Ibotta Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 3, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Q2 revenue returned to growth ahead of schedule, rising 3% year over year to $88.9 million and exceeding the high end of guidance; adjusted EBITDA was $16.5 million, with an 18.6% margin.
  • Positive Sentiment: Redemption revenue increased 10%, while third-party redemption revenue surged 27% and total redeemers grew 21% to 20.9 million. Third-party redemptions per redeemer also returned to year-over-year growth, indicating improving offer supply.
  • Positive Sentiment: Ibotta added 7-Eleven, 7NOW and Speedway to its network, covering more than 11,500 U.S. locations, while Uber launched native offers and Giant Eagle went live; management expects additional publisher wins in coming quarters.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Q3 guidance calls for revenue of $86 million–$90 million, or approximately 6% growth at the midpoint, but implies a slight sequential decline because major seasonal events shifted into Q2. Management still expects modest sequential growth in Q4 and to exit 2026 at mid-single-digit year-over-year growth.
  • Negative Sentiment: Direct-to-consumer redemption revenue fell 24% and ad and other revenue declined 32%, reflecting continued migration toward third-party publishers; total redemptions per redeemer declined 6% because of this mix shift.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Ibotta Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

There are 11 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good afternoon, welcome to Ibotta's Q2 2026 earnings conference call. With us today are Bryan Leach, founder and CEO, and Matt Puckett, CFO. Today's press release and this call contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include statements about our future operating results, our guidance for Q3 2026, our ability to grow our revenue, our ability to grow supply and demand on our network, factors contributing to our potential revenue growth, our key initiatives, our partnerships, and the capabilities of our offerings and technology, all of which are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties, and changes. These statements reflect our current expectations and are based on the information currently available to us, our actual results could differ materially. For more information, please refer to the risk factors in our recent SEC filings.

Operator

In addition, our discussion today will include references to certain supplemental non-GAAP financial measures and should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for, our GAAP results. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are available in our earnings press release, our 10-Q to be filed this week, and our Q2 2026 earnings presentation, which are all available on our investor relations website at investors.ibotta.com. Unless otherwise noted, revenue and adjusted EBITDA comparisons to prior periods are provided on a year-over-year basis. With that, I'll turn it over to Bryan.

Speaker 1

Thank you, good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to report that in the second quarter, Ibotta delivered top and bottom-line financial results that exceeded the high end of our guidance range. Importantly, we've returned to year-over-year revenue growth a full quarter ahead of our expectations. This positive development was driven primarily by a steady improvement in our advertiser offer supply, which continues to benefit from growth in both our core product and our newer capabilities like LiveLift. Our top-line acceleration was led by our redemption revenue growth. In Q2, redemption revenue grew by 10% year-over-year, marking our fastest pace of growth in this core part of our business since the third quarter of 2024. Third-party redemption revenue grew 27% year-over-year. This growth corresponded to the continued growth in our redeemer base. We achieved year-over-year redeemer growth of 21% in the quarter.

Speaker 1

This represents our fastest rate of expansion since Q2 of 2025, at a time when our metrics were benefiting from the launch of our Instacart and DoorDash partnerships. What's most exciting about these results is that we're driving this redeemer velocity efficiently across a significantly larger network footprint, which speaks to the continued health in the demand side of our business. Today, we're reporting that we have 20.9 million redeemers. To put this in perspective, just five years ago, we had approximately two million redeemers, an increase of more than 10X since then. As you've heard me say before, increased demand for offers alone isn't enough. Until we have the depth of offer supply to match the demand, we can't capitalize fully on the opportunity it presents.

Speaker 1

There are positive signs on that front, including the fact that we've delivered year-over-year growth in our third-party redemptions per redeemer for the first time since the third quarter of 2024. These results are a direct outcome of stronger execution by our team. With a few quarters now under their belt, it's clear that the new verticalized sales structure and broader revenue organization we put in place beginning in Q3 of last year is working as intended. Our teams are providing customers with an upgraded consultative sales and service motion, spending more time in market, strengthening client relationships at all levels, and ensuring the level of account management continuity required to unlock deeper advertising budgets. The recovery we're seeing is distributed broadly across our clients. In fact, within our enterprise client base, the majority of accounts that declined in 2025 were back to year-over-year growth in Q2.

Speaker 1

To share one anecdote to give you a sense of how this commercial inflection is playing out, one of our largest household products partners, a consistent top 20 client for us, was actually an early pioneer who gave us feedback back in 2024 that helped shape the initial concept of LiveLift. While their overall spend declined in 2025, we doubled down on our in-person engagement across several of their brand teams. We deepened that relationship significantly over the past year. In fact, our leadership team was invited to present at the client's internal marketing event earlier this year. We saw success by effectively multi-threading and engaging with teams across shopper marketing, analytics, and sales. This high-touch service motion quickly translated into expanded business. With recent share losses in a key segment, the client has been hyper-focused on driving incremental sales and household penetration.

Speaker 1

Given these objectives, LiveLift is a strong fit. After running a successful initial LiveLift campaign late last year, they expanded LiveLift in the first half of 2026 across the original brand, as well as new brands in different product divisions. As a result of this upgraded execution and LiveLift expansion, our net revenue with this key partner is up 75% year over year in the first half of 2026. This upgraded commercial execution is aided by our seasonal events marketing playbook, which identifies opportunities for clients to leverage retailer-native Ibotta offers during peak retail moments such as Back to School, Prime Day, and Walmart Deals. Since May, a substantial portion of our closed-won deals have directly benefited from this strategic playbook, as brands look to capture outsized market share and maximize visibility during times when consumer volume and engagement are high.

