Participants

Christie Masoner; Vice President of Investor Relations; GoDaddy Inc

Amanpal Bhutani; Chief Executive Officer, Director; GoDaddy Inc

Mark McCaffrey; Chief Financial Officer; GoDaddy Inc

Vikram Kesavabhotla; Analyst; Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc.

Ken Wong; Analyst; Oppenheimer & Co., Inc.

Josh Beck; Analyst; Raymond James

Aaron Kessler; Analyst; Seaport Research Partners

Trevor Young; Analyst; Barclays

Robert Coolbrith; Analyst; Evercore Institutional Equities

Chris Kuntarich; Analyst; UBS

Ygal Arounian; Analyst; Citigroup

Elizabeth Porter; Analyst; Morgan Stanley

Mark Zgutowicz; Analyst; The Benchmark Company LLC

Ella Smith; Analyst; J.P. Morgan

Alec Brondolo; Analyst; Wells Fargo

John Byun; Analyst; Jefferies LLC

Naved Khan; Analyst; B. Riley Securities

Bradley Erickson; Analyst; RBC Capital Markets

Deepak Mathivanan; Analyst; Cantor Fitzgerald

Presentation

Christie Masoner

Welcome to GoDaddy's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. Thank you for joining us. I'm Christie Masoner, VP of Investor Relations, and with me today are Aman Bhutani, Chief Executive Officer; and Mark McCaffrey, Chief Financial Officer. (Operator Instructions) On today's call, we'll be referencing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures and other operating and business metrics.
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 Investor Relations site at investors.godaddy.net or in today's earnings release on our Form 8-K furnished with the SEC.
Growth rates represent year-over-year comparisons unless otherwise noted. The matters we'll be discussing today include forward-looking statements such as those related to future financial results and our strategies or objectives with respect to future operations. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that are discussed in detail in our periodic SEC filings.
Actual results may differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, February 13, 2025, and except to the extent required by law, we undertake no obligation to update these statements because of new information or future events.
With that, I am pleased to introduce Aman.

Amanpal Bhutani

Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us today. At GoDaddy, our mission is to empower everyday entrepreneurs and make opportunity more inclusive for all. Our strategy is relentlessly focused on creating customer value and transforming it to shareholder value through better conversion, attach and retention. This is the driving force behind our profitable growth model, propelling us towards our north star of maximizing free cash flow over the long term.
Our team demonstrated strong execution in 2024, with annual results that are tracking ahead of our Investor Day targets. We drove top line bookings growth of over 9% and expanded our bottom line normalized EBITDA margin to 31% for the full year. Our impressive 21% growth in Applications & Commerce bookings alongside our nearly 400 basis points margin improvement were strong contributors to a 25% increase in free cash flow for the year.
Equally exciting, GoDaddy crossed a significant milestone this year, delivering our first $5 billion of annual bookings. On our key initiatives from Investor Day, we continue to make great progress in Pricing & Bundling, Seamless Experience, Commerce, Cost Optimization and Strong Traction in GoDaddy Airo. I am excited to share these updates with you today.
Pricing & Bundling delivered impactful results throughout 2024 that were higher than our expectations. This bolstered our 21% Applications & Commerce bookings growth from focused efforts in productivity. We have shared that this is a multiyear journey, and our confidence in this initiative continues to grow. In 2025, we are targeting a meaningful contribution to growth from this initiative.
We will focus our 2025 efforts on our presence products and specific customer populations within our hosting business. This continues to spread this initiative across Applications & Commerce and core platform. In parallel, we are working on the next evolution of this initiative for 2026 and beyond.
Our Seamless Experience initiative also exceeded expectations in 2024, improving conversion, renewal rates and engagement across products. In Q4, we launched a redesigned managed WordPress platform with 2 times faster performance and enhanced security. Additionally, we started testing Airo Site Designer for WordPress, an AI-powered web design tool. This initiative will continue in 2025 with similar goals to reduce friction, enhance performance and improve customer experience. Our aim is to help customers save time and focus on what they love, running their businesses and engaging with their own customers.
Our commerce initiative is performing well and annualized gross payment volume is growing at a fast pace while our focus in 2024 was on profitable growth through the creation and merchandising of our commerce subscription products, we also drove growth in our transactional payments business with annualized gross payment volume increasing 55% to $2.6 billion.
In addition, we launched new innovations such as GoDaddy Capital, a merchant cash advance program that helps our customers more easily access working capital, manage cash flow and invest back in their business. As we look to 2025, our teams are focused on delivering more new and innovative capabilities for our commerce customers. such as expanded payments processing options as well as same-day payout, which give customers rapid access to their funds.
On our cost optimization initiative, we drove measurable impact across the organization. from continued simplification of our integrated platform and global talent recruitment across multiple functions to better technology and tooling. In 2025, we plan to maintain our disciplined approach across our cost structure and drive opportunities with technology and AI to provide better experience and service to our customers at lower cost.
Last but not least, GoDaddy Airo continues to transform the customer experience and reposition where our customers start with us. Airo is quickly gaining traction, and we view it as a key driver of future growth and customer lifetime value. Throughout 2024, Airo has shown promising results with discovery and engagement. We have also made great progress in expanding Airo across more customer entry points and plans. Website building remains the biggest beneficiary of Aero engagement.
And Airo continues its momentum in becoming the largest funnel for websites plus marketing with 50% of paid subscriptions originating with the Airo experience.
We are excited to enter the monetization phase for Airo earlier than planned across two pathways, Airo and Airo plus. Airo has resulted in a combination of increased customer spend and better products attached. And with the first Airo cohort reaching the 13-month mark, we are seeing green shoots in terms of improved renewal rates for both domains and websites plus marketing.
Airo Plus takes the Aero experience to the next level with advanced logos, AI-powered marketing tools and enhanced site building capabilities. We began testing Airo Plus as an independent SKU in the fourth quarter. We also launched a front of site experience in connection with our Super Bowl ad that highlights Airo and all of its capabilities. Our ad accomplished what we set out to do, bring broad awareness to the full breadth of Airo's capabilities to a massive audience. We want the world to know about Airo and the Super Bowl is one of the largest stages.
Our Airo landing page jumped dozens of spots to become a top 6 page on our website on Sunday telling us that customers were looking for Airo. This also kicked off our 2025 marketing campaign, which will continue to highlight Airo's capabilities to take the guesswork out of building a successful online venture and showcase the unstoppable confidence Airo inspires in small businesses.
In 2024, Airo demonstrated the power of our integrated platform, the value of automation and the abilities generative AI can bring to our customers. As we look forward into 2025 Airo will take more leaps forward with personalized inputs for each customer that drives a new level of AI-driven personalization. The first test using this technology on Airo domain search beat the most recent generative AI-based winning model, opening a new vein of improvement that our teams can pursue.
We will also see the introduction of a Gentek AI across our platform and within the Airo experience, creating simplification for our customers and new engagement services that lead to monetization. With these and many other improvements on our road map, I'm excited by the innovation at the company and the focus on creating value for our customers.
In closing, I want to highlight that 2024 was a year of exceptional execution by the GoDaddy team. A year ago, we shared clear goals and strategic priorities at our Investor Day and I'm proud to say that our team has driven great performance across the board. Growing bookings over 9%, revenue at 8%, almost 400 basis points of normalized EBITDA margin expansion to 31% and $1.4 billion in free cash flow.
Our strategy is steadfastly focused on the entrepreneur's wheel across identity, presence and commerce, and it is working. The relentless focus of our operations continues to be to accelerate the pace of execution to create customer value and successfully transform it to long-term shareholder value.
With that, here is Mark.

