and mission in action. She's moved seamlessly with the help of GoDaddy's products and services to expand her presence from social media to her website to now a physical store, where she relies on GoDaddy for her connected commerce needs, both online and offline. Let's hear from her about her path to growth.
I feel like throughout this process, like, a lot shapes you, right? Taking risks changes who you are. Wicker Goddess sells vintage furniture, home goods, hand-drawn greeting cards, and prints. We launched our GoDaddy website in 2019. I remember feeling like it was a full physical expression of who I was as a human being, but now it could live on an online platform. When quarantine hit, we really relied on our paper goods that live on our website. Prints and cards and stickers were flying off of our website. It was like this time in our business where I couldn't actually keep product on the website long enough. People from all over the country who followed us on Instagram were able to access our goods in a different way and support us during a time that we really needed support so that we could stay afloat.
I'd say through the past year, it's wild to think that it was our most profitable because it is during a pandemic, but thankfully GoDaddy gave me the tools to be successful during that time. Many people were telling me, "Why would you open an in-person experience when people can't be in person?" That's what being an entrepreneur is. It's taking risks over and over again and seeing how potentially the miracles can unfold. My shop is always moving. There's furniture, there's glassware. Everything is delicate, and I feel like it's hard to create a space where nothing changes. That's what my last point of sale did. It had to be in one spot, whereas the GoDaddy Smart Terminal can come with me through the shop.
I can literally go and shop with someone, have a personal shopping experience with it in hand, checking my inventory, also ringing them up wherever we are in the shop. At the beginning, it really felt like I was by myself in a lot of this. Then when my relationship was built with GoDaddy, it felt like I had this whole new, like, hype crew behind me. They were just, like, with me every step of the way.
As I mentioned prior, this global view illustrates GoDaddy's consistent and strong brand awareness. Our brand awareness sets us apart from the competition as we remain top of mind for today's and tomorrow's customers. This awareness drives growth for the company. For example, in 2021, GoDaddy consistently held the number one organic ranking position for website builder. The marketer in me really wants to repeat that message so it sticks with you. GoDaddy consistently held the number one organic ranking position for website builder in 2021. GoDaddy's high brand awareness also helps us in that we can establish product and brand awareness and credibility quickly in new product categories. In 2021 in the United States, we tripled our awareness of commerce and payments from 3%-9%. To achieve 9% awareness in our first year in a market is a significant feat.
As you heard Aman Bhutani and Osama Bedier talk about earlier, commerce and payments is an area we're aggressively pursuing, and our marketing organization has found success in getting the word out. Our customer base and their loyalty are also significant strengths globally. In 55 countries around the world, GoDaddy supports 21 million customers. These customers have greater than 85% retention and an average lifetime of 7-8 years with us. Our customer base gives us permission to grow our solutions and power their business. As our customer base continues to attach more, GoDaddy's ARPU continues to increase alongside. Our customers hire us based on the trust they place in us to fuel their growth.
Furthering the point on trust the customers have in us, the sage guidance we provide our customers is a towering strength for us at GoDaddy, and you've heard us talk about that throughout the course of the day. Customers who engage with GoDaddy Guides consistently receive exceptional support. Our customer care is unmatched in the industry with an astounding 65 Net Promoter Score across voice and digital channels alike. Equally impressive, customers who engage with the GoDaddy Guide across either channel have a lifetime value that's 310% higher and a 344% higher monthly recurring revenue. Our customers are delighted by the care our Guides provide, and I think we can all agree that is not a typical outcome after a call to a customer service center.
We're quite proud that our net promoter score increases when our customers choose to talk to us. These core advantages sit on a foundation and culture of experimentation. In 2021, our marketing team conducted nearly 900 experiments to increase our effectiveness and drive scale. As context, here's one of the many tests we ran. Our hypothesis was that customers' confidence would increase if they heard an endorsement from a spokesperson or brand ambassador that they knew. We tested Naomi Osaka's commentary on her work with GoDaddy. She said to us, "To be one of the best, you have to partner with the best." We put her quote on our website next to our existing Trustpilot ratings and reviews, and the results were significant.
We saw an uplift in cart rate, an uplift in bookings, an uplift in conversion, and delivered over $4 million in incremental bookings from this single test alone. Our strengths are also coupled with a disciplined focus on measurement and results. We've been steadfast about highlighting our customers and their results, and we do so in an integrated way across multiple media channels. We call these integrated marketing campaigns, and we're featuring the U.K. and Australia campaigns here. These are two examples of campaigns that had exceptional results in 2021. When we featured a story about Magpie, a U.K.-based vegan pie shop, the annual growth in the U.K. was over 15% in bookings with greater than 25% increase in premium products. Australia's award-winning campaign, which featured Olympians who are also GoDaddy-powered entrepreneurs, produced similar results.
We continue to measure and monitor our brand spend based on our high awareness. Through a partnership with Google in 2021, we were able to utilize our U.S.-based scale to run a holdout test in which we turned off advertising and awareness spend in multiple markets to assess the impact. Through this test, we proved that advertising that is awareness-driving can improve the overall returns of integrated marketing campaigns. Top line returns were delivered in the quarter, and search volume for GoDaddy increased over 50% as compared to markets without this investment. As we continue to innovate by utilizing technology to improve our efficiency, we had a hypothesis. Our hypothesis was that we could build a superior search engine marketing attribution model in-house. We employed machine learning and focused on incremental return on investment rather than the traditional transactional cost per acquisition.
The experiment delivered 34% incremental return on investment. We will be scaling this technology and approach across all of our search engine marketing globally in 2022, thus delivering significant efficiency to our total marketing returns as search engine marketing represents about a quarter of our total global spend. Mark will speak more to you about this and the expected improvement in our profitability in the finance section of today's presentation. I've shared a lot of context on our advertising, and I wanna give you a glimpse into how we show up in market around the world. Our marketing has to be innovative, relevant, high reach, and frequent to break through in our hyper-connected world. This 60-second overview of our advertising campaigns will expose you to a subset of the spaces and places around the world where we talk to our customers every day.
I'm so proud to lead a disciplined marketing organization for a brand with the legacy of and a devotion to helping customers grow. These strengths recapped here enable us to show up in relevant ways as we continue to be the growth partner for our customers around the world. Thank you so much. At this point, I'm gonna pass it over to Mark.
Hello, I'm Mark McCaffrey , and thank you for joining me today. As you've heard throughout the day, we have a lot of exciting things happening at GoDaddy, and I'm eager to provide you with a financial update, including highlights of our financial model. Before we jump into the details, I wanna take a moment to acknowledge all the thoughtful feedback we've received from the investor and analyst community since I've joined. Our hope is all the content today will help you better appreciate our strategy and the value creation we expect to drive at GoDaddy over the next few years. With that, let's get started. First, I will provide you with my perspective on GoDaddy's investment thesis and how our growth and cash flow generation create a powerful formula for continued success.
Next, I will share a fresh look at our revenue pillars, including key metrics and disclosures to provide you with transparency into our business. Following that, I'll cover our framework around capital allocation to allow you to understand our decision-making process. Finally, I'll close out with an eye to the future and share our three-year financial targets to help you model our business beyond 2022. As you think about what you've heard today already, and as I walk you through my finance update, have these four numbers in your mind regarding the next three years. 10, we expect to drive at least 10% top-line CAGR. 15, we expect to grow at least 15% normalized EBITDA CAGR. 20, this result in an anticipated 20% or better free cash flow per share CAGR. 3, we plan to buy back $3 billion of our stock.
We have been telling you about the value we provide to our customers and how this translates into an incredibly strong shareholder value story as well. This framework shows how we create long-term value by leveraging our unique assets to provide a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs with the ability to attach more products to our large and loyal customer base. A detailed version of this framework is included in our appendix. We know that when customers come to GoDaddy, attachment to more than one solution significantly improves our revenue. The opportunity is sizable, and we have a track record of deepening relationships with our customers. For example, a customer today that spends $20 with us on a domain name can be worth many multiples more as we provide them innovative tools and capabilities.
