Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Pinterest, Inc. fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Hannah, and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call, with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Neil Doshi, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to Pinterest’s earnings call for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2022. I'm Neil Doshi, Head of Investor Relations for Pinterest. Joining me today on the call are Bill Ready, Pinterest CEO, and Todd Morgenfeld, our Chief Financial Officer and Head of Business Operations. Now we'll cover the Safe Harbor. Some statements made today regarding our performance, operations, and outlook may be considered forward-looking and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. In addition, our results, trends, and outlook for Q1 2023 and beyond are preliminary and are not an indication of future performance.
We are making these forward-looking statements based on information available as of today, and we disclaim any duty to update them later unless required by law. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent Form 10-Q or Form 10-K filed with the SEC, available on our investor relations website. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release and presentation, distributed and available to the public through our investor relations website at investor.pinterestinc.com. Lastly, all growth rates discussed in today's prepared remarks should be considered year-over-year unless otherwise specified. I will now turn the call over to Bill .
Thanks, Neil. Hi everyone, and thank you for joining our Q4 earnings call. I'm proud of our team's focus and execution over the past year, and in particular Q4. We reinvested in our core product experience, leading to deepening engagement and a return to user growth. We built and shipped new ad tech and measurement solutions that resulted in improved returns for our advertisers. We're just getting started. I have strong conviction that we will continue to innovate and deliver value to our users and business partners. We grew global MAUs in Q4 to 450 million, up both sequentially and year-over-year. Our global mobile app users, which account for over 80% of our impressions and revenue, grew 14%. Our U.S. and Canada mobile app users grew 5%, accelerating from last quarter.
More importantly, sessions continue to grow significantly faster than users, demonstrating deepening engagement per user as we focus on driving greater per-user monetization. In Q4, we delivered revenue of $877 million, growing 4% or 6% on a constant currency basis, roughly in line with our mid-single-digit guidance. Strength came from large U.S. retail advertisers and international markets, excluding the impact of FX, as these advertisers leaned into our full-funnel platform during the holiday season. This strength was partially offset by CPG advertisers and small- and mid-market advertisers in the U.S., who faced headwinds from the macroeconomic environment. For the full year, we generated revenue of $2.8 billion, growing 9% or 11% on a constant currency basis.
We're pleased with our results this quarter, despite headwinds from the softening ad market, which Todd will discuss later. We remain confident in our long-term strategy and our ability to execute and drive value for users and advertisers. We're also increasing operational rigor and have taken actions to control costs in Q4. For example, we significantly slowed hiring so our headcount was flat quarter-over-quarter. We reduced our infrastructure spend, which declined sequentially despite strong engagement volume increases, and we closed some smaller offices for future cost savings. These actions put us on the path to meaningful EBITDA margin expansion in 2023 and demonstrate our focus on generating strong cash flow. As we build upon the solid foundation set in 2022, we're laser-focused on our four strategic priorities:
First, growing monetization and engagement per user. Second, integrating shopping into the core of the product experience. Third, improving operational rigor and therefore margin expansion. Fourth, strengthening our leadership as a positive and brand-safe platform. On growing monetization per user, given that users come to our platform with intent to make, do, or shop, we are well-positioned to achieve this by deepening user engagement, driving more intent-to-action, and helping advertisers better monetize our supply. Regarding engagement, we have a large opportunity to increase frequency from episodic users. On top of our 450 million MAUs, hundreds of millions of logged-in users come to Pinterest episodically.
In 2023, we're pursuing more ways to bring these users back more often and define their next use case by leveraging our machine learning models and building new experiences for them. We're also continuing our work to serve more personalized, relevant, and engaging content. This effort has already yielded results, including our return to MAU growth and double-digit growth in mobile app users. We have more opportunity to leverage the unique first-party signals on our platform. Our users save and organize content to boards—active human curation at scale that is unique to Pinterest. This gives us insights into emerging trends and product associations, as well as the ability to assist users when they have intent but have not yet decided what to buy.
We're actively working to refresh the Pinterest board experience to make it easier for users to organize their interests, which should yield more and higher-quality signals. This enables us to deliver increasingly relevant and timely content recommendations. I'm particularly excited about our work to bring new and emerging demographics onto the platform. In Q4, Gen Z was our fastest-growing cohort, growing double digits and accelerating from Q3. We're building an experience that resonates with this audience on Pinterest, specifically around video. Nearly half of all new videos pinned in Q4 were from Gen Z users. Gen Z sessions grew much faster than sessions from other demographics. As discussed last quarter, video drives deeper engagement. We remain focused on growing our supply of videos from multiple sources, including creators, brands, and publishers.