Mark McCaffrey

Thanks, Aman. Throughout the last few years, we focused on creating significant value for our customers by integrating our platform to deliver seamless technology and provide one-stop shop solutions that drive conversion, attach and retention.
Our strong financial results are a testament to the continued disciplined execution of our strategy as we drive towards our North Star. In the fourth quarter, we supported this goal through our delivery of 8% revenue growth and normalized EBITDA margin expansion to 32%. Beginning with Q4 results. Total revenue grew on a reported and constant currency basis to $1.2 billion exceeding the high end of our guided range.
Consolidated annual recurring revenue grew 8% to $4 billion. For our high-margin Applications & Commerce segment, we drove 17% growth in revenue to $441 million on continued strong performance from our key growth initiatives. A&C bookings grew 17% on the strength across all products within this segment, including our proprietary websites less marketing, Managed WordPress and Commerce as well as our productivity solutions.
Segment EBITDA margin also improved to 47%. Our core platform segment delivered revenue growth of 4% to $751 million, driven by strength in domains from pricing and units, this growth was slightly tempered by our proactive strategic initiatives around platform integration that included divestitures, migrations and product end-of-life efforts in our hosting business.
Core platform bookings grew 4% and segment EBITDA margin expanded to 34%. We grew normalized EBITDA ahead of expectations, increasing 19% in the fourth quarter to $385 million, and delivered an expanded margin of 32%, up nearly 300 basis points. Favorable product mix and continued operational discipline were the main drivers of expansion.
While we simultaneously increased marketing expense, in support of the broader launch of our innovative Airo experience. On cash, unlevered free cash flow for the quarter grew 9% to $379 million, and free cash flow grew 12% to $342 million. This is supported by the $1.2 billion of bookings in the fourth quarter, representing 9% growth on both a reported and constant currency basis.
Moving on to our annual financial results. We delivered $4.6 billion in revenue, representing growth of 8% on a reported and constant currency basis. A&C revenue grew 16% to $1.7 billion, and core platform revenue grew 3% to $2.9 billion. Bookings rose 9%, with a slight currency headwind. Full year normalized EBITDA grew 23% to $1.4 billion, representing a 31% margin, up almost 400 basis points over the prior year.
Since 2020, we have driven cumulative expansion in normalized EBITDA margin of nearly 900 basis points, an impressive feat that we plan to continue building on. We also continue to demonstrate normalized EBITDA to cash conversion of approximately 1:1. Unlevered free cash flow for the year grew 20% to $1.5 billion, exceeding our guide for the year and free cash flow grew an impressive 25% to $1.4 billion, also exceeding our guide.
Over the last few years, we have pivoted our go-to-market efforts to attract high-value customers and build profitable cohorts through seamless technology and enhanced experiences. By year-end, nearly all customers are now on our integrated platform, which boasts an impressive 85% plus retention rate despite our overall company retention rate dipping slightly to 84%.
This focus on quality over quantity has increased our model's resilience, profitability and cash flow. By eliminating deep discounts, completing targeted divestitures and migrating certain offerings, our customer base declined to $20.5 million. That said, these efforts are working. Our newer cohorts are delivering exactly as intended with higher attach and conversion.
Average order size, a leading indicator, is 16% higher while ARPU is also up 8% to $220. Additionally, the percentage of customers purchasing 2-plus products has trended upwards and over 50% of our total customers subscribed to multiple products with us. This highlights successful efforts to boost cross-selling and bundling on our integrated platform, reinforcing our strong profitability and cash flow generation opportunities for years to come.
Moving forward, we remain confident in our trajectory and anticipate a return to customer growth in 2025, underpinned by our enhanced value proposition and strategic focus on high lifetime value customers.
Turning to the balance sheet. We exited the year with $1.1 billion in cash and total liquidity of $2.1 billion. Net debt was $2.8 billion, representing a net leverage of 1.7 times on a trailing 12-month basis. Last year, we bought back 5.2 million shares totaling $668 million at an average purchase price per share of about $129.
Overall, we drove a 23% reduction in gross shares outstanding since January 2022, 3 points ahead of our 3-year targeted reduction of 20%. And at the quarter end, a 145 million fully diluted shares remained outstanding.
Shifting to our outlook for Q1 2025. We are targeting total revenue of $1.175 billion representing 7% growth at the midpoint of the range. Within that, we expect A&C revenue growth of mid-teens and core platform growth of low single digits. We anticipate elevated spending for marketing focused on our broader Airo launch as well as typical seasonal expenses in the first quarter.