We also find as our relationship with our customers grow, our retention rates strengthen, and with that, the lifetime value of our cohorts increases exponentially. For example, the long-term value of our customers that engage with our GoDaddy Guides is 4.7 times higher than customers who have no engagement at all. Our customers can grow their businesses with GoDaddy using our integrated experience that enables a one-stop shop, simplifying and streamlining their move online. As we continue to add innovative tools, our ability to grow our lifetime value and retention improves even more. We are well-positioned to understand customers and deliver through new tools. We build trust with every wow interaction a customer has with us, and as a result, our customers stay loyal to us for a long time.
On the topic of cohorts, we've built an extraordinary base of customers with a strong 85% retention rate. Our base serves as the foundation for GoDaddy's durable financial growth. We estimate our existing cohorts will generate over $10 billion of revenue over the next three years. Our confidence in our ability to capture this long-term opportunity is driven by our historical track record of adding customers. As you've heard us talk about this over the last several years, we have focused on attracting customers with a higher propensity to spend on developing their online presence. This shows up in our strong ARPU growth. While our customer additions may fluctuate from quarter to quarter, we've shown the model is durable and sustainable over time. As we continue to grow revenue and optimize margins with various levers, we expect normalized EBITDA to grow faster than revenue.
These key operating expense levers will help us achieve that goal in the near term. In the technology world, everyone agrees that innovation wins out over time, and investing in the innovation is critical to the future of any company like GoDaddy. Therefore, we expect customer care and marketing efficiencies to be the critical levers for normalized EBITDA margin expansion over time. On G&A, we also expect to see improvement from our move to the cloud, simplified infrastructure, and general scale across the global platform. We have multiple levers to increase margins and will continue to balance investing in the business while achieving operating leverage down the income statement. We continue to be laser-focused on translating our deep customer relationships into long-term shareholder value by delivering strong growth in our free cash flow.
In addition to growing ARPU and the top line, we have also been able to grow our unlevered free cash flow at a CAGR of 18% and free cash flow per share at a CAGR of 21%. GoDaddy's unlevered free cash flow is generated by growth across product categories, strengthened by consistent margin expansion and buffered by disciplined CapEx. We've demonstrated a history of unlevered free cash flow margin growth with 300 basis points of expansion from 2017 through 2021. As you will see when we get to the guidance section, we expect continued progress in future years. The power of our compounding free cash flow growth gives us the ability to invest and to execute on the differentiated strategy you've been hearing about today, while also aggressively reducing our share count.
Next, I'd like to introduce you to a fresh new look at our revenue pillars. We are transitioning from our prior way of talking about three pillars into these two new pillars moving forward. This transition makes sense for many reasons, including our desire to emphasize how we will invest and grow in the future and to address feedback we've heard from our investors asking for more transparency into our growth areas. More details about this change from three to two pillars can be found in the appendix. Our two pillars are Applications and Commerce and Core Platform. Applications and Commerce includes our Create and Grow proprietary software, such as Websites + Marketing and Managed WordPress, and our connected commerce solution launched late last year. This also includes productivity applications such as email.
Core Platform includes primary domain registration, both on the registry and registrar side, Aftermarket and Hosting and Security Solutions. Combined, this reflects our entire business. The reorganization of the way we discuss these pillars demonstrates our commitment to transparency, while putting a spotlight on key metrics that will show progress against our stated objectives. We delivered strong revenue performance in 2021 across our pillars. To break it down, Applications and Commerce represents 30% of our total 2021 revenue and delivered 22% year-over-year top-line growth. That includes the inorganic benefit from Poynt, acquired in Q1 2021. Similarly, in Core Platform, we delivered solid double-digit growth. Both Applications and Commerce and Core Platform show durable, profitable growth as we continue to innovate our solutions, making further progress towards a connected one-stop shop. Let's double-click into these even more.
While we just reported earnings last night, this view summarizes these same results within our new pillars. Within Applications and Commerce, GoDaddy delivered annual bookings growth of 15% for 2021. ARR for Applications and Commerce grew to nearly $1.2 billion for 2021, up 17% year-over-year. Create and Grow ARR, which includes Websites + Marketing, Managed WordPress, GoDaddy Studio and Sellbrite, increased to $410 million, growing 19% year-over-year. Gross merchandise volume, a measure of the scale of transactions occurring on our platform, increased to approximately $26 billion for 2021. The contribution from Poynt added to this result. In Core Platform, GoDaddy delivered annual revenue growth of 12% and annual bookings growth of 11% in 2021, both of which are quite strong for this business.
We also generated Core Platform ARR of $2.3 billion in 2021, and we are well positioned for 2022 given the stickiness of our business. As we discussed last night, Aftermarket contributed to our Q4 and 2021 results. It's important to note that Aftermarket is a transactional business and is excluded from our Core Platform ARR calculation. Our plan is to disclose this set of metrics consistently going forward, including ARR, to help you better understand the health of our business. For modeling purposes, we've laid out the revenue and bookings by pillar for the past eighth quarters. Both Applications and Commerce and Core Platform have shown quarter-over-quarter sequential growth in revenue. Equally important, our bookings have set us up for expected continued durable performance in the coming quarters.
Moving on to normalized EBITDA, we've laid out a detailed view taking into account cost of sales and operating expenses that are attributable to each pillar. Certain operating expenses were allocated based on key drivers, including revenue or number of servers, depending on its nature. Normalized EBITDA by pillar excludes the impact of G&A, as certain operating expenses are managed and incurred for the benefit of the overall business. Applications and Commerce continues to deliver strong revenue growth while simultaneously investing in product development. In our Core Platform, we drove durable, profitable growth. Now, let's move on to our capital allocation strategy. With excess free cash flow, we plan to take a disciplined approach to capital allocation based on these four tenets. Number one, we will invest to strengthen our business and drive innovation while balancing our goal to expand margins.
In the long run, this will allow us to optimize our go-to-market approach, increase wallet share, and capture value across the customer journey. Number two, we will deploy excess free cash flow to opportunistically reduce share count above and beyond the $3 billion targeted buyback we announced yesterday. Number three, we will leverage M&A to accelerate growth. GoDaddy targets acquisitions that accelerate progress against our strategic objectives, bring more innovative experiences to our customers, and deliver profitable revenue growth. Number four, and last but not least, we are committed to maintaining a 2-4 times leverage ratio. We believe we can maintain a healthy balance between returning cash to shareholders while investing in our business.
As we contemplate the various options available to us, we will continue to be guided by our relentless focus on long-term value creation. You heard yesterday that we announced our intent to buy back $3 billion of shares through 2024, or approximately 80% of our free cash flow, starting with the accelerated share repurchase plan. This represents a material reduction in share count, which underpins our expectation of at least a 20% free cash flow per share CAGR over the next three years. I would like to share with you our perspective on M&A. We believe our recent acquisitions have been both strategic and have met our key evaluation criteria. As we look forward, here's how we are thinking about our strategy. First, anything we do, large or small, must fit strategically.
Our preference is for small tuck-ins that add great teams of people, features, and capabilities to our existing solutions. Strategic criteria include how an asset may help us scale our revenue pillars, accelerate innovation for our existing solutions, expand customer on-ramp to drive higher attach and LTV, and/or enter new markets and potentially disrupt them. Second, any transaction must make sense financially. With every transaction, we employ diligent resources to look deeply at the financials. Among other criteria I've mentioned, for a transaction to make sense to us financially, the ROI must be greater than our cost of capital. Third, we must be convinced we can integrate. Many deals in the tech world fail or do not realize their full potential because of poor integration. When I mention integration, it's not just about product integration. It is about the integration of the key talent that comes with a deal.
With M&A in tech, we're acquiring intellectual property and people, and I believe we must integrate both to be successful. Finally, let's talk about the next three years. In the tech world, looking out three years is not an easy task. However, we believe we are more fortunate than most when being able to look forward. We are excited about what we see. As I indicated earlier, our revenue is durable and predictable. This allows our team to forecast our guidance on a multi-year basis, and we believe our new disclosures and long-term guidance will help you model our business in the coming years. I addressed our targets for Q1 in 2022 yesterday during earnings. Given the great success we had in 2021, we do have some tough comps this year.