Speaker 1

From a vertical perspective, our growth this quarter was driven by three core categories: emerging brands, food, and health and beauty. In emerging, we're seeing significant budget inflows from challenger brands that are leveraging our network to drive immediate, efficient, net new household acquisition. In food, which remains an important category and the one most challenged by the current macroeconomic landscape, our performance marketing message is resonating deeply. Brand managers in this space view value delivery as a core mandate, and we believe they are leaning into our network because we provide scale and efficiency. In health and beauty, our strong growth is consistent with the relatively healthy industry trends for the category.

Speaker 1

Our performance across each of these categories illustrates how the Ibotta Performance Network benefits from its diverse content, driving critical volume in more challenged sectors like food, while capturing high velocity dollars in healthier, expanding categories like health and beauty. We also continue to position ourselves as thought leaders in the promotion space. In June, our team was on stage at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity alongside key partners from Kenvue, Grupo Bimbo, DoorDash and Uber. In July, our team appeared with the SVP of Marketing and Insights at Mondelez at the Adweek House Sports Summit. Those sessions demonstrated our commitment to continuously raising the bar when it comes to measurement rigor in our industry. Along with Circana, we recently released a comprehensive meta-study and analysis evaluating 48 different Ibotta campaigns across multiple CPG categories.

Speaker 1

The data from this independent study showed an average lift of 16.5% in incremental sales and a 17% average increase in new household penetration for the products promoted in our network. Crucially, the study also revealed a 10.9% average sales lift on non-promoted items within the same brand portfolio, demonstrating that our promotions generate a powerful cross-retailer halo effect for a brand's broader catalog. These campaigns exceeded Circana's standard sales lift benchmarks by a factor of 7x, showing the power of our promotions to move the needle for our CPG brand clients. As Circana's SVP of Global Media Enablement and Measurement noted in the release, quote, "For years, promotions in media have been evaluated on different standards, limiting marketers' ability to make true investment comparisons.

Speaker 1

What this research shows is that when you apply the same methodology used for traditional media, promotions can play a much larger role in driving incremental growth than many organizations currently assume." End quote. We believe that stronger execution, coupled with continued investment in innovation and thought leadership, reinforces our position as a trusted partner our clients look to in order to deliver more revenue and grow market share. We continue to focus on making it as easy as possible for our CPG clients to buy campaigns on the Ibotta Performance Network. This, we believe, creates a larger TAM opportunity and unlocks access to even greater offer supply. As it relates to the key automation initiatives I discussed last quarter, we remain on track and have made significant progress against all three work streams. We're building a powerful and intuitive next-generation buying experience for our clients, which we believe will also free up our sales force to focus on selling rather than navigating administrative tasks, as well as enabling greater scaling of LiveLift. At the same time, revenue from LiveLift continues to grow both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. Finally, as I alluded to at the top of my comments, we believe the value proposition of the Ibotta Performance Network is resonating on the demand side of the marketplace. Earlier today, we officially welcomed 7-Eleven Inc. to the IPN, marking our third major publisher addition this year and significantly expanding our convenience store footprint. Ibotta will serve as the exclusive third-party provider of CPG digital promotions, excluding age-restricted items, to the 7-Eleven, 7NOW and Speedway apps, reaching shoppers across more than 11,500 U.S. store locations.

Speaker 1

We're building a powerful and intuitive next-generation buying experience for our clients, which we believe will also free up our sales force to focus on selling rather than navigating administrative tasks, as well as enabling greater scaling of LiveLift. At the same time, revenue from LiveLift continues to grow both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. Finally, as I alluded to at the top of my comments, we believe the value proposition of the Ibotta Performance Network is resonating on the demand side of the marketplace. Earlier today, we officially welcomed 7-Eleven, Inc. to the IPN, marking our third major publisher addition this year and significantly expanding our convenience store footprint. Ibotta will serve as the exclusive third-party provider of CPG digital promotions, excluding age-restricted items, to the 7-Eleven, 7NOW and Speedway apps, reaching shoppers across more than 11,500 U.S. store locations.

Speaker 1

The convenience store channel is strategically vital for many of our largest food and beverage clients, and we are thrilled to bring Ibotta's national offer supply to this broad and important consumer base. Historically, this specific retail channel has lacked access to coordinated digital promotions. By embedding our digital offers natively into this environment, we are unlocking another high-intent surface for our advertisers, giving them an opportunity to impact consumer consideration and purchase behavior at the c-store digital shelf. This addition is also a great example of how our network reinforces itself, as several of our key CPG clients actively helped us advocate for and secure this new publisher. In addition to this new signing, we officially launched our native offer experiences at Uber at the tail end of the second quarter, and our integration with Giant Eagle went live in July.

Speaker 1

Both onboarding processes are progressing smoothly and according to plan. Furthermore, within our existing footprint, we continue to benefit from close collaboration with our publishers. With multiple retail partners, we are expanding how offers are integrated across digital and in-store experiences. For example, we are working closely with Walmart to help customers more easily discover manufacturer-funded savings throughout the shopper journey, including in stores, thereby reinforcing the retailer's value proposition while creating a more seamless customer experience. Our partners continue to see substantial strategic benefits from these integrations, including deeper digital engagement, greater loyalty, and increased basket size. Across the board, our network is strong and growing. Our go-to-market engine upgrades and product roadmap are moving forward on schedule, and our team is delivering against our plans. We look forward to building on this positive momentum throughout the back half of the year.