We project a normalized EBITDA margin of about 30%, an expansion of about 200 basis points over last year. For the full year, we expect total revenue to be within a range of $4.86 billion to $4.94 billion, representing growth of 7% at the midpoint of the range. We expect revenue growth in the US to outpace international growth by approximately 200 basis points primarily on currency headwinds that are expected to be more prominent in the first half of the year.
In A&C, we expect revenue growth of mid-teens. And in core platform, we expect revenue growth of low single digits. To be clear, as Aman said, we are excited about the Airo experience and the longer-term accelerant it represents for our business. In the near term, including 2025, the financial benefits are expected to be more modest as monetization begins to take hold in the form of bookings before being recognized as revenue in later periods. Looking back on the incredible progress of our A&C business we take immense pride in its rapid growth, rising from 30% of our overall revenue just 3 years ago to an expected nearly 40% by year's end.
This achievement reflects our relentless focus on innovation, execution and customer impact.
As we move forward, we remain committed to driving meaningful profitable growth, and we have an exciting road ahead and we are just getting started. As our record of accomplishment demonstrates, we remain dedicated to maintaining our operational discipline and looking for opportunities to gain further leverage.
Looking ahead, we expect to drive this leverage through continued infrastructure simplification and global talent recruitment, while also making long-term strategic investments in product innovation and marketing.
In 2025, we expect normalized EBITDA margin expansion of approximately 100 basis points, and we remain on track to deliver our Investor Day target of 33% by 2026. For the full year of 2025, we are targeting free cash flow of at least $1.5 billion, representing growth of over 11%. We expect capital expenditures of $30 million, cash interest payments of $150 million and $30 million in cash taxes, primarily to foreign jurisdictions.
With that, our disciplined capital allocation approach remains unchanged, and we plan to evaluate all opportunities for shareholder return according to our rigorous and returns-based framework. On our buyback program, we are committed to at a minimum covering dilution from share-based compensation over the year. We are pleased with our strong 2024 performance and our progress towards our Investor Day target of $4.5 billion plus in cumulative free cash flow generation underpinned by 6% to 8% annual revenue growth, an expansion of normalized EBITDA margin to 33% by 2026.
Before we go to Q&A I want to emphasize that our path ahead is clear, and we remain dedicated to executing our strategy to deliver durable top line growth alongside expanded profitability balancing the tube drives us towards our North Star of maximizing free cash flow.
With that, I'll hand it over to our Vice President and Head of Investor Relations, Christie Masoner, to open up the call for your questions.

Question and Answer Session

Christie Masoner

Thanks, Mark. (Operator Instructions)
Vikram Kesavabhotla, Baird.

Vikram Kesavabhotla

Hey, thanks for thanks for taking the questions. My first one is on pricing and bundling. You talked about focusing this year on presence products and specific customer populations within the hosting business. Just wondering if you could elaborate some more on the strategy there? Why are you choosing to focus on those areas? And how impactful do you think that could be relative to your work last year in productivity?
And I think you mentioned the next evolution in 2026. Just wondering if you can share any color on what those next steps could look like. And then my second question is on the customer count. Mark, you reiterated the confidence in returning to customer growth in 2025. Just what are the drivers that you think will help you get there?
And what does the time line look like in terms of returning to growth on a quarter-over-quarter basis and year-over-year? And maybe associated with that, just what are you seeing at the top of the funnel right now? And I'll leave it there. Thanks.

Amanpal Bhutani

Thanks, Vik. I'll start with pricing and bundling, continue to be very excited about that program. It delivered ahead of our expectations in 2024, and we have a very material target for it in 2025 as well.
I feel like we put the breadcrumbs in place on the evolution of this program. So there isn't sort of a hard cutover in 2026 or anything. Where we started with pricing and bundling is looking at our products, bundling them with other products and looking at unique value-based offers for our customers.
And what we learned through 2024 is that there is a better path to approaching customer cohorts rather than a product-centric lens. So what we're talking about here is that continued evolution where we've -- of course, we focused on productivity solutions in 2024. In '25, you'll see us continue to focus on some of our presence products, and that was the more product-led mindset or approach to Pricing & Bundling -- but then the customer cohort-based lens is starting in 2025 as well and the first place we're going is customer cohort in the hosting business.
And what it's really based on is the continued experimentation with customers continue continuously looking at what bundles make more sense, where is the significant customer surplus and where can we sort of price up a little bit and shift some of that value to the farm and shareholders. And I think for customer count went to...