Last quarter, we grew our supply of video content 30% quarter-over-quarter. We recently announced a deal with Condé Nast Entertainment to create high-quality video content aligned with Pinterest's key seasonal and cultural moments, such as fashion month, wedding season, summer, and back-to-school. High-quality, inspiring content will further deepen engagement, especially for Gen Z. Monetization per user should also be driven by our ads initiatives. Pinterest is unique because users come to our platform with intent. We are one of the few places where people can go from seeking inspiration to fulfilling that intent through action. We’ve built a full ad solution that helps advertisers meet users in their journey across the funnel—from top to middle to bottom. In fact, our revenue is roughly split across the funnel: one-third brand, one-third consideration, and one-third conversion.
Advertisers taking a full-funnel approach see more success than those active on a single campaign objective. In 2022, advertisers adopting a multi-objective media strategy saw up to a 50% improvement in sales lift compared to those using one objective, based on our conversion lift study. Ads, when relevant and personalized, can be highly valuable content for users, fostering authentic interactions between brands and consumers. In Q4, we launched ad load management with whole-page optimization, which flexes ad load opportunistically in contexts where ads are most suitable for users. Initial testing drove double-digit improvements in ad relevance on search while reducing CPAs for advertisers. Whole-page optimization will continue to improve the efficiency of monetizing our platform over time.
We continue to improve conversion visibility through our measurement solutions in a privacy-centric way to demonstrate the value Pinterest brings to advertisers. For example, in Q4, we launched our Conversion API, which we recently integrated with Shopify, allowing merchants to use our conversion measurement tool. Tests show that advertisers using our Conversion API with the Pinterest tag saw an average 28% lift in attributed checkout conversions and 14% improvement in checkout CPA. At CES in January, we announced our privacy-safe clean room solution with LiveRamp and Albertsons. Pinterest integration with LiveRamp provides a protected third-party space where brands can combine their first-party data with Pinterest platform data in a secure, privacy-safe environment.
Our second strategic goal for 2023 is to leverage the high intent that users express on Pinterest by integrating shopping into the core product experience. Surveys show over 50% of users view Pinterest as a place to shop. Historically, shoppable content was not fully integrated into core experiences. To make Pinterest the home of taste-based shopping, we are integrating shopping across our most trafficked surfaces, including home feed, search, and related pins, to show users products most relevant to them. Over the long term, we aim to make every pin shoppable. We are also making video content on Pinterest more actionable using the same playbook applied to static images.
This year, we will deploy our computer vision technology across our video corpus to identify products and videos and make them shoppable. We are creating a seamless handoff by taking users directly to the product detail page on the merchant's app. To this end, we continue to deploy our mobile deep linking format (MDL) on shopping ads. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, MDL accounted for 40% of shopping ads revenue, which grew 50% in Q4. People are shopping on Pinterest, and we are helping merchants reach end-market consumers. Third, we are driving operational rigor and are committed to delivering value to our shareholders. While 2022 started as an investment year, we took steps to reduce costs in this challenging macroeconomic environment starting in early Q3.
We are continuing to find ways to reduce our expenses so that we can meaningfully expand EBITDA margins. As I've said before, I'm a strong believer that constraints breed creativity, and I believe our teams will deliver more compelling products and experiences that set us up for sustainable growth long term. Furthermore, Todd and I have been evaluating our broad capital allocation strategy, including investing in the business, maintaining flexibility for strategic acquisitions, and options for returning capital to shareholders. Given the significant cash balance at Pinterest today, combined with our robust ongoing operating cash flow generation, we're planning to execute a stock buyback program of up to $500 million, which we plan to commence this quarter to help mitigate dilution from stock-based compensation. Todd will go into more details on our buyback program.
Finally, one of the biggest differentiators of Pinterest is that we are an inspirational platform, and we're intentionally tuning our business to be a positive place on the Internet. Pinterest's mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. I believe in an online environment that is increasingly full of toxicity, this is more important than ever. Not only does it help our users but also our advertisers as they look for more brand safe environments to attract customers. From a user perspective, we've long been investing in being a more positive platform from products like inclusive search to important business decisions like banning political ads because we want our users to be in a positive space for inspiration and action. Users are noticing this investment.
We have research confirming the positivity of our platform and emotional benefit to our users that we're planning to release in the coming weeks. We're seeing this sentiment come through with our advertisers as well. Some of our latest research also shows that ads that appear in a more positive environment drive more purchases at every stage of the funnel. We believe that positivity makes people more open to brands, more likely to remember them, and more driven to purchase. As I mentioned in our last call, I value the communication, input, and feedback with the investor and analyst communities. As part of that, we plan to host an investor day later this year, and we'll update you in the future on timing and additional details.