Speaker 1

With that, I will turn the call over to Matt to walk through our financial results and outlook in greater detail.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Bryan, and good afternoon, everyone. We are encouraged with the recent performance of the business. These results mark the third quarter in a row that we have delivered top and bottom line results above the high end of our guidance range. In addition, we achieved an even more important milestone. Total company revenue has returned to growth for the first time since the first quarter of 2025. We delivered revenue and adjusted EBITDA that were respectively 6% and 58% above the midpoint of the guidance range that we provided on our first quarter earnings call. Now to share the details of our top-line results in the quarter. Revenue was $88.9 million, up 3% versus last year. Within that, redemption revenue was $80.2 million, up 10% year over year, driving the stronger than anticipated performance in the quarter.

Speaker 2

As Bryan highlighted, this was the fastest pace of redemption revenue growth since the third quarter of 2024. During the quarter, we benefited from continued strong go-to-market execution, which led to increased offer supply. Specifically, we had great results this quarter leveraging our seasonal events playbook. The pull forward of Walmart Deals into June this year from July last year represented exactly this type of opportunity and generated more revenue in the quarter than we had projected. In fact, it added approximately two to three points of growth versus our outlook. Finally, LiveLift revenue remains on track relative to our expectations and, as Bryan mentioned, grew both year-over-year and sequentially versus Q1. Third-party publisher redemption revenue was $61.5 million, or up 27% versus last year, accelerating meaningfully versus the prior quarter's increase of 12%.

Speaker 2

Direct-to-consumer redemption revenue was $18.7 million, down 24% year-over-year and similar to Q1's result, where, as anticipated, we've continued to see redemption activity shift to our third-party publishers. Ad and other revenues, which represented 10% of our revenue in the quarter, were $8.7 million, down 32% versus last year. We continue to see pressure on ad revenue as a result of lower direct-to-consumer redeemers, which is being partially offset by growth in data revenue. It is worth noting the year-over-year decline in ad and other revenue in Q2 was significantly larger than both what we reported in Q1 and what we expect to see in half two. This quarter's comparison to last year was up against a period when CPG ad revenue grew. That was the only quarter in 2025 where that occurred. Turning now to the key performance metrics supporting redemption revenue.

Speaker 2

Total redeemers were $20.9 million in the quarter, up 21% year-over-year. We again delivered significant growth in third-party redeemers across the IPN, including strong growth with our largest publisher partner, highlighting healthy engagement on the demand side of our network. On top of organic growth with existing publishers, the quarter also benefited from the launch of DoorDash in the second quarter of 2025. Redemptions per redeemer were 4.4, down 6% versus last year, a comparable result to Q1. The primary driver of this decline was the mix of redeemers, specifically the growth in third-party redeemers, which have a lower redemption frequency as compared to our direct-to-consumer redeemers. Notably, in another indication of improving offer supply, third-party redemptions per redeemer were 3.8, up 2% year-over-year, representing a return to growth in this metric for the first time since the third quarter of 2024.

Speaker 2

Redemption revenue per redemption was $0.88, representing a 4% decline versus last year, driven primarily by the mix of redemption activity. Bringing it all together, total redemptions were $91.4 million, up 14% versus last year. This acceleration in growth versus Q1 was driven by 27% redemption growth with our third-party publishers. Switching to the cost side of our business, non-GAAP cost of revenue was up $1.1 million or 6% versus a year ago, driven by an increase in both technology and publisher-related costs. This resulted in a Q2 non-GAAP gross margin of 79.3%, down approximately 60 basis points versus last year, but up 170 basis points sequentially versus Q1. This increase versus Q1 coinciding with a step-up in revenue quarter to quarter demonstrates our opportunity to expand gross margins as revenue grows.

Speaker 2

Non-GAAP operating expenses were up 8% versus last year and were 64.5% of revenue, an increase of approximately 250 basis points year-over-year. Non-GAAP operating expenses were slightly favorable versus our prior expectations as we realized certain timing-related benefits in the quarter. Within that, non-GAAP sales and marketing expenses were up 17% versus the prior year, driven by a planned increase in labor and the previously mentioned investment in third-party lift studies, partially offset by lower marketing expenses. Non-GAAP research and development expenses were unchanged. Lastly, non-GAAP general and administrative expenses, an area of the P&L where we are intent on driving leverage, decreased by 5%, while depreciation and amortization increased by approximately $800,000 or 77%.

Speaker 2

As planned, our investments in areas related to our transformation, inclusive of both the P&L and what is being capitalized to the balance sheet, increased at a faster pace than our overall costs. This increase in investments was approximately 17% and again was highlighted by higher labor costs in the sales organization, third-party lift studies, and other technology-related costs. We delivered Q2 adjusted EBITDA of $16.5 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 18.6%, non-GAAP net income of $11.7 million and non-GAAP diluted net income per share of $0.46. Our non-GAAP net income excludes $15 million in stock-based compensation and includes a $2.1 million adjustment for income taxes. We ended the quarter with $148.2 million of cash and cash equivalents. In Q2, we spent approximately $23 million repurchasing approximately 700,000 shares of our stock at an average price of $32.33.

Speaker 2

We had 25.8 million fully diluted shares outstanding as of June 30th, and as of the end of the quarter, we had 67.3 million remaining under our current share repurchase authorization. Finally, on cash flow, we generated $8.1 million in free cash flow in the quarter. Stepping back and looking at the year-to-date result, we generated $31.3 million in free cash flow in the first half, a decrease of 7% versus last year, but tracking a bit higher than our plans halfway through the year as a result of modestly higher earnings and favorable working capital. Now shifting to Q3 guidance. We currently expect revenue in the range of $86 million-$90 million, representing approximately 6% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We expect Q3 adjusted EBITDA in the range of $12 million-$14 million, representing about a 15% adjusted EBITDA margin at the midpoint.