Looking at this over the next three years, however, gives you a better picture of our growth potential. Through 2024, we are targeting at least 10% revenue CAGR. It starts with our revenue guidance for 2022 and implies an acceleration in top-line growth in 2023 and 2024. By growing normalized EBITDA by at least 15% CAGR, we also believe we can deliver 20% or better CAGR for the free cash flow per share. We expect our Applications and Commerce pillar will achieve a high teens CAGR and Core Platform will continue to grow in the mid-single digits through 2024. Aftermarket provides some variability in this growth target, and as you saw in Q4, it can provide an upside from quarter to quarter, depending on market dynamics. One of the great attributes of our business is how it can deliver predictable cash flow.
By 2024, we believe we can achieve a compounded unlevered free cash flow of $3.8 billion. For those modeling us based on a DCF, the valuation potential on just this part of our financials is impressive. Over the next three years, we are planning to repurchase $3 billion of our outstanding shares, delivering at least 20% CAGR in free cash flow per share. As you know, we've been prudent stewards of capital over time and will continue to exercise a disciplined approach. Moving forward, we want to highlight some changes to our guidance in terms of both timing and cadence. In addition to revenue and unlevered free cash flow, we will provide growth ranges for the two revenue pillars shown on the P&L and quantitative guidance for normalized EBITDA on a quarterly basis.
We will also begin providing disclosures on a quarterly basis for ARR and normalized EBITDA by revenue pillar, as well as annualized GMV to close the information gaps in new models. Last, we will continue to disclose customer count, retention, and ARPU on an annual cadence. We believe this approach will allow us to give you better insight into the key value drivers at GoDaddy. Let's summarize the key attributes of our financial model and how we think about creating value for shareholders over the next three years. I've touched on each of these foundational aspects of our strategy today. We have a large, diverse business with multiple drivers that position us to continue to drive profitable double-digit revenue growth at scale. Our financial model is predictable given the large percentage of our business that is recurring.
A key output of our model is the large and growing amount of free cash flow our business generates. We intend to utilize our capital to invest in our business to fuel growth, while at the same time focusing on returning excess cash to shareholders. As part of our newly announced buyback program, we thought it would be helpful if we highlighted some key takeaways which we believe are important as you think about our revenue pillars. We expect strong annual growth in the high teens with our Applications and Commerce solutions. This comes off a strong 2021, where our metrics highlight the momentum we have going into 2022. Osama spent time today highlighting our commerce opportunity. With our large and loyal base of more than 21 million customers, we believe we can drive high growth rates in this part of the business.
We've disrupted the category, and our vision for connected commerce is resonating with our customers, particularly with entrepreneurs and small businesses that are struggling with how to sell online in an ever-changing environment. With commerce and other upsell motions, we will focus on growing lifetime revenue with our existing customers while also adding new customers along the way. We have numerous growth levers to drive performance in this area, and we've provided you with the new metrics to help you monitor and measure our progress moving forward. The key takeaways for our Core Platform business are that we have a foundational business that continues to grow organically, as evidenced by our double-digit growth in 2021. Our domains customer base, their loyalty, and their desire to have us be their one-stop shop for enabling their digital presence are major competitive advantages.
Every one of our existing customers and those we add along the way provides us with an upsell and cross-sell opportunity. Roger walked you through our position and our strategy in this area. He also highlighted how aftermarket can deliver strong results as it did in Q4, a sign that we can drive and benefit from the upside in this product area. We still have numerous growth drivers we can dial up when conditions are right to fuel the continued stable growth we expect from our core business. In closing, the most important takeaways of the day, we are a leader for small business solutions, a position we do not take for granted and a position that we've built by understanding the needs of our customers. With that deep understanding front of mind, we invest in innovation and new technology that is relevant to our industry.
Our business model is centered around our more than 21 million customers, a base that continues to grow and a base that is eager for more capabilities that can help them grow their business. This base of loyal customers helps us to deliver a predictable revenue stream. As you heard today, we began in domains, and we have successfully developed additional on-ramps for new areas of growth simply from serving our customers well. Having been at GoDaddy for nine months, I'm excited to be part of a team that always thinks about the near term and the long term. It's difficult to balance, and I'm pleased to see how our management team and our board emphasize delivering strong results while at the same time investing in areas for future growth. We have a balanced combination of durable top-line growth, profitability at scale, and robust cash flow.
Remember the four numbers we started with. 10, we expect to drive at least 10% top-line CAGR. 15, we expect to grow at least 15% normalized EBITDA CAGR. 20, this results in an anticipated 20% or better free cash flow per share CAGR. 3, we plan to buy back $3 billion of our stock. In closing, I wanna thank you again for the time and attention you've given us today. I wish our meeting with you could have been in person, and hopefully in the coming year we'll get a chance to speak face-to-face. With that, let me turn it back to Aman.
Thank you, Mark, and thank you for being with us today. Let's go to your questions.
Thank you, everybody. Our first Q&A is for Mark. Mark, can you speak to the drivers of double-digit revenue growth in 2023 and 2024?
Thanks Christie. You know, I think when we looked at the three years out and we looked at our durable model, acknowledging we're coming off a fantastic 2021, all right? You know, we have tough comps in 2022, but we see an implied acceleration into 2022 and 2023 that will drive our growth going forward.
Our next question is for.
Christie, if-
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
Sorry, Christie. If I could just add to that. You know, we're super excited to have opportunities like Payable Domains, our investments in WordPress, the aftermarket, and our payments and commerce, where we're seeing great early results, all part of this sort of double-digit durable business that we shared with you today.
Our next question is for Aman. You've owned Poynt for about a year. Can you give us a sense of what has worked well as you have integrated and how that might be instructive for future deals?
Yeah. Our focus with acquisitions is that we want teams that build amazing products for customers, and Poynt is a fantastic example of that. We actually, when we do M&A, we go in and do our own NPS surveys to see what customers say about the companies we're looking at. Once we decide to buy a company, we want to integrate it deep into the stack so that we can open up that opportunity for all our customers. Poynt, particularly the team here, did a fantastic job. I think Roger touched on it, just the number of product launches was fantastic and coming very, very quickly. I'm sure Osama would love to weigh in on that. Osama, how about you tell the story from your perspective coming in?
Hey, thanks Aman. Well, you know what? I feel like we did diligence both ways here. We wanted to make sure this is a fit. We fell in love with the awesome assets that we found at GoDaddy. Within about 100 days of closing, we were already piloting GoDaddy Payments, Websites and Marketing. That set the tone and an amazing pace for a lot of awesome products. The best thing is that we found that our customers really love what we have to offer.
Great. This next one is a follow-on for you, Osama. Can you talk about payments as a new on-ramp and the stickiness of that product longer term?
Sorry. Yeah, sure. Thank you for that. You know, payments is the most important utility in business. Utilities are sticky by nature because everything else is built on top of that, and therefore they're hard to switch off. We feel that every business wants to be transactional, even if they're not looking for a commerce solution, quote-unquote. So we're enabling it at the account level, as you heard today, in the easiest possible way. This allows us to make every user and surface across GoDaddy transactional, starting with domains at the top of our funnel. And when customers love it, they tell everyone else they know. At scale, I see the potential for a second on-ramp and significant market pull down the road.
This next question is for Mark. Given the inflationary environment and rising interest rates, does the company see any concerns on refinancing of future debt and potential increase to financing costs?
Yeah. It's hard to predict the future, but you know, we come back to we have a strong balance sheet. We have a durable model that generates a lot of cash flow. We have access to the credit markets and, you know, as I discussed in the presentation, our leverage model, we're committed to keeping that at 2-4 times. You know, we've seen over time our model is able to withstand the macroeconomic environment, and we believe we can continue to do so.
This next question is for Mark as well. Can you please shed some light on the FCF guidance? Is it going to be a back-end loaded, and what exit levels should we be thinking for 2024?
I think when you look at it, you know, we went through the details of how we think the CAGR is going to work. I would look at it as normalized EBITDA will be growing at a 15% CAGR. You know, you can imply that, free cash flow will be growing at a similar annual growth rate as well.
Great. For Aman, what are the most important performance indicators investors should be focused on to track the success of upsell and attach?
Yeah. We're super excited about some of the data we've shared with you today, and definitely we'll continue to share how we do product launches, which continue to show the pace of innovation at the company accelerating. In terms of financial metrics, Mark shared with you today a broader set of metrics, and for sure, the ARR numbers for our A&C pillar will be a great way for you to see our progress in this space.