Mark McCaffrey

Absolutely. And Vic thanks for the question. Just a reminder, our focus is on high-quality customers, and we want customers that are coming in with intent. So our goal is really looking at the metrics around what is the average order size at the initiation with that customer?
How are they attaching? How is it ultimately impacting our retention rate. So the drive to getting customers is more in line with getting the high-value customers versus just getting any customer. And having said that, we had some headwinds, and we've talked about them around our customer count. We had divestitures.
We ended deep discounting at the top of our funnel. We had migrations. All of those created a drag on certain customers, certain brands that we had and we are now getting through the majority of that work, and we're looking at that starting to abate from a comparison basis. funnel you asked about, we're still seeing at the top of funnel very solid traffic coming into our funnel. We're seeing customers attaching faster, all the positive signs, all the positive signs around Airo that are part of our strategy.
So at the end of the day, we feel our strategy is working.

Vikram Kesavabhotla

Okay, great. Thank you.

Christie Masoner

Ken Wong, Oppenheimer.

Ken Wong

Hey, Ken. Great. I just wanted to maybe kind of dive in a little bit on the revenue growth for next year. I think we were, generally expecting, some convergence between revenue and bookings, and we are seeing a little bit of that. Just wondering if there's any kind of one-off headwinds that we should be aware of, any quantification of of how FX might have impacted that number.

Mark McCaffrey

Yeah, thanks, Ken. And we're still seeing great momentum in bookings and obviously it, depending on the terms, transactional subscription that's going to impact revenue in different periods. But on an overall basis, bookings is going to outpace revenue and continue to see that momentum going through 2025. FX, we did see, I would say a small impact on FX in bookings towards the second half of the year. Not much. Now, it hits us in bookings first, then it rolls out into revenue, so it is very much in our model for 2025. But I would say at this juncture, it's relatively small overall.

Ken Wong

Okay. Perfect. And then last year, you guys more or less deliberately kind of fired customers with the base falling $20.5 million -- you guys have been talking up investments in terms of customer acquisition for '25. Like how should we think about the contribution to growth from that aspect of your focus?

Mark McCaffrey

I'll start and then maybe, Aman, you could jump on. So we're looking this year and we've talked about our investment in marketing around Airo and bringing people into the Airo Experience. And with that, we are starting to enter the monetization phase. But the monetization phase takes a while to build and goes to bookings first and ultimately to revenue.
So for this year, I would say, modest impact of the Airo launch and some of the efforts we're making around attracting customers into that experience. But as we go out, obviously, we expect that to increase.

Amanpal Bhutani

And maybe I'll just quickly add, Ken, maybe two parts to it. One, as Mark already talked about, which is attracting the higher-value customer, the higher intent customer. And the second is that we want them to start with us in a different place. Years ago, a customer comes to GoDaddy, they start with domains while more and more today, a customer comes to GoDaddy and start with Airo. And Airo is a collection of products, a collection of services that adds value to them immediately.
And that's super important to us because it allows us to reposition the company and the starting point of the company with the customer.

Ken Wong

Thank you guys.

Christie Masoner

Josh Beck, Raymond James.

Josh Beck

Yeah, thanks so much for the question team. I wanted to go back to some of your comments about kind of pursuing the monetization vectors or phase, if you will, of Airo and Airo Plus. It sounds like you're entering that phase maybe earlier than you had planned, say, 12 months ago. So just kind of curious what triggered that change and really what was behind that.

Amanpal Bhutani

Yeah. Happy to talk about that. Definitely, we brought Airo to market in November, December for the first time with a small cohort of customers and expanded and that's 2023 and then over the last year, expanded it. And in our original estimates, and I think I've talked about it many times the idea very much was that the focus was on discovery and engagement and then monetization.
And we really wanted to solidify discovery and engagement because we want to change the base that people start with GoDaddy on. And what's happened in 2024 is that discovery and engagement have gone very well. Obviously, we've shared metrics of millions of customers discovering Airo and then half of them engaging with Airo. And now we've continued to share the metric of how Airo has become the path where people started GoDaddy and then find their way to websites, right, with the Airo path sort of providing 50% of websites starts.
So that's very good discovery and engagement metrics. And what it's done is it's sort of bolstered our confidence and pulled forward some of the Airo monetization, which, of course, Mark talked about the positive of Airo in terms of just some green shoots on retention rates, some product attach, all of that's fantastic, some conversion improvements to -- but what happens now is that a SKU appears, which is a monetization SKU, which is Airo Plus that we launched in Q4 and you're going to start to see us hold in a number of the new very innovative products on the Airo platform as Airo Plus to the customer.

Josh Beck

Super helpful. And then maybe just a quick follow-up on the GPV. I think it was $2.6 billion, growing mid-50s and then obviously, the comps are also very high with respect to growth. So I guess, how much penetration do you see in the years ahead? Obviously, you've had tremendous success getting to this point.
Is that something where there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit and gains to be had? Or should we be thinking about growth maybe slowing there? Any guidance would be great.