Speaker 2

With that, let me provide a little more color on the outlook. As both Bryan and I have referenced, we are benefiting from the consistency and effectiveness of our go-to-market execution with our clients and publisher partners. It's showing up in our results with both our core product offerings and with LiveLift. This has been the catalyst for improving revenue trends during the last few quarters, and we are confident that can continue. I do want to highlight that while our guidance implies improving year-over-year growth rates in Q3, we do expect a slight quarter-over-quarter revenue decline at the midpoint. This is a result of the timing of important seasonal promotional events that shifted into Q2, as I referenced in my comments earlier. Regardless, our current expectations for Q2 and Q3 in combination for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA are higher than a quarter ago.

Speaker 2

Looking forward, beyond our specific Q3 revenue guidance, we continue to expect a modest sequential increase in revenue quarter-over-quarter into Q4. Factoring that in, we'd expect to exit 2026 with mid-single digit year-over-year growth. As it relates to our cost outlook, while there was spend timing affecting our second quarter results, we continue to plan for modest sequential increases in quarterly non-GAAP cost of revenue and operating expenses across the back half of the year. These increases will continue to be squarely in areas that are critical to our transformation and geared toward our largest growth opportunities. With regards to free cash flow, given the strong cash generation in the first half, we now expect full year free cash flow as a percentage of adjusted EBITDA to be approximately 70% as compared to our expectation of 65% at the start of the year.

Speaker 2

Lastly, with a healthy balance sheet and strong free cash flow generation, we remain committed to the balanced capital allocation approach we've now consistently deployed across a number of quarters, investing in organic growth and our strategic priorities while also returning cash to shareholders. We are excited by the renewed traction in our business and the significant gains we've made in the first half, both in unlocking more offer supply and continuing to drive growth in redeemers from existing publishers and the addition of new publishers to the IPN. We look forward to making further progress along these vectors and driving even greater value for our CPG partners, retailer publishers, and consumers in the coming quarters. With that, operator, let's please open up the line for Q&A.

Operator

For today's Q&A session, we'll be utilizing the raise hand feature. If you would like to ask a question, please click on the raise hand button at the bottom of the screen. Once prompted, please unmute yourself and begin with your question. We will now pause a moment to assemble the queue. Thank you. Our first question comes from Ron Josey with Citi. Your line is now open. Please feel free to ask your question.

Speaker 3

Hi, this is James Sherman-Lewis, Sherman, Lewis on for Ron Josey. Two questions here, if I may. On the steady improvement Ibotta has seen to offer supply, can you unpack the drivers of progress here and whether you're seeing macro improvement amongst CPG advertisers or having more success with this more verticalized sales structure? Then I have a follow-up.

Speaker 1

Sure. Thanks, James Sherman-Lewis. Appreciate the question. Yes. As I mentioned in my remarks, we're seeing the benefits of the last year of improved go-to-market execution by our team that has included the verticalized go-to-market structure, but is far from a comprehensive list of all the things that we've been doing differently. Our team really deserves a lot of credit for spending more time in the room with our customers, meeting with more people when they visit in person with those customers, maintaining consistency, being more proactive, understanding their business more deeply. Our business-to-business marketing function has allowed us to have reasons to be in touch and ways to help our clients. For example, the Walmart Deals example or the example I gave last quarter relating to SNAP benefits.

Speaker 2

Those things have meant that when in a challenging environment, these CPG companies are increasingly turning to us because they trust our measurement. They trust our team will deliver what we say we're going to deliver. You're seeing that in the turnaround account by account. Accounts that were shrinking are now growing again. We're hearing that we're one of the first phone calls that they make when they face some of these headwinds in the macro. I think while there are challenges in their business, clearly they view us as a partner that can help them navigate those challenges right now.

Speaker 3

Perfect. Appreciate it. Then on the pickup in new publisher wins, 7-Eleven, Reed's, Giant Eagle, et cetera. Curious if you have any update on your expectations for the long-term cadence of new publisher signings. Great to see the recent win rate, but curious if you're potentially expanding further into verticals outside of core grocery as well.

Speaker 1

Thank you, James Sherman-Lewis. We are, as you can see now, the leaders in multiple different verticals. If you look at the mass vertical, we have Walmart. If you look at the dollar vertical, Dollar General and Family Dollar. If you look at the last-mile delivery, you have Uber, you have DoorDash, you have Instacart. You look at something like 7-Eleven, and that's really the anchor tenant in the convenience channel. We also have Shell in that category. We're increasingly positioning ourselves as the place where you can put your content natively in the experience of the largest retailers in the country. We'll continue to do that. There are other categories that we haven't penetrated yet that will be a priority. There are other companies within categories that we have that are a priority, and we have ongoing conversations with a number of them.

Speaker 1

In fact, we're finding that our CPG brand partners are some of our biggest advocates. I want to call that out with regard to the 7-Eleven win. Without naming the client, there were a couple different clients for whom this was a very strategic channel, very important, and they made their views known as references. I think that that just shows you the kind of network effects in action. We plan to celebrate this, and then we will have a, we believe is a steady stream of additional announcements in the coming quarters.

Speaker 3

Great to see the wins. Thank you, Bryan.