Just to add to that, Aman, you know, we are going to be providing the ARR metrics by pillar and some subsets within that, and we will be doing so on a quarterly basis so people will be able to track our progress more frequently.
This next one's for Mark. The $3 billion buyback and ASR announcements are emphatic statements of equity undervaluation. Can you talk about those announcements within the broader capital allocation framework?
I think what comes back to, you know, we have the fortunate ability of a pretty predictable revenue stream, and we have durability in our model that allows us to look at our cash flow over the next three years and see our ability to not only invest in the business to drive innovation, but return value to our shareholders. I want to focus on that durable and the predictable and the realistic ability for us to balance both, which is a key advantage for us. I would even say competitive advantage for us going out over the next three years. Those are the tenets of how we look at this. Again, balancing our ability to invest in innovation, but at the same time share return of value to our shareholders.
Great. For Aman and Mark both, can you talk about the growth levers you have the highest confidence in? What are the key milestones we should be tracking?
Yeah. You know, as I started to talk about earlier, there are parts of our business, the aftermarket, the opportunity with WordPress to serve GoDaddy Pro's, the continued innovation in domains with Payable Domains, and our sort of early results with commerce and payments. If you take a step back, you know, our core priorities for the year, for the last year plus have been commerce driven by presence, GoDaddy Pro, and innovation in domains. What we've done today is we've brought it all together and said, "Look, we're going to bring commerce and payments to every surface in the company." Doesn't matter if it's domains, doesn't matter if it's website builder, doesn't matter if it's creating a piece of content, every piece is going to have a bit of commerce, have a bit of payments in it. So those are the areas we're most excited about.
Those are the areas that we, our teams are focused on, and we're super excited about the results that we just posted in 2021. You know, Osama got to share some data points on it. I got to share some early data on it, and it's been, I think it's been exciting for all of us. Mark, I don't know if what you wanna add to that.
Well, if you like, just with my smile, I hope you see the excitement around where we're going with commerce and some of the milestones. I'm really excited to also look at our ARR metrics. I know we've got a lot of feedback from investors and analysts about providing more around this. You'll see based on our earnings, based on our, you know, some of the what we've said today, we're here to provide transparency, and we want people to track us and our progress for our stated objectives. Not only are we providing ARR by the pillars, we're providing ARR in things like Create and Grow. We're providing ARR in commerce related SKUs.
Now, I know I indicated in the earnings that we will be updating that, but that's because we will continue to evolve our metrics to give more transparency as our business grows. I can't forget to add GMV, right? We've added GMV as a disclosure, which is a great indicator of our growing business within our community. Again, a lot of great stuff, and we wanna make sure that we have the ability to track our progress.
Okay. Our next question, I think a couple of you are gonna wanna chime in here. We'll start with Aman. Many companies are focused on payments. Why will customers choose GoDaddy? What are GoDaddy's competitive advantages in the payment space?
Yeah, it's no longer an open question. Customers are choosing GoDaddy every day. New customers coming into Websites + Marketing have multiple choices, the best names in the world, and over 60% of them are choosing GoDaddy Payments. In Managed WordPress, where folks have 140 choices, almost a quarter of customers going through the flow are picking GoDaddy Payments. This is not an open question anymore. Customers are clearly telling us they want GoDaddy to provide them with a one-stop shop.
They want the GoDaddy tool set, the seamless, the intuitive part, and backed by Care, the human touch that makes the difference for our customers. I'll turn it to Osama to talk a little bit about our offering, and you know why we're so excited about some of the things we're bringing to market already and also coming on.
Hey, thanks Aman. As I mentioned before, you know, payments is a utility. Yes, you have to do it extremely well, but it's also a means to an end. It's what do you do with it? The massive customer base we have with 21 million customers, the surfaces we have, whether it's domains or websites or emails, the ability to list on marketplaces, social search, just so much potential to integrate it into those services and make and do it in an easier way for our customers than they can find anywhere else. That's what we're focused on. We believe that's just an amazing combination and awesome opportunity for shareholder value.
Maybe before you go, Christie, I turn it to Fara. Fara, I'd love for you to just touch on our customers starting to see us as a commerce player, and what are your thoughts on that?
Absolutely. I hope that many of you before today saw GoDaddy in market talking about our ability to help customers sell anything anywhere. We've been broadly communicating in the U.S. this value proposition, and we know it's resonating with customers for all the facts that Aman and Osama just shared. We're just getting started. We will continue to be talking about commerce and payments because we know it's critically important for growth for entrepreneurs. If you didn't see our campaign before, you got a sneak peek today. Hopefully, you'll be keeping an eye out for ongoing focus in the future because this is an area we're incredibly excited about, and our customers are telling us with their daily choices how deeply it matters to them to rely on us as a one-stop shop. We'll continue to talk to them about it.
Great. This next question is for Aman. You've been in the CEO seat for 2.5 years now. Can you talk about what keeps you excited at GoDaddy?
Oh, my God. I, you know, I'm excited about many things, but the thing that has me most excited is that the pace of change at the company continues to accelerate. You can see that. You know, two years ago, I remember doing an earnings call and one of the analysts asking me, "Aman, how are we gonna know if innovation or experimentation is making a difference?" Two years in, nobody's asking me that question because people say, "Okay, we see it in the product roadmap. We see the change happening. We see stuff happening." That gets me up in the morning every day.
You know, I don't know if people realize we did a big thing here today. We just told the world that every domain name is going to come with a payment instrument. GoDaddy has 84 million domains under management. Every person that buys a domain doesn't have to do anything else. They just start accepting payments. Our customers, we think they're gonna love that. We think it's going to be so simple for them that it will be a game changer. That's the type of innovative thinking we can bring to the table when we have the right assets. At GoDaddy, we just put a fantastic set of assets. That's what's got me excited. I mean, Osama talked about it eloquently, and Roger talked about the sort of operational muscle of the company improving and Fara, our marketing and Mark, the financials.
It's just all these pieces have come together really well. As I look into the future, I say with complete confidence, I'm more excited today than the day I joined.
This next one is for you, Aman, and I think Fara will wanna talk on here too. We talked about customer care driven product innovation. Can you talk about that a bit more and the product roadmap that aligns with customer demand?
Yeah. You know, our customers love our products, the tools that they need to be efficient, the tools that they need to work with their customers in a great way. We work with micro-businesses, and they are creative, they are resilient, they put their heart and soul into their business. Often they need somebody to call who can guide them, who can help them.
As August very eloquently said, we are the person that they call. When they want to do something with their customer, they rely on us, and that's a fantastic opportunity because we create millions of those human moments that give us energy, that give us information, that give us the data we need to continue to build the product, continue to hone our marketing, to make sure that we're meeting the needs of the customer. You know, I talked about the entrepreneur's wheel today. Across that wheel, we laid out a set of needs that our customers have. Those needs are reinforced by what we hear in Care on a daily basis, and that really powers our organization. I'll turn it to Fara to sort of cover a bit more on it.
Great. I have countless examples of customers stopping me on the street when I tell them that I work at GoDaddy, and they tell me, "Oh, my gosh, I talked to a GoDaddy Guide today, and they were amazing." They know their name. They know the GoDaddy Guide's name, and they talk about how that Guide really helped give them confidence. They will tell me that it changed their level of confidence and their progress and their growth. That's so powerful, right? Think about how often after a customer care call you hang up the phone and feel good nonetheless. Great. What I'm also thrilled with specific to care is the fact that customers are engaging with us digitally, and they're also engaging with us via phone. There is humanity in both of those, right?
Think about how often a customer wants to engage via chat or via text. It's seamless, and it's easy, and it enables them to focus on their day job. Sometimes they wanna pick up the phone and call us, and they have amazing results there too. There's a feedback loop back into my team from a marketing standpoint. We're always learning every day what our customers need and what they're saying to us. It is an incredibly powerful tool for our customers and for GoDaddy.
This next one is for Aman. What's the TAM for aftermarket? Also, what percentage of aftermarket sales are marketplace versus GoDaddy's own inventory?
Yeah. You know, the fantastic thing about the aftermarket is that it's like real estate. You can sort of buy and sell the same asset again and again. Over the last couple of years that, you know, we've just done phenomenally well, and I'm super excited about it. I'll actually turn it to Roger, 'cause I know a lot of the great work done in the aftermarket was with his leadership. Roger, why don't you talk about the aftermarket?