Amanpal Bhutani

Yeah. I continue to be very excited about GPV growth, and I think we want to continue it at a fast pace, but our model is a profitable growth model. So what we did in 2024 is not just grew GPV very fast what we did is we started to launch SaaS offerings as well, which has helped sort of the higher-margin revenue getting out there.
And in terms of penetration into the base, I would say still the largest contributor to our GPV growth is our base of customers. And we're -- I'm afraid to even say we're getting started is we have penetrated such a small percentage of our base, and I feel there's so much more to go in front of us. So that's what we're after.

Mark McCaffrey

And even adding to that as new customers have come into the funnel and started using payments over the years, they will grow and add to that GPV as well. So there is plenty of runway on our GPV growth going forward.

Josh Beck

Great. Thank you both.

Amanpal Bhutani

Thank you.

Christie Masoner

Aaron Kessler, Seaport Research.

Aaron Kessler

Perfect. A couple of questions. Maybe back to the Airo. I think you said 50% of bookings for web presence, which is pretty impressive. Any thoughts on maybe how much those are kind of incremental versus in terms of that uplift, do you have a sense for that?
And then maybe talk about some of the internal efficiencies. I know it's kind of a longer-term process, but that you're gaining from AI, just and then what would you expect from 2025 as well from some internal efficiencies you're getting. Thank you.

Amanpal Bhutani

Yeah. On the first part, without breaking every piece of it down, overall, Airo has demonstrated higher conversion, higher product attach and just now starting to show better renewal, not just for domains but for websites.
And when we talk about Airo website, what we're really talking about as people starting with the Airo Experience and then sort of launching into the website experience. And that's what's reached 50%. So Airo has become a very large funnel and obviously, now is going to be the largest on of website. But Airo is helping across all these metrics. But even as I talk about them, I have to sort of mention these are green shoots, right?
Airo is an infant. It's about 1 year old, and its first cohort just came up for renewal for the first time. So we have so much more to do here, but the real excitement for me here is that we are starting the customer with something different at GoDaddy and that different vehicle is Airo and it offers us lots and lots of opportunities. And Mark, do you want to...

Mark McCaffrey

Airo, on your incrementality, it's always hard to measure whether they would have gone to websites or they went to website because of Airo. Having said that, the metrics we're tracking are things like average order size when they're initiating -- those are indicators to us that they're coming in and doing more than they previously did. And those were all very positive in the early stages of what we're seeing.

Amanpal Bhutani

And then on the question on internal efficiencies, where Obviously, I'm super excited about AI, and we continue to invest in AI, machine learning, generative AI and now Agentec AI as well. And we think there's great room for innovation for internal efficiencies there sort of across the company.
And our model in some of the places, for example, in care is a little bit different than other companies. But we've continued to make progress. For example, we've talked about Gabby. We've also talked about our conversational bot and those tools continue to do better and better in year from now, we'll be talking about them a lot more.

Aaron Kessler

Great, thank you.

Christie Masoner

Trevor Young, Barclays.

Trevor Young

Great, thanks. On the EBITDA margin guide, 1Q implying about 2 points expansion year-on-year, meanwhile only committing to 100 bps for the full year. If I heard you correctly, the marketing spend is also going to be concentrated in 1Q. So just help us understand, is there some additional spend layering in later in the year that we should maybe be contemplating as we think about margin progression.
And then similarly, is there any sort of FX headwinds, any nuances between where rev rec is and where costs lie that could be weighing on margin as well?

Mark McCaffrey

Thanks, Trevor. On the margin, as we say, every quarter is going to be a little bit different for us. And so looking at Q1 versus the entire year gets a little tricky, but we do have a seasonality related to it.
Now having said that, on the 100 basis points, it's just following the model that we have talked about, right? We're seeing the upfront benefit last year from things like infrastructure simplification, global talent recruitment those were very front-end loaded for us. And now it's generally the tailwind related to the continued growth in A&C, a higher segment EBITDA margin.
There's nothing in particular that we haven't called out. We have talked about marketing. We have talked about product innovation. But generally, it's staying within the parameters that we've talked about within the model that we've talked about, and we're heading towards the 33% in 2025 -- sorry, 2026.

Trevor Young

Great. Thank you, Mark.

Christie Masoner

Robert Colbrai, Evercore.

Robert Coolbrith

Great. Thank you for taking your question. I wanted to ask a little bit more about the renewal rate improvement you're seeing on the very early Airo cohorts, particularly in relationship domains. So I was wondering if it's just because they're doing multi-product attach at a higher rate or maybe the domains -- the improvement in relation to domains conveyed that there's something more unique about the Airo renewal motion.
And then associated with that, are you seeing an opportunity for higher expansion at renewal from customers who have received the Airo Experience or engage with it. And does that potentially portend opportunity to put Airo in front of the broader installed customer base of renewal in the future?

Amanpal Bhutani

Yeah. Thank you. When we talk about the Airo cohort for domains. These are customers that bought a domain and were immediately sort of engage with the Airo Experience, right? They were surrounded by the so they chose to engage with it.
And what we see there is that because Airo offers 8 to 9, what we call cards or areas for customers to engage where they can run that domain into appealing. They can do a little bit of social marketing or they can create a logo or they can get a one-page website that Airo just creates for them, right?
This is before they go build a full website. all of these other interactions happen for free for these customers that have just bought a domain. And our hypothesis is that because the customer now has greater value that over time, that should be a little bit higher retention rate. Now it's going to be different from our 2-plus products and such because there, what we're talking about is two paid products. But what we have here is customer using multiple products and that should lead to better renewal rate.
In terms of expansion of other opportunities for Airo customers, that is what we're after. We want to start the customer with a set of products, and we want to keep adding to that value over time. So you'll keep seeing us add more and more capabilities to Airo.
But as they start using it, expose them to a logo builder or an image creator that's much better than what came naturally with Airo or marketing tool, a marketing consultant or the digital marketing tool we have, which do a much better job and then the customer can opt in and sort of upsell themselves into Airo Plus.

