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Zeta Global Holdings Corp. (NYSE:ZETA)
Q2 2021 Earnings Call
Aug 10, 2021, 5:00 p.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Zeta Q2 2021 earnings conference call. [Operator instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Idalia Rodriguez, partner with Arbor Advisory Group.
Please go ahead.
Idalia Rodriguez — Investor Relations
Thank you. Joining me on the call today are David Steinberg, Zeta’s co-founder, chairman, and CEO, and Chris Greiner, chief financial officer. Before we begin, I’d like to remind everyone that statements made on this call contain forward-looking statements. The same forward-looking statements notices found on the 8-K and earnings release filed with the SEC outlined to this call as well and can be found on the IR portion of Zeta’s website.
In addition, our discussion today will include references to certain supplemental non-GAAP financial measures, which 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 today’s 8-K and executive materials, which are available on our investor relations website at investors.zetaglobal.com. Now, I’d like to turn the call over to David Steinberg. David?
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you so much. Good afternoon and thank you for joining Zeta’s first earnings call as a public company. We appreciate your interest. Before we dive into the details of our very strong second quarter, I’d like to take a few moments to talk about Zeta: who we are, what we do, how our technology platform is unique and valuable in the marketplace, and why we’re excited about the accelerating momentum of our business.
What do we do? 14 years ago, my partner, John Sculley and I set out to build a next-generation marketing platform to help brands acquire, grow and retain customers more efficiently and effectively. The mission is more critical today than ever before. Modern marketers are struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of digital innovation and are seeking solutions that help them to get to the market quickly, identify and engage their target customers with precision, deliver personalized experiences across all channels, and improve ROI with sophisticated deterministic measurement that comprehends the impact of every program. That is what our tech stack, the data marketing platform, or ZMP, was purpose built to develop and deliver.
In fact, a recent study by Forrester has proven something that we have known for quite some time. Enterprise marketers, taking advantage of the ZMP’s identity-based omnichannel activation capabilities achieved 50% better results than without it. The ZMP is rooted in our proprietary data. We made a number of high-impact acquisitions to build over time, one of the largest opted-in identity-based data sets in the world.
On top of this identity bedrock, we’ve built a patented artificial intelligence engine that analyzes billions of structured and unstructured data signals to discern consumer intent in a way never before possible, which allows us to create higher-value audiences that unlock new possibilities for personalized omnichannel engagement. In the second quarter, our data set expanded from 500 million to over 515 million individuals globally and from 220 million to over 225 million in the United States alone. We combine our proprietary data with first-party data provided by our customers to understand unique insights, uncover new use cases and accelerate growth for many of the world’s largest brands. However, data is not our product.
Data is the electricity that powers our software business. Our customers use the ZMP to orchestrate and execute targeted marketing programs across all addressable channels. The patented AI at the core of the ZMP gets smarter over time, enabling customers to achieve both greater scale and higher ROI, a rare and powerful combination. We believe this drives strong retention, as well as expand and extend sales motions.
Our annual net retention rate for our largest customers was 122% in 2020, up from 104% a in 2019. Today, we serve a diverse customer base, including one in three Fortune 100 enterprise customers across a variety of vertical markets, with no one customer accounting for more than 7% of revenue and no one industry accounting for more than 14% of revenue in the second quarter. Our customers consist of many of the world’s most well-known blue-chip brands across every major industry vertical. Enterprise customers choose Zeta for our ability to help them deepen connections with their customers.
The ZMP creates a true 360-degree view of the consumer, enriched with our proprietary data signals while keeping Zeta’s and each customer’s data technically separated, a key differentiator in the end market. This provides enterprises with a single source of truth that improves their understanding of consumer needs, attitudes and behaviors far beyond what they could derive on their own. Each month, in the United States alone, our platform analyzes over 50 billion web pages and online discussion form interactions. 3 billion visits to real world locations, over 1 billion purchase signals and up to 2,500 demographic and behavioral attributes, to determine behavioral intent at an individual deterministic level so that our customers can deliver the right message to the right consumer at the right time.
Because the market is consistently evolving, the ZMP is flexible, so we can respond quickly to technological advances and seamlessly connects with emerging digital platforms and new services. For example, CTV is our fastest growing channel, growing by almost 500% year over year in the second quarter. From a demand standpoint, we’re seeing an acceleration in the pace of digital transformation and marketing and the adoption of data-driven marketing. We’re seeing a digitization of marketing channels.