Finally, as you may have seen in our press release today, Todd Morgenfeld, our CFO and head of business operations, will transition from the company to pursue new career opportunities on July first. Todd has been instrumental to Pinterest growth over the last six-plus years and is committed to ensuring a smooth transition while we search for a new CFO. I'd like to take a moment to recognize Todd for his dedication to our employees, our pinners, advertisers, and our shareholders. Todd has made significant contributions to our business over the last six-plus years, including leading the company's IPO process, helping the company navigate the pandemic, advancing our revenue functions, maturing our business operations, and partnering with me when I joined the company last year. Todd, we thank you for your partnership and leadership.
Everyone at Pinterest will be cheering for you in your future endeavors. I intend to be cheering the loudest.
Thanks, Bill. I appreciate the kind words and the partnership. I also want to thank the entire Pinterest team and the board for the opportunity to contribute over the past six years. I look forward to watching the company continue to innovate, execute, and grow. I'll now discuss our results. In my remarks today, I'll talk about our Q4 financial performance and our preliminary Q1 outlook. All financial metrics, except for revenue, will be discussed in non-GAAP terms unless otherwise specified. As a reminder, all comparisons will be discussed on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. In 2022, we made platform-wide innovations that resulted in improving the user experience through more personalized content, showing more relevant products that fit users' tastes and preferences, and delivering increased value to advertisers through ad stack innovation, new measurement solutions, and more seamless handoffs to merchant sites.
Even though softening demand lowered ad pricing across the industry, including on our platform, we grew revenue in the fourth quarter. We expect our 2022 investments in our ad stack to help deliver competitive cost per action as the demand environment normalizes in the future. As we continue to innovate on new products like mobile deep linking, whole-page optimization, and improved measurement solutions, we believe these investments will drive better returns on ad spend for our partners. As Bill mentioned, we remain focused on deepening engagement with our existing and episodic users, which should allow us to grow our revenue per user over time. From Q4 2019 to Q4 2022, our revenue grew at a compound annual growth rate of 30%, while our monthly active users grew at a compound annual growth rate of 10%.
Our growth opportunities should continue to be robust as we improve frequency of visitation, make Pinterest more shoppable to satisfy intent to action, deliver more solutions for advertisers, improve the relevance of our advertising to match our users' commercial intent. During the quarter, 450 million global monthly active users came to Pinterest, growing 4% year-over-year and 1% sequentially. We believe that our investments in relevance and personalization are the primary drivers of our return to seasonal growth. In the US and Canada, monthly active users were 95 million back to year ago levels. As we've noted before, our mobile application users are our most monetizable users and account for over 80% of our total impressions and revenue.
Global mobile application monthly active users accelerated to 14% growth. US and Canada mobile app MAUs accelerated to 5% growth after returning to growth for the first time this year in Q3 of 2022. Global and US and Canada sessions grew significantly faster than monthly active users and accelerated from the third quarter. We saw growth in many of our core verticals as well as several of our emerging verticals like travel, vehicles, and men's fashion. Turning to our financial performance, Q4 global revenue of $877 million grew 6% on a constant currency basis or 4% on a reported basis. Strength came from large retailers looking to drive sales during the holiday season. We had solid growth from our international markets when adjusting for foreign exchange headwinds.
There was also resilience in our awareness objective or brand ad spend as advertisers continued to lean into the brand safety and positivity on Pinterest. Some emerging verticals, including automotive, travel, and financial services, posted strong revenue growth. While we saw pockets of resilience from some CPG advertisers, many of our CPG partners and our U.S. mid-market and SMB advertisers continue to face some challenges stemming from the current macro climate. In terms of revenue by region, U.S. and Canada revenue was $722 million, an increase of 5%. Total revenue from Europe was $123 million, growing 5% on a constant currency basis, but declining 7% on a reported basis due to foreign exchange headwinds. Total revenue from our rest of world region was $32 million, growing 33% on a constant currency basis and 26% on a reported basis.
Turning to our EBITDA and expense profile. Adjusted EBITDA was $196 million in Q4, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 22%. This EBITDA figure includes several actions we took in the fourth quarter that we believe will reduce our expense profile for 2023 and beyond. Most notably, this included a realignment of our resources against our shopping strategy, as well as reductions to our recruiting staff and closures of some of our smaller and less utilized office spaces. Collectively, these actions accounted for about 2 percentage points of EBITDA margin. I'd also like to provide more color on how these actions impacted some of our expenses. Total operating expenses were $508 million, up 17% quarter-over-quarter.