Yeah. Thanks Aman. Over the last two years, we've really executed against new levers to drive the aftermarket business, and we're very excited about the results. We've been investing in experimentation, specifically, you know, AI and machine learning. We hired a whole bunch of scientists. We invested on both sides of the marketplace. On the supply side, we've unlocked passive inventory with lists for sale. On the demand side, we've scaled brokers, not just in terms of number of people, but also, you know, in additional languages and time zones, to provide that white glove service for the customer, for the retail buyers of aftermarket. Overall, our execution is just very strong, and it will continue. I'll pass it over to Mark to talk about sort of the second part of the question.
Yeah, absolutely, we've been getting that question a lot, and I just wanna make sure I get it out there. The amount of our own inventory that we're selling on aftermarket is immaterial. You know, I won't get into the actual numbers, but it's pretty insignificant to our entire base.
This next one is for you, Mark. The new disclosures are very helpful for parsing out the growth opportunity between platforms and applications, but still remaining on the wish list is insight into the payments business. Can you help investors size the payments business today or the penetration rate of payments in the GMV? What is the offline to online mix of GMV today?
Great question. I'll start with saying we're very early stage in payments. You know, we launched a quarter ago. We're seeing great activity, and Osama can comment on some of the great things we've seen at the early stage. It's a little early to start talking about metrics. I'll acknowledge, you know, we will reach a point where we will increase our disclosure around metrics, GMV, GPV. Right now, as we said always, 2021 was about the launch, 2022 is about experimentation, and 2023 is when we start seeing results in the marketplace. More to come, but right now I think that's where we are.
This next one is for you, Mark, as well. What gives you the confidence in the sustainability of 20% free cash flow per share CAGR?
Well, you know, I always come back to the durability of our model and our predictability. You know, 85% retention rates, and a cash flow generation that continues to allow us to get leverage, increase our market share. At the same time, we're returning value to our shareholders. So confident in the 20+ CAGR around cash flow per share, and we'll continue to drive the levers that allow us to get there.
For Aman, what product suite is your top decile customer taking, and how does churn look when customers are taking more products?
Yeah. As we shared, you know, the top decile customer is using a bundle of products with us. They're using a domain name, they have a website with us, they may do email, they also do commerce with us. In the charts that I showed, and Osama showed as well, you can clearly see that the lifetime value is pretty significant for that customer. That lifetime value, in part, is driven by low churn rates for high-end customers. You know, we've continued to add more and more customers at the higher end. For example, we disclosed the number of customers we have that have over $500 in ARPU, and that number moved this year to 1.5 million customers.
You know, again, between those two data points, it becomes pretty clear that there's a good set of customers at the higher ARPU, but as Osama showed today, there's a lot more opportunity there, and that's what we're going after with commerce and payments.
This next question is for Mark and Roger. At a broad level, what are your expectations for the inputs of units sold and average selling price in the aftermarket over the next two years? Would you expect them to be materially different from the prior two years based on recent innovation, or are there structural aspects that would have you believe they will still trend in an upward direction?
I'll take the first part, Roger, and you can talk about a little bit of what you're seeing in the future around innovation. Listen, couldn't be more excited about aftermarket. Aftermarket continues to be growing, and we're really excited about the volume of the transactions and the average deal size we're seeing. That, to us, indicates there is real market demand around aftermarket. Now, it is a transactional business for us and therefore predictability becomes based on any given quarter and market demand in that quarter. We love what we're seeing there, and we believe it will continue to grow and we will be able to, you know, innovate to take more and more of that market. Roger.
You know, as I said, we continue to be super confident in our execution in the aftermarket. It's all these new levers that we're leaning into, and that's evidenced, you know, in our results for the last two years. We have a strong team in place. We're continuing to hire and add scientists, brokers, as you said. You know, we'll continue to follow our operating principles that I talked about, going after velocity and impact, building great customer experience, scaling efficiently. I think that's the spirit of the question, is really how do we keep scaling? You know, we continue to lean into those principles, and the team is just, you know, firing on all cylinders.
Great. This next one is for Aman and Osama. What is the opportunity to sell payments into the existing base? What are your thoughts on Apple's tap-to-pay offering for iPhone? Do we have an opportunity to partner with them?
Yeah. You know, we think that Apple's tap-to-pay has come at a perfect time. We're talking about taking commerce and payments to every surface. From our perspective, you know, it coming to the iPhone makes total sense. In terms of, you know, our opportunity, that I will turn it to Osama first, and I can come back and take a couple of top points. Osama, why don't you go first?
Thanks Aman. Hey, this is one of the things I'm most excited about. Honestly, it's. I feel like sometimes people get it wrong. It's like, you know, most businesses are created to be transactional, right? Nobody opens a business saying, "I'm just gonna offer information and never collect any money." Yet the way we look at commerce is we wait for the customer to kinda beg for it. We believe that making it available out of the box, the ability to enable transactions is way bigger than what we consider commerce. It's why only $5 trillion of consumer spending has been digitized 30 years into the Internet.
We are being very aggressive, creating it at the account level, doing it as easy as possible, attaching it to top of the funnel, allowing every other product to simply have it. By the time the customer pushes a button and says they wanna transact, it's already there. I think the potential is huge. We're seeing every time we put something out in front of our GoDaddy customer base of 21 million customers, they like it. We're gonna keep doing it as long as we see that pattern. Just a couple of seconds on the Apple thing. Look, I think we shared in our numbers, we're already seeing about half of transactions in Q4 were tap-to-pay.
That's a massive shift from just a few years ago, right? Before the pandemic, it was 10%. We're not surprised. We've been expecting this move, and we're glad that Apple is going in this direction, and we will make it available to our customers as soon as they tell us they wanna do it.
Maybe I'll just jump in and add that as investors well know, analysts well know that we've priced the payment product very competitively. This is a price point where, you know, it puts money back in our customer's pocket. Obviously it's priced to take share and, you know, we're absolutely excited about being able to approach our existing base of customers with it as well.
I think this is where the CFO jumps in and says, "And it's priced to make money as well.
This next one's for you, Mark. Free cash flow and normalized EBITDA are outpacing revenue. What's the primary driver of leverage? Given the enormous opportunity, how does management balance margin expansion with investments in revenue growth?
Yeah, that's great. I think I mentioned that previously, like the balance between investing in innovation to grow our business as well as returning shareholder value. Listen, I really look at this, we're fortunate we can do both, right? We can provide that balance. You know, in the tech world, everybody knows that great innovation in technology and products wins over time. We will continue to invest in that. Our leverage really comes from marketing, and Fara has talked about some of the great things going on in marketing and Care, right? Where we have relationships with our customers, and we're able to grow upon those relationships. That really provides a basis for leverage for us to grow our normalized EBITDA margin.
On top of that, you know, G&A, we're simplifying our footprint. You know, we've talked about it in the past, and we're continuing to move to the cloud. We're continuing looking at our physical footprint in this new world as we come out of the pandemic and say, how can we get more efficient? How can we be more practical, and how can we streamline so it's simpler, it's better, it's efficient, and it's agile.
I'd be remiss to not weigh in. Thank you for mentioning marketing, Mark. Marketing has been a core strength of GoDaddy's, right? With very high brand awareness, that's come through an ongoing disciplined investment in marketing over time. You know, today, we talked to you about our historical progress. That progress is gonna carry into the future, right? We're tapping into increased capabilities in search engine marketing, seeing better results from integrated marketing campaigns. We're actually able to produce more with the same or less spending, which is an amazing opportunity for GoDaddy, right? Coupled with 21 million customers around the world, we have an active audience that we can engage with. These are all ways that we can continue to go to market in very disciplined and durable ways.
Sorry, Christie. I'd love to give a little bit of color on the product side on this as well, and I'm going to share with you a quote from Roger, which he says to me quite often, and he'll just sort of look very straight and say, "You know, what I do is simplify. We just do the fewest things, and we do them really well." That's our philosophy on product and engineering. We have fantastic talent on the product engineering side. We continue to attract fantastic talent on the product and engineering side, but we are working on the fewest things that add value. Our teams are more and more disciplined about being laser-focused on working on those things, because only by working on those fewest things that add value for our customers can we create shareholder value.