Robert Coolbrith

And maybe the last piece, just the opportunity to perhaps at renewal put Airo in front of customers who haven't seen it before versus new customers?

Amanpal Bhutani

Yeah, we continue to work on taking Airo into the broader base of customers. I think I've talked about it a little bit in the past too our learnings from taking websites and then the productivity solutions and now commerce into the basis that, that go-to-market motion tends to be a bit different than new customers. So it tends to come a few quarters after we've nailed a new customer side.
But we're continuing to work on that. We're very excited about 4 basic customers continuing to be a very exciting place where if you're on the site, you'll see Airo and Airo Plus over the next few months Airo is already on many of the services, but you'll actually see a robust start popping up for existing customers, too.

Robert Coolbrith

Okay, great. Thank you.

Christie Masoner

Chris Kuntare, UBS.

Chris Kuntarich

Great. I just want to go back to the comment, Mark, that you had made on the 16% average order growth. Could you give us a sense for what that was growing in 2023?

Mark McCaffrey

We don't -- haven't disclosed that back to 2023. So I would say it's a year-over-year comparison at 16%. Remember, we are in a different environment in 2023. So it's -- we're comparing it to post arrow to pre Airo. So again, we'll continue to update that as we go forward.
But right now, it's at 16%.

Chris Kuntarich

Got it. Yes. I think that was kind of really what I was trying to get at here was that accelerating? Was that average order growth accelerating in the order of magnitude of 5% mid-singles, high singles here just as kind of a proxy for what that performance improvement was coming from Airo.

Mark McCaffrey

Yeah. Chris, we haven't gone out and given numbers like that back that far. So we can take it offline, but we're making progress at 16%.

Chris Kuntarich

Got it. And just maybe on Airo Plus, Curious how you're thinking about that product. You're obviously doing independent SKU tests now at this point. Is this something we should be looking for is something that you're going to be putting marketing dollars behind this year?

Amanpal Bhutani

Yeah. We're going to test it first, Chris, and customers are going to start to see it on the site and only once that testing is complete, you'll see why we tested pricing and so on. As we get to confidence on its performance, then likely, you'll see some marketing on it. As Mike has talked about, we are putting marketing dollars behind Airo, we think it's a fantastic experience in the world needs to know about.

Chris Kuntarich

Got it. Thank you.

Christie Masoner

Ygal Arounian, Citigroup.

Ygal Arounian

Hey, good afternoon guys. First, just going back to the full year revenue and the kind of point of convergence from 2024 bookings to '25 revenue. Maybe you could just help kind of a little bit of what's embedded in the range of the guidance, like what would it take to get to the lower end of your guidance, meaning 6% revenue growth coming off a year of 9% bookings growth. Just what's the right way to think about that?

Mark McCaffrey

Yeah. thanks. And we continue to great momentum. And the revenue growth comparison, obviously, it trails the booking comparison, and we're comparing it against different years, different periods, different aspects. We feel really good about where we are in the range.
But there are transactional ends of the business that we continue to monitor. There are impact not only our core platform, they can also impact our A&C. So we try to build that range to take into consideration that what is the volume, what are the units coming in and what are the different ranges there.
So I would say, if you really want to see the what can get us from one pole to the other pole you have to look at the transactional business because the bookings takes a period of time to revenue on subscriptions.

Amanpal Bhutani

And I think we could give a little color and say transactional businesses, you're talking about the aftermarket business being a big part.

Mark McCaffrey

That is the biggest part of it. We did have the return to some larger transactions last year, making this year a tough compare in the aftermarket. As we always say, we don't anticipate those log transaction. So that is always going to be of a swing for us depending on what we see out there.

Ygal Arounian

Okay. That's helpful. And another one for you, Mark. On capital allocation. So it's been a couple of quarters now with not a lot of buybacks or certainly less than what you've been buying kind of run rate previously.
Building cash, you're below your leverage targets here. Just give us an updated thought on buybacks, capital allocation. Is the M&A environment any different or your approach to M&A -- so how do we think about that as your cash to grow here?

Mark McCaffrey

No change to our approach. We were ahead of where we had targeted coming out of 2024. We bought back through Q3. And like I said, never look at any particular quarter for a trend. We continue to evaluate on a quarter-by-quarter basis, and we continue to look at what the right rate of return is for all of our capital allocation.
Overall, no change in how we approach it, no change in how we look at things, and we'll continue to apply that in a very disciplined approach going forward.

Ygal Arounian

Got it, thank you. Thanks.

Christie Masoner

Elizabeth Porter, Morgan Stanley.

Elizabeth Porter

Great. Thank you so much. First, we generally think of websites is a pretty sticky market. And with the opportunity to drive more website attach -- should we think about the opportunity as really skewed towards the new customer side? Or do some of the products like site optimization allow you to actually dip back into that installed base of customers then maybe leveraging a different website folder and provide an opportunity to drive an attach to a GoDaddy website. Thanks.

Amanpal Bhutani

Yeah. It was a bit -- you're right on the spot. Yes, there is the opportunity with new, but site optimizer is built to help reach existing customers that could renew their sites that could do other job. I think we've shared publicly that whole site optimizer is still being tested with a smaller cohort of GoDaddy customers of the technology, it's built to make any site better in the world.