The growing importance of identity-based deterministic targeting data and an increase in demand for measurable marketing spend and return on investment. We believe we’re seeing the market come to us, and I am confident that the investments we’ve made over the last two years and continue to make, position us to capitalize from these tailwinds. Last year, we successfully launched Opportunity Explore, a campaign planning tool that provides brands with proprietary insights on segments and personas in conjunction with a comprehensive view of an available addressable channel for each consumer target. And we are able to stand up instances of the Opportunity Explorer in a matter of days, and now it serves as an effective go-to-market wedge product, a new net customer acquisition, as well as a gateway for broader platform adoption.
Chris, and our president and chief operating officer, Steve Gerber, have done an exceptional job this past year in expanding and reorganizing our sales organization to support and accelerate growth across multiple dimensions. In readying to scale our growth even more aggressively, I’m proud to announce that we have hired Zeta’s first chief marketing officer. Crystal Eastman has joined us in June from the Trade Desk, where she was the head of global marketing. Through that senior role and other senior roles she has held throughout her career at American Express and BlackRock, Crystal deeply understands the increasingly sophisticated needs of enterprise markers.
I’m thrilled to welcome Crystal to our team. For our Q2 business commentary, before I turn it over to Chris to fully walk you through the numbers, let me touch on some highlights. Q2 capped a very strong first half for Zeta. During the quarter we delivered record revenue for a second quarter of 106.9 million an increase of 39% year over year compared to revenue growth of 25% year over year in the first quarter of this year.
Solid profitability on a non-GAAP basis with adjusted EBITDA of $11.4 million. Adjusted EBITDA year-over-year growth was 106%, and adjusted EBITDA margin of 11%. Since the beginning of the year, our revenue growth expectations for the second half of this year have improved, driven by a more favorable outlook and our high level of revenue visibility. During Q2, we won business with over 30 new customers, while simultaneously achieving record net revenue retention rates for total Zeta and Zeta scale customers.
With some of the parts of Zeta, our marketing cloud, our data cloud and our activation capabilities are resonating with customers and differentiating us from competitors. We’re also significantly accelerating momentum in product innovation and customer wins, which establish a strong foundation for future growth. Let me expand on each and share some highlights. First, our recent product advances.
We’ve made our CTV offering even more sophisticated with CTV, genre and content targeting, which allows marketers to reach their targeted audiences in specific context with any specific shows. This solves for a key barrier to entry, as linear buyers compensate the shift to CTV, and TV buyers have been accustomed to control at the content level. We’ve also developed a CTV content consumption household index to provide clients with deep insights into what content their target households are watching, to inform their go-forward media plans and creative strategy. Our CTV enhancements this quarter provide a unique and differentiated combination of actionable insights and activation controls that will accelerate advertiser shift from linear to CTV and improve ROI for Zeta customers in this increasingly important marketing channel.
We continue to scale our Identity Graph, adding over 5 million customers, bringing our precision reach to over 225 million in the United States. We also continue to fortify our deterministic graph, which, as a reminder, is not reliant on third-party cookies. And we launched a new identity resolution service that acts as a backbone for ensuring addressability and accuracy in how we apply Zeta’s data and artificial intelligence to individuals’ intent in our predictive campaign recommendations. We will continue to invest in the resilience of our identity solution, which is core of the Zeta marketing platform to ensure we are future proofed for the evolution of the digital landscape.
Lastly, we created a new way for brands to rapidly onboard their first-party data at a faster, more automated path to campaign automation. This new functionality, which we call low code onboarding, eliminates the implementation dependency on enterprise IT resources and reduces our time to get started with new customers from weeks or months to year dates. With more and more brands looking to maximize their use of one PDD to power more productive acquisition and engagement programs, we are well positioned to be the partner of choice as they embark on their digital transformations. Now, I’d like to share a few of our notable customer wins in Q2.
First, with respect to our omnichannel capabilities, a long-standing insurance customer that has worked with us in messaging for over five-plus years expanded across paid channels in Q2, leveraging the same targeted audiences and campaign infrastructure, the customer works seamlessly to the ZMP to expand reach and improve impact. We forecast this relationship expansion to increase this customer’s ARPU by up to 20 additional percent. We believe this model could be repeated and scaled across more than 50% of our customer base in the next 18 to 24 months. Second, with respect to how we win with Opportunity Explorer, using the first-party data of a major retailer, we were able to isolate browsers from buyers, retarget them across multiple channels to an AI-powered trigger-based program.
This solution displaced a major competitor and put this retailer on a path to becoming one of our largest customers in 2022. Third, with respect to the CDP, a long-standing travel client who had primarily focused on omnichannel activation but relied on a third-party legacy database services model. They were aligned with our vision of moving into an omnichannel model, driven by a single view of the consumer, but they challenged us to onboard and migrate them within eight weeks. Through the data conductor, the low-code solution I mentioned earlier, we launched this quarter.