If you adjust for the costs associated with the actions I described during Q4, our operating expenses grew 13% quarter-over-quarter in line with our guidance. These costs were spread across sales and marketing and G&A. More specifically, our sales and marketing expenses grew 29% quarter-over-quarter. The actions I referenced accounted for approximately five points of that growth, while our brand marketing campaign that I've referenced on past calls drove the vast majority of the rest of the growth. G&A expenses grew 25% quarter-over-quarter. Over 80% of that growth was driven by the actions I previously mentioned, as well as increased taxes and bad debt expense. Excluding all of these items, our G&A would have grown 4% sequentially. Finally, we ended the quarter with approximately $2.7 billion in cash equivalents, and marketable securities.
As we look ahead, while the macroeconomic environment remains volatile and we're experiencing softer advertiser demand, we want to share our best judgment around our guide based on the signals we have today. For Q1, we expect revenue to grow in the low single-digit % range year-over-year. Quarter to date, our revenue growth is trending nearly in line with our reported revenue growth from Q4. However, similar to last quarter, we believe the error bars are a bit wider given the volatility in the market. Our guide includes about 1-2 points of foreign exchange headwind, and we also expect headwinds to persist from our U.S. small and medium business and mid-market advertisers as they continue to face outsized challenges in this macro environment.
While we've made significant progress in opening up more monetizable supply and reducing cost per action, these advertisers remain price sensitive. For the first quarter non-GAAP operating expense, we expect a sequential decline in the low double-digit % range. First, we're not planning to invest in a brand marketing campaign in the first quarter as we did in the fourth quarter. Second, the net impact of the actions we took in Q4 and to date in Q1 related to expense reductions are reflected in the guidance. While these actions resulted in additional costs within these quarters, we believe they will contribute to our full year goal of returning to margin expansion.
As you think about our operating expense cadence through the year, you should expect a meaningful deceleration each quarter in year-over-year growth in OpEx, especially as we move into the second half of the year, as we will be lapping the significant investment in hiring we made into the business in the first half of 2022. On monthly active users, as you know, we generally do not provide guidance. We are encouraged that our investments in relevance and personalization brought us back to top-line MAU growth. We're focusing on deepening engagement within our core and episodic users. As Bill mentioned earlier, we're focused on providing long-term shareholder value, including through our capital allocation strategy. Our board of directors has authorized a share repurchase program of up to $500 million. .
We plan to commence repurchasing shares this quarter, and we intend to complete the program over the following 12 months. We believe it's important to have equity as a portion of our overall compensation program as it fosters an ownership culture with our employees, and this share repurchase program will help offset the dilutive impact of this equity compensation. Our repurchase program is in addition to an operational approach to mitigate dilution that we implemented in the second quarter of last year called net settlement, under which we, as a company, hold back shares to cover the taxes on employees vested RSUs, where the company pays for the taxes from our own cash reserve on behalf of the employees.
Net settlement could amount to a use of cash of approximately $275 million in 2023, depending on a variety of factors, including the stock price and the number of grants that vest through the year. Finally, I want to thank our teams at Pinterest, our advertising partners, and all of the people that come to Pinterest to find inspiration. With that, we can open it up for questions.
Certainly. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by 2.
Again, to ask a question, press star one. As a reminder, if you're using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. We will pause here briefly as questions are registered. The first question is from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.
Thank you so much for taking the questions. Maybe two, if I can. First, Todd, you know, congratulations on future endeavors. I'm sure we'll probably have one more earnings call together, but just wishing you best of luck in future endeavors. Maybe on the first question, you know, obviously visibility remains low in the overall advertising environment. Can you give us your perspective on how you're managing through that sort of low visibility that you're seeing right now versus managing towards building what you want to build on the advertising side for the long term, and how we should expect the interplay of those factors or in the coming quarters?
Second, you know, as we exit 2022, you guys sprinkled a lot of this into your prepared remarks, but how should we think about what the top priorities are for investment into 2023, how again, that maybe plays back against sort of the broader growth environment that you're seeing? Thanks so much.
Yep. Thanks, Eric. You know, if I step back and sort of, you know, address your questions on the broader landscape and sort of where we are, in progressing along, you know, our objectives there. You know, first I'd say, you know, while 4%-6% revenue growth typically wouldn't be something to write home about, we're actually outperforming compared to a lot of our peers. We believe we're gaining share, especially with our larger and most sophisticated advertisers, where we're gaining more share of wallet. As we've talked about, we have huge growth potential in front of us, and I'll try to frame out that potential. When I came to Pinterest, 2 quarters ago, analysts and investors had a few questions.
Could we regain share with our core user base after the pandemic unwind? Could we compete in a world of more short-form video? Could we build a monetization engine at scale? After a little over six months, I'm more confident than ever that we can do all of the above, and we're focusing our investments in employing operational discipline across the organization to get there. On the first question, can we return to user growth? Yes. We've returned to year-over-year MAU growth, and better than that, we're seeing double-digit growth on our most monetizable and stickiest mobile app MAUs. We're also seeing that our engagement overall is growing double-digit percentages. We feel really good about the growing sessions and the fact that sessions are growing even faster than users, and that growth is accelerating.