Elizabeth Porter

Great. And then just as a follow-up, the pricing and packaging in 2025 seems to be more focused on web presence and cohorts and hosting. How should we think about the relative benefit of the strategy to these areas in 2025 compared to the impact the strategy had on productivity in 2024. Productivity just in general, seems to be a bigger contributor within A&C and we know hosting has gotten a little bit smaller with divestitures. So could you just help us understand how big of an opportunity these areas represent?

Amanpal Bhutani

Yeah. Pricing and bundling continues to be a multiyear opportunity, and we feel very good about the transition, obviously, being a product to Pricing & Bundling you're moving to a customer cohort base lens. And we think the opportunity is very large over multiple years.
In terms of contribution, that I had wanted to share, which is why we included it, is that we have a very material contribution from pricing and bundling in 2025 as well. And I think there's a bit of a sort of there's a bit of confusion for people because there's too much focus on productivity rather than looking at GoDaddy's very large customer base and all sets of products that they have and also the products that we can bundle with those products to create these new value-based offers. That's really the scope that we should be looking at versus looking at one specific product within our P&L, if you will.

Elizabeth Porter

Great. Thank you so much.

Amanpal Bhutani

Thank you, Elizabeth.

Christie Masoner

Mark Zguowitz, benchmark.

Mark Zgutowicz

Thanks,. I appreciate it. Mark, just maybe a follow-on to Trevor's question on the margin guidance for the year. I'm curious what your A&C and core platform adjusted EBITDA margin expectations are for 25. And the question stems from -- I would just expect to see perhaps more leverage than the 100 bps just given the mix shift to A&C.
So that's where that question stems from. And then I also noticed that there was some deleverage in corporate quarter-over-quarter and fourth quarter and wondered if any of that I guess, what drove that and what -- if there's any of that lingering into your 25% margin guidance.

Mark McCaffrey

And thanks, Mark. Real quick on the margin guidance. We were very front-end loaded when we went from '23 to '24 with some of the actions we had taken. We talked about the 3 buckets, and each of them having a certain contribution in the first 2 were very frontloaded. We feel really good about our pace towards the -- and the 100 bps of improvement is based on the fact that we are now going to be seeing more of the tailwind related to the A&C growth.
And that will help in that segment EBITDA margin, and that will help be that tailwind that helps us get there. Now at the same time, we are continuing to look at marketing investment around Airo and product innovation. So we're investing in the long term. And we feel good about our path to get there. I always say our North Star is free cash flow.
So we are well on track on the free cash flow targets coming out of the year, and we continue to have that great momentum to get there. On the Second question, and I'm going to say -- yes, nothing to call out. We were finishing up some infrastructure projects towards the end of Q4, but there's nothing specific or nothing lingering into 2025 to call out. We're on a good track to continue to get operating leverage on our P&L.

Mark Zgutowicz

Okay. Great. And then just 1 last question. You touched on it a little bit, but aftermarket, you had a nice acceleration in 4Q. And I'm just curious what drove that and what your assumptions are with aftermarket in 1Q and for '25?

Mark McCaffrey

Yeah. We continue to see it as a low single-digit grower, and we're seeing good volume at the, I would say, the base level of the smaller transactions. Like I said, we don't build in any of the larger transactions, which can create some volatility -- and that pattern seems to be holding. Every quarter may be a little different up or down depending on some of that, but we're -- that's what we build into our model going forward.

Mark Zgutowicz

Okay, got it. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.

Amanpal Bhutani

All right, thanks Marks.

Christie Masoner

Alexei Gogolov, JP Morgan.

Ella Smith

Hi, This is Ella Smith on for Alexia. So maybe first with Airo. How many of Airo users are existing GoDaddy customers versus how many are new customers? And how do you think about that distinction in customer groups moving forward?

Amanpal Bhutani

Currently more -- the greater percentage of Airo customers are going to be in the new because all new customers are getting exposed to Airo and we see great engagement from them with new customers. On existing customers, the go-to-market is a bit different, but that is an area of larger opportunity over time.
Also, the new continues to sort of weave into the base as well. So over time, you're going to see the base become larger and larger in terms of Airo customers, and we have a lot more to do on that and a lot of great ideas to bring to customers.

Ella Smith

Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And for a quick follow-up, how did your GMV far in 2024? And looking ahead, do you still expect GPV to outpace GMV growth?

Mark McCaffrey

We straight away from GMV and just the disclosures around it only because it's not a clear indicator of how it translates directly into our revenue. GPV is the number we base it on. And obviously, we talked about the growth in the GPV. So nothing to really call out in GMV related to GPV at this time.

Ella Smith

Got it. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate it.

Christie Masoner

Alec Ronallo, Wells Fargo.

Alec Brondolo

Hey, thank you so much. Maybe two from me. On Airo, I think all of the AI products in the bundle right now are built by GoDaddy. How do you think about potentially adding a third-party AI products to that subscription tier over time? And then maybe secondly, if I had to characterize Airo Plus, there's the Logo Maker, there's the enhanced website building tool, and I think it's a marketing product. Do you think you found like the killer feature or tentpole feature for the bundle at this point in time?