Operator

Our next question comes from Bernie McTernan with Needham. Your line is now open. Please feel free to unmute and ask your question.

Speaker 4

Great, thanks for taking the question. Bryan, I was hoping we could just dive into the balance of the supply and demand in your marketplace. Growth in the quarter was driven by new supply, obviously bringing on 7-Eleven, some more redeemers. Was there a need from a marketplace equilibrium perspective to bring on 7-Eleven now?

Speaker 1

Yeah. I think a couple things. The first thing is it's true that we did increase overall redeemers, and over the last five years have grown from two to 20 million in overall redeemers. It's true that by doing that, it's allowed us to stimulate some offer supply. I think in this category as a particularly good example, I just mentioned a couple of these clients that this is a really strategic channel for them. This is where they sell a lot of their individual pack sizes. By bringing this on, it will unlock different budgets that are specific to that channel for us to be able to add more offer content. That's an example of how one leads to the other.

Speaker 1

It's also worth noting that this is the first quarter in some time in which we actually increased redemptions per redeemer. That's important because it means that offer supply is growing by enough to exceed the growth in redeemer demand, and thus you're seeing there's actually more offers per redeemer, even with more redeemers. I think that's a really valuable leading indicator in this instance, shows that we're on the right path in terms of rebuilding our offer supply pipeline. We think that this development with 7-Eleven will demonstrate even more momentum. We think that will affect the calculus of other publishers. That, in turn, sends a signal to the market that, look, this is the best place to drive incremental sales at scale.

Speaker 1

Now you can do that across a lot of different formats, a lot of different channels, through a single set of technologies, through a single set of relationships with one company. We think that that network is more valuable the broader it grows.

Speaker 4

Understood. Thank you. Just as a follow-up, Bryan, you mentioned health and beauty as one of the three drivers in the quarter of strength. I don't think you've mentioned that subcategory within CPG before. Can you just talk to in terms of how new it is for a revenue driver for you guys?

Speaker 1

Yeah, I think it's a category that is expanding and doing well. We've had strength in that category for some time. We've put more focus on the category in the last year, I think that's paying dividends now. I do want to clarify, Bernie, in response to your first question, that the growth in redemptions per redeemer that I alluded to is on the third-party publishers. I think it's still a valid point because as we add more third-party publishers, we expect to be able to keep up with that on the offer supply side.

Operator

The next question comes from Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please feel free to unmute and ask your question.

Speaker 5

Thank you. Appreciate the questions. Two, if I may. First, I want to stay on the supplier side. It seems like from your commentary that you've seen some real progress there with your suppliers. Could you just talk about what's been effective at unlocking some more supply? Are you moving past the traditional kind of trade or promotional budgets and getting into the more traditional media side of the budgets, digital media side? That's question one. The second question is, maybe Bryan, stepping back, when you think about the margin profile of the business, look out maybe one to two years, relative to the path you were on kind of prior to the sales reset, the go-to-market reset, how would you contrast over the future margin profile of the business, relative to what the trajectory was prior to the kind of the sales reset? Thank you.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Ken. I'll take those questions in turn. I'll add a few comments on the second, then I'll hand it over to Matt to comment in more detail. With regard to your first question, I think there are a number of different factors. Fundamentally, it's about trust. It's about building deeper relationships so that these brands pick up the phone and call us and say, "I've got a problem this quarter. I need a solution I can turn to that can act very quickly to drive a meaningful amount of market share change in my favor." I think that we're being able to go into multiple different levels of an organization, something we call multi-threading. We might be talking to brand leadership, we're also talking to the shopper marketing and trade team, the marketing leadership within the overall company revenue growth management, the media agencies.

Speaker 1

We have thousands of brands, hundreds of clients, there's a wide range of different arrangements that we have. I would say that, broadly speaking, they believe that our measurement is stronger and more credible than it was a year ago. The partnership with Circana, I think, has been very validating in terms of a third-party independent. We put out a major study at Cannes, a meta study showing that we were seven times more effective in driving incremental sales lift than the benchmark median. These kinds of validating points create an environment where the stigma that may or may not have existed in the promotions category is no longer attaching to Ibotta. I think we are seen as transcending that as performance marketing that's delivering top and bottom-line growth.

Speaker 1

I think the verticalization has paid off, and there's more specialized knowledge among our sellers, so they're going in proactively and saying, "We notice this trend. We think we can help you in this way." I think that is not something that people have the data to do in many cases, and we can do it with the data that we have. I think that being seen as a problem solver that's trusted and having those relationships is the primary unlock that we're seeing. Now, we're continuing to work on the things I mentioned last quarter. For example, making it easier to buy on our network, make it easier to sell and spend, therefore, more time selling rather than actually setting up offers and handling the kind of quote-to-cash logistics. I believe that that will be a further tailwind to developing more and more offer supply.

Speaker 1

What you're seeing now is the benefit of the last year of sustained commitment, better training, better incentives, alignment, better quotas, those are the right folks in the role. That's what you're seeing primarily right now. On your second question, looking out a year or two relative to the path we were on, I think what's exciting is these trends that I've just been alluding to are going to accelerate our ability to capture more offer supply. We are dropping a high percentage of those incremental revenue dollars to our adjusted EBITDA line because we have, relative to that, a much more fixed or growing much more modestly the cost profile of our business. Because we're getting favorable terms, broadly speaking, with these publishers that we're adding on, we're not seeing a lot of hit to our margin there.

Speaker 1

In fact, we're really pleased with the leverage that we're getting as our marketplace grows bigger and bigger. As far as how that translates over that time period, I'll defer a little bit to Matt on that.