In fact, in our Form 10-K, which will be filed today, you'll see that our weekly active to monthly active user ratio is at its highest level ever, at 61%. That's clear evidence that we're deepening engagement as we've been talking about for the last couple quarters and finding really good success there. Second, we can compete in a world where our peers. You know, the second question was, can we compete in a world where our peers are all in on short-form video? I think we're answering that question with a clear yes as well, but doing it on our own terms. Our supply of content is growing. Video content is up 30% quarter-on-quarter. We're finding more efficient ways to get engaging content on Pinterest, serve the needs of our pinners, you know, from inspiration to action.
Importantly, while we're seeing more than 10% of our engagement is on video, it's more than 30% of our revenue that is on short-form video. When we think about monetizing that short-form video, which I think has been an open question broadly, we're seeing really good success in the monetization of short-form video, which I think is unique and stands out. Further to that point, you know, the question of can we build a monetization engine to scale? Absolutely.
You know, I couldn't be more excited about the advancements we've made in our ad stack, and how that's allowed us to grow monetizable supply north of 15%, higher than overall engagement gains because of tech innovations like whole-page optimization, which opportunistically increases ad load when a consumer is in a shopping mode or has a commercial intent. We're building solutions to help advertisers measure results on our platform, like our Conversion API and our new clean room solutions. While we're early in the adoption curve on those measurement capabilities and those new tools for advertisers, we're seeing that our best share gains, our best growth is coming from the most discerning advertisers that are implementing those tools.
The more they see visibility into our performance, the more we see that performance is clear, and I think that bodes well for our future as more and more of those advertisers adopt those tools from us. While we remain in a demand-challenged environment, I think the improvements we've made to deliver advertiser value are paying off. I think that's why you see us growing faster than many in the peer set. While demand doesn't flip overnight, we think the setup that we have of deepening engagement, the supply on our platform growing even faster than the deepening engagement with innovations like whole-page optimization that are making sure we have really great relevance of those ads and allowing us to serve more relevant ads in commercial context.
That coupled with the progress we're making on measurement tools and the performance we're seeing there, early in that adoption curve with discerning advertisers, we think all that sets us up really well for the medium to long term, even as we're fighting through a lot of choppiness in the near term, just as everybody else is.
Thank you, Mr. Sheridan.
I think-
Mr. Sheridan.
Yep. 1 final point. I think, you know, Eric, you'd also asked about top priorities. I think I addressed many of these in the call, so I won't belabor those. I think on each of these points, while we have really great progress, we continue to proceed forward on those. I talked about making sure that we're, you know, making all of our core experience is shoppable, as well as driving further improvements to engagement and our ad stack. We think we're early in those journeys, so we're gonna have really good proof points. Those continue to be our priorities. Finally, the operational rigor, where, you know, we've implemented a program around operational rigor. We're seeing good results from that. Importantly, even as we're implementing more operational rigor, we're seeing really good product innovation.
The comments I've made, you know, multiple times around constraints leading to creativity, we're seeing that in action. We feel really good about the progress on that. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Sheridan. The next question is from Ross Sandler with Barclays. Please proceed.
Hey, just following up on the prior question on priorities and investment levels. Todd, if revenue, I know we don't have a ton of visibility, but let's just say low single digits is what we see in the first half, and then it improves to something higher than that in the second half of the year. What kind of margin expansion might we see based on the planned investment levels that you talked about for 2023? The second question, Bill, you guys have talked about using an ad partnership idea as a kind of supplement to your direct ad sales, where you bring in demand from some of these retail media networks and DSPs and other third parties. Could you just talk a little bit more about timing and magnitude of something like this?
It didn't come up on that prior checklist. Is that more of a 2024 event? How do you, if you do implement that balance, manage the partnership idea with direct ad sales? Thanks a lot.
Yeah. Thanks, Ross. I'll hit your second question first, then give it to Todd to hit your first question. We definitely think about sourcing ad demand as an opportunity. Our first priority is always going to be our direct sales and the partnerships that we're driving there. We feel really good about the progress our sales team is making and how we're winning with those advertisers that have implemented our latest tools. The most sophisticated and discerning advertisers are seeing our performance be the strongest. We feel really good about that first-party selling motion. We do believe there's an opportunity to augment our demand with third parties. You mentioned one of those that we've done already around retail media networks.
We think there's a lot more opportunity there. Leveraging third-party demand has been an underutilized lever, particularly compared to other platforms. That is something we will continue to explore. No specific updates on deals or partners yet, but it’s something we’ll take more action on in the near term. We’re already taking action with retail media networks and plan to continue. It is not something I would put into 2024; we are actively exploring it.