That's how we're approaching product, and that's why you'll continue to see us, yes, invest in product technology, but provide outsized product releases, because that's how our teams are working.
Right. This next one is for Mark. What type of revenue impact is embedded into the three-year growth outlook for these new initiatives in domain and commerce? What are the potential upside growth drivers?
Yes, I always love the guidance above the guidance question, I call it. Listen, we're really comfortable with our guidance where it is today. We have a practice of looking out for the three years, seeing what we see and being prudent when we're laying out what we think we can accomplish. Are there upsides? You know, we've talked about aftermarket payments as a transactional business that will come down the pike as well. As we get more into three years, we'll continue to be transparent and update everybody. We're excited about where we are. We're excited about looking at our durable, profitable revenue growth. We're excited about the opportunities that are in front of us, and we're really comfortable with our double-digit CAGR at 10%.
This next one is for Aman. What is the roadmap for international expansion, and how similar are customer acquisition strategies ex-U.S.?
Yeah. We are in the fortunate position where the GoDaddy brand has awareness globally, right? I think we've shared in the past that we're at over 9 million customers out of our 21 million customers that are outside the U.S. Now we haven't disclosed sort of specific dates on when we're going to take our commerce and payments capabilities outside the U.S., but I can share with you that we're super excited about it, and it will follow sort of our major markets. Just to remind everyone, our major markets are Canada, the U.K., India and Australia, outside the U.S. Over time, that's where you can expect us to bring commerce payments and other capabilities to the table.
Great. I'd love to weigh in on this because you also asked about customer acquisition channels and how similar they are. I would contest that there's been no time like now in terms of similarity, right? Around the world, we're seeing customers are experiencing similar things and needing similar things from GoDaddy. As we continue to expand our products, that'll enable us to drive even more scale. Today, when we look at how we go to market, we use very similar channel strategies when we go to market. Search engine marketing plays a huge role in how we go to market globally. We talked earlier about the fact that we're building our bidding capabilities in-house with machine learning, and based on recent experimentation, we delivered 34% upside, and now we're scaling that globally, right? That is a huge opportunity for us.
We go to market in integrated ways across multiple channels. That's common in all markets. It ends up, as Aman said, generating very high brand awareness for us and enabling us to continue to grow.
I'll just tack on to that. You know, it is a very disciplined, repeatable approach that we can measure what we invest and the ROI we get from that investment. We go into areas that we see that model being able to be repeated and can get the benefit out of it, which creates that great return and the ability to penetrate.
Great. This next question is for Osama. Can you discuss the ability to offer much lower payment terms versus the competition?
You know, it's payments, transaction costs, as long as I've been doing it now, how long is that? Since 2002. I feel old saying it, but it's been tribal knowledge, the ability to use technology to route rapidly, the ability to manage risk efficiently. It really takes a lot of experience. At Poynt, we had built a significant level of experience, not just at Poynt, but I pulled some of the best payments talent in the world together to figure out how to merge online and offline, and I'm proud to say that at GoDaddy now we have one of the world's best teams working on that.
It's a bit of our secret sauce, and so we're using it to be aggressive about taking market share and making money. I'll use this opportunity to just take it back to what I covered today. You know, in case you didn't hear the whole thing, it's part of a bigger strategy, right? It's not just being aggressive in payment pricing on its own. We feel it's very early days in commerce. There's more change that's happened in the last year than any other time. Only $5 trillion has been digitized. It's less than 10% of all global consumer spending, and the level of complexity is growing exponentially.
With that exponential growth of complexity, businesses need better platforms, better solutions to manage it all, as opposed to trying to piece it together themselves. GoDaddy is better positioned than many of the players on the internet. It's why I'm here. We've got some of the best assets on the internet, domains, you know, 84 million domains, 10 million mailboxes, websites. Our thousands of Care agents, our hundreds of millions of cards on file, our millions of pros, our hundreds of thousands of point-of-sale devices, our 21 million customers, and again, a very experienced team across commerce. We have a great track record of attaching products to that customer base, and with domains at the top of the funnel.
We're doing that with payments, but it gives us an on-ramp for all transactional capabilities that eventually become commerce. Our customers want us to do this job. They want a one-stop shop from GoDaddy, because it's hard to go back after you build your business and create a one-stop shop, right? If you get it at the start, it's a lot easier. When we put it in front of them, they take it. More importantly, we also wanna move upmarket in an open ecosystem strategy. Open source and WordPress specifically has already done a lot to enable no code to take over on the web. And that's become a theme now.
We're leaning into WordPress as a capability, combining it with our connected commerce platform and enabling a level of ease and customization that hasn't existed before. We'll also enable developers and pros to extend our solution into every vertical and market, so it doesn't depend just on our work. We'll also help them to better monetize and give them distribution to that 21 million customers in exchange. That as a strategy around this idea of being the best value for our customers, we believe is a very winning combination.
On the topic of Payable Domains, how do you plan to promote this product? It seems like a great and more professional alternative to other P2P players for micro merchants.
Yeah. I'm going to say that we're very, very excited about this product. Can't wait to see customer reaction to it, and we're going to be a little bit quiet on how we would bring it to the world and how we market it, but look out, it's coming soon.
How has the competitive landscape evolved, especially within the website building space? Strong new product announcements and investment over the last year, but any holes or areas where customers are asking for more than you are looking to fill?
Yeah. You know, we're really happy with the product that we have with Websites + Marketing, and as we shared today, that over the last three years, it's grown share by 40%, and that's fantastic. But customer needs do continue to evolve, and where it makes sense, we add new capabilities. For example, in earnings yesterday, I talked about us bringing in, tucking in the Reamaze capabilities to Websites + Marketing that allows our customers to have a single message inbox. They can pull their Instagram inbox, their Facebook Messenger, their voice line, and handle all their customer interactions from one inbox. These customers have very, very quickly started adopting that product.
you know, where we do see a need, where we get customer feedback, and we have, as you know, a very good relationship with our customers, a tight feedback loop, you know, we make sort of the decisions to either build it or, you know, partner or buy or tuck in something that brings that capability to our customers.
Great. Within Core, what is the outlook for domains versus legacy hosting and security, as domains has been a strong performer while investors question legacy's ability to grow?
You've seen we've combined them both into the Core Platform. You'll see we've given guidance on where we think the growth will be as a combined. Just a couple things. In hosting and legacy hosting in specific, you know, we've seen in the past is low single-digit% growth.
It is a high cash flow generator for us and has very high margins. We are very happy with the ability to generate cash and invest that in other areas of the business. Aman can go into some of the opportunities we see around hosting, internet itself, and Roger can talk about some of the opportunities on domains. You know, we see that we look at it from a customer point of view. This is very much about what our customers need and what our customers want and our ability to attach. The statistic I always like to give is for every dollar one of our customers in legacy hosting gives us, they spend another dollar somewhere else in their funnel.
Our real opportunity is, can we make that a dollar, another dollar or $2? Can we provide more benefits, get it to $3, and then the exponential growth we're talking about and the one-stop shop that we really offer to our customers on a basis and our ability to grow that.
Maybe just to complete that thought around looking at it from the perspective of the customer. Our customers are moving from legacy hosting products to Managed WordPress. WordPress is by far the tool of choice for our designer and developer customers. As we look at the capabilities and tiers of product that they want, we're particularly excited about the Pagely acquisition and bringing and integrating it very deeply, just like we did Poynt. We can provide a spectrum of services and Managed WordPress as well. Just to sort of have folks understand that it's the same customer that sort of goes against Managed WordPress and legacy hosting for us.
Mark, can you discuss the pacing of the $3 billion buyback? Will it be an even $1 billion per year or more front or back-end loaded?
You know, we will be prudent and disciplined how we go into the market and use that $3 billion authorization. For modeling purposes, I would put it at $1 billion a year. We'll keep everyone updated, but you know, we will be prudent and look to take advantage of any market opportunities we have around that authorization.
Back to the Payable Domains topic. Will that just be U.S.-focused or will it be rolled out across all of our markets? Can we also talk about the international opportunity and how you see growth going forward?