Speaker 2

Yeah. I'm probably not going to give you the answer you want, meaning I'm going to give you a number necessarily. I'll give you a couple of data points I think could be helpful as you think about this. I would just start it by saying with consistent and sustainable revenue growth, we're going to have the opportunity to deliver strong incremental unit margin and overall margin expansion. We saw that play out just right now in Q2 relative to Q1, where a step up in revenue, kind of meaningful step up just from a value standpoint, $82 million, $82.5 million in Q1 to $89 million in Q2. We dropped a lot of that increase to the bottom line quarter-over-quarter. Right?

Speaker 2

That gives you a sense, as we see consistent top-line growth, we're going to have the ability to drop more and more EBITDA to the bottom line. If you look at the business today, it's a very healthy business, although the margins are lower where they have been historically. We just generated, on a trailing 12-month basis, 16% EBITDA margin at a time when the business was declining about 7% on a same trailing 12-month basis. The business is sound, even in a moment where the business has been declining, and we've been investing through that transformation and through that decline because different to two years ago, the opportunity that we see in terms of the top-line potential of this business and the work that we're doing to transform the company gives us a lot of confidence in the upside potential of this business over time.

Speaker 2

The investments that we've made over the last several quarters are we think the right ones, and we think they're paying off already. There's not a significant step change in investments from here. We need to get past and kind of lap the things that we've done, and we'll see that happen to some degree as we move through the end of this year and in the early part of next year. We'll see those increases begin to moderate a little bit. We're set up really well, both in terms of where we see the potential on the top line and how we see the opportunity to leverage the P&L as we deliver that over time.

Speaker 1

Thank you very much.

Operator

Our next question comes from Mark Mahaney with Evercore. Your line is now open. Please feel free to unmute and ask your question.

Speaker 6

Okay. Thank you. I may be old school, but this 7-Eleven deal sounds like a really huge win for you. Could you spend a little bit more time on that, the amount of time it took you to put that deal together? I know you got sort of endorsements from your network to get that going. How long it takes to get that fully up and operational kind of across the 7-Eleven franchise? And put this in context with other publishers. There's less materials, equally material, more material than those two other major publishers that you've announced year to date. Thanks a lot.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Thank you, Mark. These wins are multiple quarters or sometimes even years in the making. These are conversations that may involve creating new user experiences. They may involve sharing a level of data that these companies have not ever shared before, or certainly not with folks in the promotion space. The reason why is because we have a really robust, innovative approach to measurement, and that means we're going to be able to put this data into a way of tracking incremental sales that is really powerful from the standpoint of bringing content into these channels. So we've taken the time to make the case that we need to do this right so we can create an environment where people really feel good about the return on their investment, and then you're able to pass more value on to the 7-Eleven shopper.

Speaker 1

You build these relationships with these large companies that have year, two-year packed product roadmaps, you have to find your way into those product roadmaps with a business case, you have to negotiate all of the various agreements that surround this, involving not just the commercials, but other dimensions of the partnership. As far as this particular partner, this is a different realm than loyalty and digital promotions has played in in the past. This is the first time they will have a large access to these kind of offers, which is really exciting for their customers. I think they were made aware that, look, value is the key thing, it bumped up the prominence of this opportunity.

Speaker 1

Look, I think the more that we partner with companies like Uber, what we hear from companies like 7-Eleven is, "We really respect them. If they've put the effort and thought and judgment into this, we ought to take a harder look at it." You start to see these things snowballing a little bit. In terms of the rollout timing, we're looking at the second half of this year to roll this out. Of course, you have 11,500 stores, and as you mentioned, you have these other parts of their organization that are included, which are important. The 7NOW, the Speedway, et cetera, in addition to 7-Eleven. I think they've begun the process of figuring out how they want to do this, and we work in parallel to do this as we're finalizing the commercial agreement.

Speaker 1

That'll give us some time to make sure we get out and have the conversations we need to with our supply partners. In terms of the scale, there are a lot of different variables that go into that. On the one hand, the consideration is lower in the convenience channel, and so people are making more impulse purchases. Not as many people will probably select offers prior to going into a store and plan their list the way they would a grocery trip. However, we know from the deals and the content they have right now that it's heavily used and very popular, and something people do open when they get into the 7-Eleven, and it drives their purchase decisions once they're in the store.

Speaker 1

Where they choose to place our offers and how those show up in the results of searches and things like that will have a big effect on the redemption rate, and thus the size of this opportunity. I'm not going to comment on the T-shirt size of it just yet, but we'll get a sense of that in the back half of this year, and be able to factor that into the 2027 commentary that we give you.

Speaker 6

Okay. Thank you very much, Bryan.

Operator

Our next question comes from Nitin Bansal with Bank of America. Your line is open. Please feel free to unmute and ask your question.

Speaker 7

Thank you for taking questions. It feels like many of the foundational pieces are getting in place. You have completed the go-to-market transformation, making steady progress on the product front, and expanding the publisher network as well. As we think about the next leg of your growth, and specifically LiveLift adoption, is the biggest hurdle customer adoption and educating market around the new way of running promotions? Or do you believe the remaining bottlenecks are largely internal and within your control? Thank you.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Nithin. I think both those are within our control to some extent. Let's take the premise of your question and break it down into both those. I think it's very astute to observe that just because you have a product that delivers profitable revenue, that the entire market will adopt it when it has, for a century, viewed promotions as a risk of subsidizing purchases that are already occurring. That is why all the groundwork we've laid with measurement, the statistics, the approach, validating that, making sure to walk people through that, train them. We had a whole on-site session with a top CPG here, in which we spent 8 hours talking about measurement and proof. That is starting to change those attitudes within the finance teams, within the people that control the purse strings and the budgets. That is behavioral change on the ground level.