We are very much looking at that as a meaningful opportunity in the near term, versus something relegated to the medium or long term.
Ross, on your margin question, not to be too basic, but in a world with a volatile demand picture and some uncertainty on the year, revenue needs to outgrow costs. We talked about meaningful margin expansion a few quarters ago, and that's something we're still committed to. Ideally, as the demand environment normalizes, deepening engagement strategy, opening up more monetizable supply, and our measurement tools will drive better returns on ad spend.
As the demand picture normalizes, we expect upside from a revenue perspective. On the cost side, gross margin improved this quarter due to more discipline in infrastructure. We plan further optimizations and slowed hiring significantly last summer. We continue to evaluate other levers, including our real estate portfolio, to stay on track for margin expansion.
For modeling purposes, year-over-year OpEx growth for Q1 is a huge step down from Q4. You'll see further step downs through the year as we lap headcount investments from H1 2022 and brand/marketing campaigns in H2, including some discretionary creator rewards programs.
This means we can post significantly reduced OpEx growth through the year, supporting even low levels of revenue growth and driving margin expansion.
Operator, next question.
Thanks. Thank you, Mr. Sandler. The next question is from Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.
Thanks for taking my questions. I have two. First, you’ve made progress around users, sessions, and engagement. Any stats on clicks to advertisers, interaction with advertisers, or transactions? I know it's early, but any way to quantify early progress on users engaging with advertisers?
Second, Bill, regarding user behavior and key merchants/inventory, what are two or three of the most important e-commerce verticals that will catalyze advertising growth over the course of this year into next?
On the first question, shopping ads grew 50% YoY. We are enabling easier conversions and user access to purchase via mobile deep linking. Significant revenue from shopping ads comes from mobile deep linking, showing early indicators of full funnel engagement. This helps make more content shoppable and demonstrates our ability to drive full funnel performance, where historically we’ve been stronger in the upper and mid-funnel.
At the lower funnel, conversion objectives represent about a third of revenue via mobile deep linking, which hasn’t been adopted platform-wide. Early adopters show strong performance. Much of our confidence in the future comes from early adoption of new conversion and measurement tools, like Conversion API and mobile deep linking, used by a smaller set of larger, sophisticated advertisers.
As adoption grows, this bodes well for competing broadly on shopping and lower funnel actions. Early indicators show positive trends. Shopping is broad on our platform: women’s fashion, apparel, weddings, home redesigns, and other high-engagement categories. These represent meaningful user behaviors.
Emerging behaviors include autos and men’s fashion. Gen Z is the fastest-growing demographic. Shopping is broad-based, with some categories prioritized first, but the opportunity is larger than many may realize. Todd, anything to add?
Everything Bill said is accurate. Another perspective is via joint business partnerships. Comparing large vs small rather than by retail category, we saw 25% growth in joint partnerships in H1 2022 vs H1 2021. This confirms that the ad stack and full funnel model work for the largest, most sophisticated advertisers. We ended the year up 27% YoY in joint business partnerships.
This growth shows that large, sophisticated specialty e-commerce and retailers succeed on the platform. Engagement expands from brand through consideration to purchase behavior. We have high confidence in success driven by these larger players throughout the cycle, despite market challenges.
Great. Thank you both.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Nowak. The next question is from Rich Greenfield with Lightshed Partners. Please proceed.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. Bill, how should we think about your comments around time spent and deepening engagement? I know you're only reporting overview metrics and haven't gotten to DAU yet. Is that the metric you're trying to optimize—getting people to use Pinterest daily? You mentioned Gen Z and video—if a user touches a video pin, do they spend more time on Pinterest if they create X number of boards? I'm trying to understand what unlocks meaningful increases in time spent.
Is it engaging with video, creating a board? What have you learned since taking over Pinterest? What are you solving for that leads to a more engaged user who comes back regularly? Daily, every few hours, weekly—what’s the goal? I know that’s a long-winded question.
Thanks, Rich. As I mentioned earlier, we see a huge opportunity in moving users from episodic to more frequent usage. Shopping behaviors are more daily-use oriented versus monthly or quarterly. Much of our progress comes from AI and machine learning providing better personalization and recommendations. We see opportunities to use nudges to help users discover new use cases on Pinterest, increasing engagement and frequency of visits.
We have early evidence that personalization and AI are driving engagement improvements. We aim to move people from episodic to weekly and daily usage. Engagement sessions and multiple engagement measures are already growing 10%+, which is promising. We’re still early in this journey, but these trends give us confidence in building deeper user engagement.