Yeah. On Payable Domains, we will start in the U.S., and then we will enable it across our markets. It's too early, still to talk about when it's going to come into international markets. We're super excited and focused to get it out in the U.S. The international opportunity overall continues to be fantastic for us. As you know, we have the ability to sort of put our marketing dollars where we get the best return, and we have done that over the last two or three years, being able to deploy dollars across the world and taking share there. We've seen fantastic growth in the international business.
It is a business that does a lot of domains, which means we have opportunity to add more products in the future there too, which we're particularly excited about, especially with something like Payable Domains, which is just very, very simple to bring together.
This next one's for Mark. Of all of the new product launches, including Payable Domains, WordAds, Websites + Marketing and Managed WordPress, which would be the most significant driver of GMV growth in the near term?
Well, I think I have to point to my friend Osama here, right? Obviously, our ability to grow commerce will be our ability to grow GMV, and our ability to help our customers be successful in that area will increase our opportunity around GMV exponentially. I don't know, Osama, you can
Yeah, sure. I'll weigh in quickly here. Look, you know, we started with Websites and Marketing, and that's also already going really well. We added WordPress. We continue to iterate the experience on those, and the more we improve it, the more adoption we get. We've removed more friction than anyone else in the payments sign-up process, right? I think you guys should go through our onboarding flow just to see how much simpler it is already today, and we plan to make it even simpler. Now we're just getting started on some of these other services. Websites were the most obvious. We're getting started on new services, can't really tell the trajectory and stuff until we start rolling those out.
I believe between websites and in-person, because we already do, as Poynt, we brought a lot of experience doing in-person, and that's where still 85%-90% of commerce is done. We believe that will—those two will continue to be the biggest drivers. The potential for domains is just massive. Because, you know, just to spend a second on this, you know, there is the potential here to reshape how the internet works, right? To have payments. You know, I used to think way back in the day when I started payments, you know, somebody should have put this in the browser. Commerce would have been so much easier.
Therefore, you know, my next job after PayPal, I went to Google to put it in the phone because I felt like the phone would become transactional out of the box, and that's what's happened. That's the big difference between mobile and the web. This is an opportunity for GoDaddy to leverage an asset where it has a lot of strength to make the infrastructure of the web more transactional. The potential there is huge.
This next one's for Aman. How do you increase cross-selling into the 21 million customers?
Yeah. We have obviously a secret weapon with Care, which is built over 25 years of improvement, culture, you know, people joining forces very, very closely to improve the process more and more. Care ends up being an area where we're able to attach products, we're able to upsell products. Over the last couple of years, we've been doing a better and better and better job of bundling products online as well. If you go through our path and just search for a domain, you'll see more and more sophisticated ways for our customers to choose a bundled product, to realize that there's a better offer for them, to realize that, you know, when they're trying depending on what stage of their entrepreneurial journey they're in, we've got something for them. Today we have two levers now.
We have the lever of being able to attach on the site. We have the lever of being able to attach on care. As we shared with you the example of email, where we've continued to sort of attach more and more email into the base. I'm told by GoDaddy leaders who've been here much longer than I have that there's been an open question for many years from the external community on how many more emails can you attach, and here we are today telling you about a 25% penetration rate and customers absolutely loving the product, and we just continue to go. Fara, I don't know if you're off mute. Did you want to add more?
Yeah. I am. Two comments worth noting. You may have recalled from earlier today that Roger talked about the fact that our conversion on godaddy.com has gone up significantly by 10% year-over-year. That is for existing and new customers, right? Our existing customers come back and visit godaddy.com as well as call Care. That's evidence of both bundling, smart cross-sell, and making certain that we're presenting opportunities to our existing customers. Then, Aman, to your point on, you know, on office and productivity solutions, if we reflect back, five years ago, it was a third of the size that it is today, which means we've been wildly successful in helping customers understand the value of additional products and services like email, right? That make them both more professional, better to engage with their customers and do so more effectively and drive growth.
Great. This next one, I think a few of you will wanna weigh in, but we'll start with Fara. Can you discuss the go-to-market for moving upmarket? For example, is there a different sales approach or marketing for, maybe something like WooSaaS, and how is that different from WooCommerce? Is success there upside to the 10% CAGR, or is it built in?
We are continuing, as we talked about today, to build capabilities to go upmarket. We do know that that will require different ways of going to market. The great news is we talk to our customers every day, right? More complex sales often require more hands-on, and we know how to do that. We've also proven that we're exceptional at experimentation. Roger talked about the fact that we've seen exponential growth in experimentation. We'll continue to do that with our customers. Lastly, when we think about going upmarket, remember, we've 21 million customers. We don't have to go anywhere. They are already our customers. It's just finding ways to engage with them through existing surface areas, whether it be godaddy.com, you know, our GoDaddy Guides or other areas that we'll continue to experiment into. Osama, you jumped off mute. Do you wanna jump in?
Yeah, yeah. I would love to add a little bit here. Just a couple of thoughts. You know, our 21 million customers, as Fara pointed out, 10 million or so I think are in the U.S. That represents about a third of U.S. small businesses. It represents the economy. It's very similar to how the economy is distributed in income for small businesses. We already have quite a few upmarket customers, especially in domains. It's about giving them products and then helping them connect the dots to those products. Yes, there's learnings that we're gonna get to there, but we're off to a great start.
The numbers we're seeing, we've got already, just in the last six months, between launching beta testing payments and launching our connected commerce product, we tripled the size of the average customer in our connected commerce platform. In my history, I've had to do this before. You know, when I first started at PayPal, it was a long tail of sellers. It didn't look anything like it does today. In fact, we didn't have any large businesses. We've made that journey. You know, when I first got there, it was about $2,000 per customer per year on average. By the time I left, it was $100,000. A lot of learnings leveraged there.
Poynt has an average customer of about $250,000 a year in sales. That's our average customer across our whole base. That's where we're getting the billions of GMV that came with Poynt. We had that muscle, and that's the muscle, that's the target we were going after. Then finally, recently, we brought in even additional talent from Pagely, who's really good at enterprise-managed WordPress for some of the largest businesses in the world. We have a lot of muscles and a really good set of products, in addition to a decent set of our customers already in that category.
As a follow-up to the website conversion question, Fara, what do you attribute this improvement to?
Truly, I attribute it to experimentation. We've been very methodical about looking at how and where to improve the customer experience. We build a clear hypothesis, we test, we test again, we test again, and we deliver results. The fact that we get to talk to our customers every day, we have a feedback loop that makes our experimentation and our hypotheses sharper, and that's what delivered the results that we saw this past year.
Hey, Christie, I just wanna go back on the last question 'cause there was a tail end of it on the guidance and the CAGR and building in some of our growth, and I just wanna make sure we don't skip over that. As far as the great opportunities we have in front of us and our 10% + CAGR over the next three years, there's a reason we've gone to ranges within our guidance, and that's to acknowledge that we have upsides within those ranges based on our ability to, you know, see these opportunities. You know, we're excited. A lot to come. We have an implied acceleration within our three years related to a great 2021, and where we're seeing 2022.
You know, we went to a range to try to acknowledge that there's opportunities in there for upside.
This next one's for Aman. What are the advantages of WordPress Commerce versus other CMS commerce players out there, and how do we gain greater share in our website building products?
Yeah. WordPress by itself is the largest CMS platform in the world. A very large percentage, you know, depending on how you cut it, 60% of sites in the world run on WordPress. Already WordPress has a huge base, and it has taken more shares from custom code sites than all of the other application build providers out there. By itself, it's a very, very big base. It also is the preferred tool for designers and developers, so it's no surprise that designers and developers would use that tool to build commerce sites as well. Right? As we look at our ability, that is a massive ecosystem, and we have been in the WordPress space a very long time. We are the largest WordPress host in the world, in our hosting business.
When we look at those capabilities coming together, especially layering onto it our capabilities coming from SkyVerge, capabilities coming from Pagely, our own Managed WordPress capabilities, you know, we're bringing together a powerhouse of talent and technology to be able to sort of address various levels of need for the customer. We absolutely expect our investment in this space to generate results for us over the next few years. I don't know, Osama Bedier, if you wanna just touch on. I know you touched on this, Osama Bedier, a little bit already, but maybe just to reiterate one or two things on that upcoming-
Yeah, yeah. I'd love to. You know, the magic of WordPress is open source. It's just the fact that the sky's the limit. That's why it has such a massive developer base. There are lots of other walled gardens. In fact, the vast majority of other CMSs out there are walled gardens where, you know, a few people control the direction. As a result, you're kinda putting your you know, your earnings or your future in their hands. With WordPress, you just have the ability to either build whatever's missing yourself or hire somebody to build it out for you. There's no limit.