Speaker 1

There still is a norm of allocating resources in an annual way with an annual measurement process. Nithin, as you might imagine, that is not the way you would do this if you were going to leverage things like machine learning and the digital capabilities of the present. Instead, you would function more like a digitally native company, where you set a set of rules or constraints around how profitable you want your promotion to be and, you have a target number of incremental sales that you're trying to achieve, and then you essentially configure and change the parameters of a promotion as you go to get as close to those parameters as possible.

Speaker 1

What's exciting is that if we deliver that, and we're giving ranges that are generally accurate and then hitting those ranges, the message we're hearing back from the market is, "We're going to keep doing that until those rules and constraints are no longer met." It's not the old world of an aliquot of money and then come back to me in a year no matter what. It's kind of a, if you can meet these conditions, we'll continue to invest in an ongoing way until you can't meet them, and then we'll cut it off. That's what we want. I think the second part that's going on is there are things on our roadmap that I discussed last quarter that we do need to improve.

Speaker 1

We do want to make it so that people can buy on this network in a way that is much more self-service, that allows them to see the relationship between efficiency and scale, and choose where they want to be on that kind of continuum. That allows them to see the recommendations that we're making for opportunities, so we could scour the market and actually look and say, "Oh, here's an opportunity based on the data that we're crunching." Then recommend a campaign design and have them implement that, then build confidence in our algorithms and our recommendations. Those interfaces that make it feel more like buying media are being built right now, and that has required us to revisit the foundational data models and our program APIs and things like that. We are making good progress on that.

Speaker 1

I think as we head into next year, we're going to have a next generation suite of products that grow out of those program APIs and that reimagined, streamlined product catalog, things like that. There's a lot of kind of behind-the-scenes getting ready to really scale. The roadmap is very clear. It's got total alignment in the business. I think what remains to be seen is how fast will that help our sales team demonstrate that this is something new and different, and change those behavioral norms that have been there for so long. What we're seeing already is that the conditions for that are there, which is that they trust us. They believe that this is a valid way of measuring.

Speaker 1

If now you could get more data and build it with the benefit of more publishers like 7-Eleven, and you could actually have a signal that's even more powerful and more definitive with better predictions, it would allow more clients to use LiveLift because we would have more confidence in those projections even shorter into their campaign. They wouldn't have to run such a long campaign to benefit from LiveLift, and that will open the aperture of access to that product. I think they're confident in our current products. We have a whole new generation of products coming out, and it remains to be seen exactly the pace of adoption of that. I think I'll get more information on that, and we'll have a better insight as next year unfolds.

Speaker 1

Clearly, we are going to be not just relying on the improved go-to-market execution, but a host of these other innovations. We believe we're investing more in innovation than anyone else ever has in this space, and we're excited to see how the market responds to that.

Speaker 7

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please feel free to unmute and ask your question.

Speaker 8

Great. Thank you so much for taking the question. Maybe building on that last question, Bryan, I certainly understand the desire to get to a point where you're sort of always on, and budget is sort of being toggled with relationships on that side. When you think about the end of this year and the budget-setting exercise that the CPG industry generally goes through and the priorities that are being set, what do you see as the mission-critical pieces of execution that you have to put in place to ensure that the budgeting cycle coming out of this year and going into next year sets the company up for the most incrementalism it can capture, especially when measuring it against some of the innovation you guys have introduced into the market? Thanks so much.

Speaker 1

First of all, it's true, most of our clients still do have an annual cycle. Keep in mind, not all of them are the end of the calendar year. Plenty of them are mid-year, different times in the year, so it kind of is always happening. I would say that the most important things are to continue to have a seat at the table in the conversation about the strategy and high-level objectives of our clients. As long as we are upstream and understanding what they're trying to achieve, we can fashion a set of proposals that will make sense for their needs. Part of that is communicating to them the growth that we anticipate in our own network and what the actual opportunity size is for their brands right now. That might be, "Hey, you got two brands, but there's nine brands that aren't participating.

Speaker 1

Here's the opportunity." It might be, "Hey, you've got two brands, but they're capitalizing on about 15% of the total capacity of our network, and our network is projected to grow by roughly this amount." We are already having lots and lots of those 20-27 conversations, and it's important to get out in front of that because, as you said, they're going to lock in those budgets. I think that what's also interesting, though, I mentioned that onsite we had with the large CPG company. What I heard them say very clearly was, "Look, it's true we have annual budgets. To the extent we genuinely believe that you can deliver top and bottom-line growth, we're going to invest in that. I don't care what time of year it is. I don't care what budgets look like." We're still convincing them.

Speaker 1

They're intrigued, but there's some more work to do to completely convince all of our clients of that and to change that mindset. In a lot of cases, we are considered a marketing expenditure, so when they go to protect their bottom line, the impulse is, "Well, let me cut anything that's in the category of marketing expenditure." What we're trying to communicate is, "Okay, no. If you cut this, you're actually going to cut your bottom line. You're going to worsen your bottom line because we are accretive to your bottom line." We are not like some billboard that you invest in on the theory of long-term brand equity. Very, very different. Very, very provable. Distinguishing ourselves is kind of the substance of those forward conversations that we're having right now.