A key unlock is whole-page optimization, showing ads as valuable content. Growth levers include MAU expansion and plugging leaked engagement where users’ intent wasn’t satisfied, capturing monetization that might otherwise occur elsewhere. These strategies give users reasons to return more frequently while increasing revenue opportunities.
Whole-page optimization launched in Q4, letting us serve more relevant ads in commercial contexts, satisfying user intent and monetization. Multiple growth levers exist: episodic to daily usage, capturing leaked engagement and monetization, and increasing relevant ad load. This positions us for long-term growth beyond historical levels.
While we have early indicators, we’re at the beginning of realizing this potential. Ad load is currently a fraction of what highly commercial platforms serve. We’ve laid the foundation to dynamically scale ad load in a user- and advertiser-friendly way, unlocking more revenue potential over time.
Tying back to third-party demand, supply must exist before adding demand. Supply growth outpaces engagement growth, giving us the ability to serve relevant ad content, unlocking more potential in the ad platform.
The only other thing I would add on that.
We-
So we-
I, I-
Over the past few years, we’ve focused on bringing people back to Pinterest for more aspects of their life to drive stickiness. Personalization and relevance investments last year deepened engagement. MAUs grew, mobile app users grew 14% globally, 5% in U.S. and Canada. Bill highlighted weekly-to-monthly active user ratio at all-time high. Sessions are growing faster than users. Deepening engagement is working due to heavy investment in personalization and relevance, reflected in financials with rising gross margins and cost of revenue.
Gross margins increased because we built 100× larger machine learning models last year using first-party signals. These models power engagement improvements and provide a foundation to deliver new use cases for users going forward.
Operator, next question.
Thank you, Mr.-
Please.
Thank you, Mr. Greenfield. The next question is from Colin Sebastian with Baird. Please proceed.
Great. Thanks, good afternoon, everybody. Following up on episodic users, when might we see MAU acceleration beyond seasonal trends, as Todd mentioned in Q4? Also, features like Watch and Pinterest TV are gaining visibility. How are these impacting monetization or ARPU? Bill, you mentioned video stats and revenue contribution—could you clarify? Thanks.
Thanks, Colin. Regarding episodic to frequent usage, progress is already visible. Personalization gives users reasons to return, so engagement grows faster than MAUs. Focus on MAU acceleration should shift to overall engagement and revenue per user rather than MAUs alone.
Hundreds of millions of users visit episodically. Our focus is on driving deeper engagement with users we have. We track where users are, which monetize well. Chasing MAUs as a vanity metric may not yield the best monetization or platform defense.
We prioritize deepening engagement in areas with highest competition and monetization potential. Focus on accelerating engagement and revenue per user. Regarding video monetization, this is one of the most exciting opportunities. Before my joining, short-form video engagement was strong, but unit economics were uncertain. We now have 10%+ engagement on video, but 30%+ of revenue from video, demonstrating successful balance of engagement and monetization.
Video monetization is outperforming expectations. Our lean-forward platform allows more flexibility than entertainment platforms to monetize short-form video. We see significant opportunities to continue growth while maintaining user experience and engagement.
A question I've been posing to the team: images existed on the web before Pinterest, but Pinterest brought new utility. Similarly, short-form video exists independent of Pinterest, but we can bring unique utility. Others may lack the user license to do so, being in a lean-back entertainment mode. We have users in a lean-forward intent mode, where shoppable content will be better received. A key focus for us is making video shoppable, leveraging our team’s strength in computer vision.
AI and computer vision are core competencies for us. Using computer vision, we make video more shoppable with early positive results. Our new core computer vision model, with over a billion parameters, has improved visual search shopping relevance by 8%. This shows our ability to balance engagement and monetization from short-form video, with much more potential ahead.
That does. Thanks, Colin.
Thanks, Colin.
Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Sebastian. The next question is from Mark Mahaney with Evercore ISI. Please proceed.
When sessions are growing faster than users, is it more sessions per user in current categories, or are users exploring new categories? Second, regarding margin expansion in 2023: can you provide qualitative or quantitative guidance? Does meaningful margin expansion imply 200 bps of EBITDA improvement?
Thank you.
Thanks, Mark. Couple things. When we say sessions, we're looking at what we consider to be a meaningful engagement with the platform. You're not just coming here and bouncing, but you're on for more than one minute in general. Those are quality engagements, largely from people on mobile application, the mobile app, and even more impressions and revenue opportunity from those sessions than what we have seen from kind of our web-based users historically. We've seen good engagement across a number of verticals, some of our core end verticals, but we've also seen, as I mentioned in my script, that there are some areas where we're seeing some cross-fertilization into some new areas. I'm highly encouraged.