Combined with already a massive ecosystem, like millions of designers and developers that earn their living building it out. Now, it's missing a few things. You know, sometimes when it's organized by a few people, it's you know a lot of the earlier things are easier to get out of the box. We see our job is to fill that gap by contributing back to the WordPress community, by enabling a lot of that ease out of the box. We feel like we can get to the best of both worlds.
Yeah. Maybe just to jump in on our own website builder with Websites + Marketing, you know, where WordPress does a phenomenal job of having a ton of capability and customization and, you know, all the tools that any sort of larger customer would need, Websites + Marketing does a fantastic job for the small micro customer that just wants to quickly get a site up, doesn't need a ton of complexity, just needs things to work in a simple way and perform really well, which is what Websites + Marketing is targeted at. Websites + Marketing builds beautiful sites, builds sites very, very quickly, but those sites perform very, very well. If you look at the metrics that Google uses to look at a website, Websites + Marketing outshines every other product out there every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
It is built for performance and built for the micro business, and we love that, and we're gonna continue to use that at the base of the pyramid for customers.
This next one's for Mark. What's the reason behind implementing buybacks now?
When we looked at our journey over the next few years and we were discussing our strategy, you know, came back to the durability of our model, looking at the balance we can provide and our ability to invest in innovation as well as return value to our shareholders. It's really taking a look at a three-year outlook, looking at our cash flow generation, look at our ability to invest in future long-term value, but also acknowledge that we wanna return value to our shareholders and have the ability to do so. That's the timing. It was really looking around our strategy for the next three years, what we can accomplish to strengthen our balance sheet and really you know, defining what our journey's going to be.
This next one is for Aman. GoDaddy Guides' productivity was impacted in early COVID that we talked about at our last Investor Day. Any lessons learned in remote work and efficiencies that can be sustainable?
Yeah, we've learned a lot in terms of remote work. I actually published an article on LinkedIn where I talked about how when we're hiring new guides, they want to know whether they have to work in the office and how much they can be remote. I'm literally expecting job offers now that say, just like compensation, they have a line item that says, "Hey, I'm allowed to work remotely X% of the time." This is a new demand for people, and it's, like, actually a competitive differentiator. For GoDaddy, we work very hard to create a culture in the office, in our space, where people work together very, very well. We were concerned a little bit when everyone went remote.
Well, our supervisors, our managers, our guides have done a fantastic job over the last couple of years to enhance the tools where they've started to deliver that same culture, that same moment to customers remotely as well. In fact, if you look at the last two years during COVID times, even though we've had everyone be remote, and there were a set of innovations that we had to do and technological challenges that we had to deal with, and our guides had challenges where they had kids at work and stuff, you find our NPS in Care just head upwards. Because ultimately, the, we found that sweet spot where we were able to have a very efficient workforce. We are now actually able to open jobs remotely in parts of the world where we otherwise couldn't have had guides.
You know, we can be very efficient, while at the same time provide that very high level of service that GoDaddy is known for, and again, keep pushing NPS up.
This next one's for Mark. ARPU opportunity seems large. Can you talk about how the company moves upmarket to a larger customer base?
I think it gets into our ability to attach and grow and provide more innovative solutions to our customers. Our ability, and I think we've said it a few times today, but our relationships with our Guides, our ability to provide innovative solutions, our ability to innovate in new technologies that evolve as their needs evolve, really creates such a massive opportunity for to continue to grow that relationship. We went over some of the statistics today in the presentation. I think all of us touched upon it. Our continued investment in technology, our ability to be relevant is the greatest opportunity we have to continue to grow that lifetime value around our customers. I'll just come back to, we have 21 million customers.
21 million customers that we have relationships with, and we get to see what their needs are, and our ability to grow that lifetime value with them and make them successful is one of our biggest competitive advantages.
This next one's for you, Mark, as well. Can you talk about the rationale in the guidance shift from the 411 to the free cash flow per share metric?
Yeah. This is about our evolution and journey as a company and telling our story differently. The 411 was done previously. We are in 2022 now, so you know, we're still sticking with the 411 , you know, but now we're looking out three years and we're looking. We're a different company. Our story has evolved. Our strength has evolved. Our balance sheet is strong. With that, you know, we are now looking at how do we balance continuing to generate or go for long-term value, but at the same time, returning value to our shareholders because we have the ability to do that.
That durable model, that realistic approach to driving profitable revenue growth and our strong, you know, financial position, you know, really allow us over the next three years to again have a competitive advantage, but also return value to our shareholders.
This next one's for you, Mark, as well. Given that Applications and Commerce revenue grew more than 20% in 2021, what are the most significant segments or levers that could help exceeding the high teens CAGR target through 2024?
We have a lot of opportunity, and I will ask everybody, you know, to contribute to that conversation. We have levers, and we have relationships with our customer care, and we have abilities to get efficiency out of marketing and drive towards, you know, growth. You know, we're comfortable with where our growth is. I would add a reminder that the growth in A&C last year also included the acquisition of Poynt. There is some, you know, added benefit in there that we received in 2021. Our ability to grow in the high teens as we've kind of projected that, we're excited about.
We're excited about the opportunity, we're excited to go pursue it, and we're excited about the levers we can start to see unfold before us as we talk about things like Payable Domains and moving forward into connected commerce and everything along those lines for A&C.
Great. This is our last question.
Oh, wait. I know Aman.
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut anyone off there.
All right. I was just gonna take yet another opportunity to talk about the great possibilities we have with bringing commerce and payments to every surface we have at the company. I would just point you back at the entrepreneur's wheel. Please look at, you know, each of the items that our customer needs, and there are items there that previously you would not have heard from GoDaddy because we are truly taking the whole wheel into account, the true extent of digital identity, the ubiquitous presence, the connected commerce, and then taking each of those surfaces and saying, "Okay, how does GoDaddy bring commerce and payments to our customers for each of these surfaces?" Go ahead, Christie. Sorry.
That's okay. What are the key levers that gives you confidence on your financial framework?
I'm mute. We're on Zoom, but it looks like you're looking at me on that one, Christie.
Okay.
I'm laughing a little bit because I think Aman had the great closing statement here, just so you know, now I'm gonna add, you know, financial levers to it. Listen, we have a great history as a company, we have a history that shows our ability to be durable, agile, and sustained over a period of time. We've gotten stronger as time has gone on. We've gotten more relevant to provide more solutions to our customer base, and we have tons of opportunity in front of us to continue to drive that growth going forward, continue to get efficiency in our operating model, but continue to invest in innovation that's relevant to continue our market here. That strength, again, I'll come back to, is a great competitive advantage.
I know that's the last question there, so I'm gonna open it up to everybody else to kinda add on to that. You know, I'll leave with the I couldn't be more excited about where we are today. I couldn't be more excited about the opportunity in front of us. Aman, you said 2.5 years, I'm here nine months. Coming out of nine months, I'm just, I can't wait, and I couldn't wait for this day to talk about this. I can't wait to get out there and start to execute and show you what our ability to drive in this market is going forward.
This is the conclusion of the Q&A section. If anyone has any follow-up questions after today's event, please reach out to investors@godaddy.com. Now I'm gonna turn it over to Aman for some closing remarks.
Thank you, Christie, and thank you all for joining us. We're very grateful that you took the time to spend, you know, two days back to back with us. For many of you, we hope that the day today gives you insight into our strategy, it gives you insight into the very large opportunity in front of GoDaddy, the unique position that we have as GoDaddy with the assets we have, with the talent we have that we're bringing to the table, and the innovation that we're producing, and the large shareholder opportunity that represents. Because every time we create value for customers, we create opportunities to create more value for shareholders. We've laid out the plan, or Mark laid out the plan for the next three years, and we're excited and would love to, you know, continue to engage with you on that journey.
Thank you very much for joining.