Speaker 1

I think that these more trusted relationships with our sellers on the front lines is what's going to give me the confidence that we'll have strong enough partnerships that they'll be there to capitalize on a much higher percentage of our redeemer demand capacity than they have in the past.

Speaker 8

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Andrew Marok with Raymond James. Your line is open. Please feel free to unmute and ask your question.

Speaker 9

Great. Thank you for taking my question. Maybe one on this revamped event strategy that you've talked about. Obviously, with 3Q coming up, we do have a Back to School on the calendar. Just how you're thinking about that in the context of this new event strategy and anything new that you might be trying out around that.

Speaker 1

As you know, we've developed expertise over this over the years, most notably our free Thanksgiving program, which has given away millions of free Thanksgiving meals and been a very big driver of usage and awareness of our platform. What we've done in the last year is add to the sales effort, a real kind of built-out scaffolding around them, and a much more fully loaded revenue organization. Part of that is the B2B marketing division, which is sort of broken out of our old marketing department and put into our revenue function. What they've done is identify these moments that matter, and sometimes you can see them on a calendar, like it'll be Back to School, or it'll be St. Paddy's Day, or dads and grads, or resolution.

Speaker 1

They certainly got a packet of insights that are specific to each client and a proposal that makes sense. Really great companies also capitalize when things come up that they didn't necessarily think would come up. Gas prices are high or there's a challenge with changing consumer behavior because of a lettuce scare or you have something going on with Amazon that you need to defend against or worry about. These things cause. The SNAP example where just suddenly, the government's going to change the allowance for SNAP. Being responsive, being the first one in their inbox with a, "Hey, we're seeing the effect of GLP-1s on your business. Here's what we're going to do about it for you. We're seeing the effect of private label on your business.

Speaker 1

Here's what we think we can do." The more we're hearing from them, what they're worried about, the better able we are to sort of see the world through their lens one by one. We're able to then hand our sellers a packet, but it's a kit, a set of data, a set of collateral that they can go out with and win. A big part of why we've done as well as we have in this last quarter and beginning to see this going forward is that there is a kind of a trust factor between our sellers and the client analytics, client insights, and the B2B marketing team, the product marketing team that's enabling this go-to-market to be much more effective. We've made sure those incentives are better aligned, and those teams are working better together.

Speaker 1

I think it's the right thing to point to as an example of a variety of things we're doing, whether it's sales operations, sales finance, like I said, insights that are all supporting the sellers. When I talk about making it easier, that's another way of supporting the sellers because that's getting the sellers close to 100% as possible selling on the road, listening, developing solutions, creating solutions, versus administering business that we've already won.

Speaker 9

Got it. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Andrew.

Operator

Our next question comes from Andrew Boone with Citizens. Your line is open. Please feel free to unmute and ask your question.

Speaker 10

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask on D2C, as supply improves, what should our outlook be as we think about D2C broadly? Bryan, is there a point that that should rest in terms of declines and start to grow again, or how are you guys thinking about that strategically? Then we've talked in the past about pricing. This quarter, there was a step up in third-party revenue per redemption. Is there anything behind that or anything you want to touch on in terms of pricing strategy that happened in this quarter, then how we think about that going forward? Thank you.

Speaker 1

Yeah. I think the pricing point, it has a lot to do with the composition of where the redeemer growth is coming and where the redemptions are coming. The third-party revenue per redemption was actually flat. It just is a function of that mix. We feel like on pricing, we have gotten it to a place that is client-centric, that is consistent with the goal of delivering highly effective promotions, however that's defined by the client, whether that's profitable revenue growth or maximizing scale. They want to know that we're able to charge them an amount that doesn't preclude that, and we've generally seen that we've reached a good equilibrium on that. It's also a more continuous rational pricing approach, and that's been, I think, well-received by our clients, moving away from setup fees and things like that.

Speaker 1

As far as the D2C business more broadly, we continue to see that when inventory of offer supply is strong, we have the opportunity to lean more into user acquisition, user retention initiatives, such that we feel confident there's enough value that will retain those savers within our D2C, which is why we've been focusing so much on unlocking offer supply because we know that that's the primary kind of precondition for leaning back in. However, there are some things we're trying on the D2C app to try to arrest the decline in ad and other, in particular. Some new kinds of ad units, things like that we hope may cause that to level out.

Speaker 1

There may come a point where we have such a nice amount of offer supply and quality of offer supply that we choose to increase our investment in terms of marketing spend on the D2C property to regrow that. One of the things we're always focusing on is making sure that the data asset that we get in connection with the D2C property is not diminished, and we had some very big wins this last quarter in terms of turning that trend around and making sure we actually have more data than we did coming from D2C. While that doesn't translate into revenue per se directly, it is important to everything else we do. That powers a lot of the LiveLift capabilities and so forth. I think the first step is to begin increasing offer supply. That is now starting to happen.

Speaker 1

You're seeing double-digit growth in redemption revenue. That's the headline. I think we will see on what timeline we feel confident reinvesting in the D2C property.

Speaker 10

Thank you.

Speaker 1

Thank you.

Operator

This concludes the Q&A session of the call. I would now like to turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Thank you very much for joining us today. We're very pleased with the progress in our business. I'm grateful to our team for their commitment to these actions we've taken over the last year. I think we've pulled forward by a quarter the timeline on which we've returned to growth as a company on the top line. We're really excited to see that inflection, and think we can build on this from here. Appreciate the questions, everyone, and we'll see you in November.

Operator

Thank you for joining today's session. The call has concluded. You may now disconnect.

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