Amanpal Bhutani

On the third-party products for Airo Plus, just like we included a product within Aero that was third party. We're very curious about third-party products, and we actually test with a number of our partners. When we find something, you'll see it emerge sort of within the product with the right packaging and such.
And in terms of the second part of the question, when I think about sort of a 10x feature or there's something really good, what I would say is we have great sort of starting point with site optimizer and the marketing suite, the digital marketing suite. We know from early testing that those 2 products that attract customers. So will really double down on those to get those to a very large group of customers, and we don't necessarily need a 51 rate, a new one right now.

Alec Brondolo

Thank you.

Christie Masoner

John Byun, Jefferies.

John Byun

This is John in for Brent Fila. First question is -- both of them are on AI, but for Airo Plus, it can spin out a couple of months, but just curious what you're seeing in terms of acquiring paying subs. I mean, I know we're still testing it.
And then second on Antech AI. Just wondering how they might look. I don't know if there's any examples you could share of what they might be.

Amanpal Bhutani

Yeah, John, super early for Airo Plus, but we'll definitely talk about it more in future earnings call. And in AI, without giving a competitive info. But I would just say that from last year, what you saw in Airo was the power of automation and generative AI. And if you look at some of the capabilities that Airo already automates and does, Agentic AI has the opportunity to really super power even what Airo does. So that's -- in terms of the use cases, there are lots and lots of use cases.
But if you look at the core use cases that our customers are already using, AI and Airo can do them a lot better.

John Byun

Right, thank you very much.

Amanpal Bhutani

Thank you.

Christie Masoner

Navid Khan, B. Riley.

Naved Khan

Great, thanks. I have a clarification before I ask my question. So just on the guide, Mark, for the full year, are you baking in any kind of impact from FX in your guide? And then I have some questions.

Mark McCaffrey

Naved, we are seeing some of it small at this point. It's a little bit of a headwind we came out in our bookings that will roll over into the first part of the year, but nothing really significant. .

Naved Khan

Okay. And then a two-part question. One is, we are seeing the cost of using generative models kind of getting cheaper and cheaper with models like DeepSeek -- how should we think about the P&L impact of this kind of development? And then the other question is just around customer growth. So now that the noise from the divestitures is going to be behind us in 2025.
Do you expect to return to positive customer growth?

Amanpal Bhutani

Yeah. On the cost of generative AI, Naved, I just pointed to sort of a lot of commentary over the last couple of years. We've been very judicious in terms of cost on generative AI. I've been a huge proponent of generative AI. I do feel as the platforms get out there, and we have more and more people are going to build better models that are trained faster that are trained cheaper, but we already are very careful about that.
And if it gets cheaper and better, that's only good for our customers and good for us. So that's fantastic.

Mark McCaffrey

And then on the customers, just a reminder, we're focusing on high-value customers, and we're making sure that we're getting those cuts funnel. Having said that, we are starting to move past a lot of the efforts we've made around consolidating our technology stacks and we're seeing strong top of the funnel. So we do expect customer accounts to return to positive, and we'll continue our focus on our strategy because it's working.

Naved Khan

Great. Thank you.

Christie Masoner

Brad Erickson, RBC. .

Bradley Erickson

Thanks for putting me on. I got the echo too, it sounds like -- can I guess, start with, can you give your latest thinking around how you think about your marketing tools comparing the tools on some of the big walled gardens out there. I know this isn't like a new topic, but just curious to get your latest thinking on that dynamic, given how quickly it's evolving.
And then maybe a follow-up from Naved's question on Deep Seek. Just curious, like in your management conversations across companies, et cetera, has -- are you feeling like there could be infrastructure efficiencies over time? Clearly, that's worth points. But just pragmatically, what do those conversations sound like as you have them.

Amanpal Bhutani

Yeah. On the marketing tools, Brad, we have very early-stage products and marketing tools, but our tools are custom built for our customer, which is the micro business part of the these are very, very small businesses. So our tools are really factored and built for that customer.
We think of ourselves at the base of the pyramid and the only place for us to go is up, and that's fantastic. So we're just starting out on those. And in terms of AI and infrastructure costs and discussions internally on infrastructure, this is a quickly evolving situation. Like my view is AI is moving so quickly. Most people have no idea or I think we can't really guess how different things are going to be in 3 to 6 months.
So while we want to stay on top of it, our real focus is how do we take AI, create value for customers and then transform the value to shareholder value in terms of greater attach upsell pricing as well.

Christie Masoner

Deepak, Cantor.

Deepak Mathivanan

Hey guys, thanks for taking the question. I'll ask a couple of ones. First, can you just talk broadly about the macro trends in early 2025. How is the top of the funnel trends particularly in the context of new business formation that's driving your business? And then the second question, obviously, earlier in the year, there was a lot of news flow around are you seeing any tailwinds to certain products or maybe to your customer growth or maybe migrations from to some of your sort of like DIY products at this time? Any color you can share there would be helpful. Thank you so much.

Amanpal Bhutani

Deepak with a minute left. I'm going to be quick on this one. On business formation, we've talked about how business formation data doesn't fully correlate. Go Daddy. But what I will say is that our customer continues to be resilient.
They got to put food on the table. And these people have shown the creativity under different economic conditions and happy to talk about that more. But I think we've talked about that quite a pot. And on WordPress, super excited about WordPress, new version that we launched is twice this past fantastic product. And I'm looking forward to sort of getting to market very broadly, but we've just launched it recently.

Christie Masoner

I'll now turn the call back over to Aman. Thank you.

Amanpal Bhutani

All right. Well, thank you all very much for joining, and a big thank you to all GoDaddy employees for a fantastic 2024.