In fact, one of the things I called out was men's fashion, which may come as a surprise to some on the call. We're actually seeing some of that use case diversification into things like automotive, travel, which is something we started calling out as people went out and about post-COVID. To answer your question, yes, we're seeing some use case diversification. Not only across our core verticals, but also into some emerging ones, which gives us a lot of confidence in the kind of next journey toward use case diversification. On the non-GAAP margin, we had said a couple of quarters ago that we thought that could be, you know, around a couple hundred basis points of margin improvement, and we're committed to delivering that.
It's going to take us stepping down from where we were in the fourth quarter meaningfully in terms of year-over-year growth. I think the year-over-year OpEx growth implied by my, you know, low double-digit sequential decline is probably in the low 20s on a year-over-year basis versus 40% growth from Q4. You should expect another big step down in the second quarter, another big step down in the third quarter, and another big step down in the fourth quarter. When you do the math on what that implies for the year, it's not just a little deceleration from this year, it's a complete reset.
Thank you, Mr. Mahaney. Next question is from Lloyd Walmsley with UBS. Please proceed.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Mahaney. The next question is from the line of Lloyd Walmsley with UBS. Please proceed.
Thank you. Two questions if I can. First, just kind of going back to that earlier comments around partnerships around monetization with the likes of retail media networks or other DSPs. How much do you guys see that as an opportunity around, like, billing and ad coverage on certain categories, helping monetize new geographies, or even just on a pure pricing? Like, do you think you benchmark so low that using other platforms can drive up pricing? Anything you can share there would be helpful. Going back to the notion that you monetize, I think you said video is 30% of monetization, 10% of engagement. Appreciate some of the color you've already shared, but is that SKU brand or is that also kind of match your overall DR mix?
You know, are you selling those ads or media partners in some cases selling ads on that content? Like, or is it just a function of the ad creative working where, you know, you just get a higher click-through rate on those ads? Like, anything you can share there to help us understand that better would be great. Thanks.
Partnerships can increase ad relevance, augment demand with third-party sources, and improve performance even for smaller auctions. Whole-page optimization ensures ads are integrated and relevant, benefiting engagement and monetization.
If even the largest auctions benefit from augmenting demand with third-party sources, certainly we can as well. In doing that should give you greater relevance. I think, you know, I made the comment earlier around the sort of foundation we've laid with whole-page optimization. That sets us up to think about in an integrated way how we bring ads to the user in a way where those ads are relevant content, which we think has a twofold benefit. One is, you know, drives engagement when it truly is, you know, particularly in a commercial context where that ad could be relevant content for the user.
Secondarily, it lets us, you know, it lets us serve more ads, you know, you know, and take our ad load up from where it's been, and our ad load has previously been a fraction of what you would expect in other places with the kind of commercial intent that we have. Ad coverage, increasing relevancy, ad load, these are things that will naturally improve with us over time. As we think about the benefits potentially of augmenting with third-party sources, retail media networks or otherwise, you know, we think that's an opportunity. Geographies can be an opportunity. Your final point on pricing.
You know, I think one of the things that I think is hard to overstate in the progress we've made here is that, you know, the whole industry is going through a rewiring on ad measurement and moving from cookies to privacy-safe ad measurement solutions. While the whole industry is going through that rewiring, you know, we are, we've provided our Conversion API, we've launched our clean room effort, and our early indications there are really positive, but we are very early on that adoption curve. As we think we move along that adoption curve, we think we actually are performing far better than many advertisers realize, far better than what they've been able to measure. Bringing that greater measurement is a real opportunity.
Those are things that we're absolutely gonna do first party. Those are also things that as we think about the potential for partnership across the industry, there's multiple different ways that that can play out, and you've seen us talk about some of those already, like what we did on our clean room efforts with LiveRamp and Albertsons, and we think we'll have more of those kinds of opportunities going forward that will help with measurement, and therefore also help with pricing as advertisers have better visibility into the value we're creating for them. Then on your other question on video, we're probably not breaking it down quite to the level of specificity that you're asking for. You know, we're seeing good broad-based, you know, engagement on video.
Give it to Todd if there's anything more you want to share about video generally. No, I would say You know, in general, that it tends to be more of an awareness opportunity. That's kind of where it started. We have built performance video and have seen decent returns there. I think the opportunity going forward is, as Bill's talked about before, building a real full funnel video advertising experience that takes people through conversion. I think there's a unique opportunity given the shopping mindset where more than half of the people come to Pinterest to shop. Video advertising can take you through the full funnel in a super compelling way. I'm excited about the opportunity there.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Walmsley.
Operator, I think we're at time now.
The next question. Thank you. That concludes-
Operator, we are at time now. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks again to all of you for joining the call and for your questions. We look forward to keeping the dialogue going, and hope everyone enjoys the rest of your day. Thank you.
That concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.