We were able to ingest all data feeds and stand up a world-class CDP in a week, so that they could capitalize on post-COVID bookings. Finally, we announced a new partnership with Dun & Bradstreet to bring our core solution to the B2B market. As a part of the agreement, D&B will become a multiyear important scaled customer. They looked at every competitor in the marketplace and ultimately chose Zeta because of the capabilities of our software, our data, our ability to combine inflows seamlessly, our omnichannel marketing capabilities, and our ability to deliver measurable results.
In summary, it’s been an exciting last few months for Zeta. Our recent IPO marks a new and exciting chapter, providing us with additional capital to further strengthen our platform for our blue-chip clients, as well as attract and retain more talent. We’re proud of the results we’ve delivered to date; we’re even more excited about the future, as we continue to execute strongly upon our strategic growth plan. I would like to really thank the Zeta team, for everybody’s hard work, dedication, and perseverance.
I’d also like to thank our customers, partners, and investors for the support they’ve given us throughout this journey. And with that, let me hand it off to Chris to discuss our results in greater detail. Chris?
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. Let me start off by echoing David. I, too, am incredibly excited for Zeta’s next chapter as a public company and couldn’t think of a better way to begin our journey than with announcing our very strong second-quarter 2021 results. Across the board, we saw strong broad-based execution, building upon our momentum from the first quarter and leading to an improved outlook for the year in both revenue and adjusted EBITDA.
We’re seeing a positive shift in revenue mix, further improvement in ARPU, and increasing win rates, all of which are the result of continued investment in our platform, data sets, and sales team. This is best illustrated through how our core growth drivers contributed to this quarter’s results of 39% revenue growth and 106% adjusted EBITDA growth. I’ll first cover key elements of our second-quarter results before diving into our core growth drivers and the performance metrics that powered our progress toward our long-term growth and profitability targets. We delivered 106.9 million in revenue during the second quarter, up 39% year to year, and up 5% compared to the first quarter.
Scaled customer growth, ARPU expansion, record net revenue retention, and ramping sales productivity from our hunters and farmers all contributed to this quarter’s results, each of which I’ll discuss in more detail shortly. From a revenue mix perspective, we continue to drive a higher percentage of our revenue direct on the Zeta Marketing Platform, or ZMP, increasing revenue mix to 77%, up from 74% in Q1 and 68% ending 2020. Also in the second quarter, our percentage cost of revenue, excluding depreciation and amortization, was 39.2% as compared to 38% last year and 38.4% in the previous quarter. Over the full year of 2021, we are on track with our goal of achieving at least 75% of revenue direct from owned and operated ZMP channels.
We expect meeting this goal to produce at least a 100-basis-point reduction to our percentage cost of revenue in the full year of 2021 versus 2020. Our revenue results drove strong operating leverage through our expense structure, even with our incremental investment in sales and innovation. Our operating expenses for the quarter include stock compensation expense and onetime IPO-related expenses, which are considered add-backs for a non-GAAP measure of adjusted EBITDA. Excluding stock-based compensation and onetime IPO-related expenses, we realized scalable efficiencies year to year in G&A, sales and marketing, and R&D.
G&A as a percentage of revenue was 20.4% in the second quarter compared to 22.4% in the prior year, an improvement of 200 basis points. Sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue was 21% in the quarter compared to 21.8% last year, an improvement of 80 basis points. And R&D as a percentage of revenue was 8.6% as compared to 10.6% last year, lower by 200 basis points. Before discussing our core growth drivers and performance metrics, let me quickly touch upon other GAAP and non-GAAP measures of our financials.
Net loss increased from 15.1 million to 94.9 million compared to the prior-year period. This increase is primarily driven by 119.3 million of stock compensation expense recognized during the quarter. Modification to the vesting terms of pre-IPO restricted stock grants caused higher stock compensation expense. Future expense related to unvested restricted stock amounted to 662.1 million as of June 30, 2021.
Our growth, translated to operating leverage, with adjusted EBITDA increasing to 11.4 million from 5.5 million in the prior-year period, an increase of 106%. Adjusted EBITDA margin increased to 10.7% from 7.2%, a 350-basis-point increase year over year. Operating cash flows during the quarter also increased to 7.6 million from 6.3 million in the prior year, an increase of 21%. Cash on the balance sheet stands at 113.6 million from 50.7 million as of December 31, 2020, primarily due to the proceeds from our IPO.
And finally, net working capital, defined as current assets, less current liabilities, was 97.4 million as of June 30, 2021, increasing from 37.4 million as of December 31, 2020. Now, let me transition to our core growth drivers and some of the performance metrics that contributed to our strong results. As a reminder, we have five core growth drivers. First, growing ARPU and scaled customers, who we define as customers generating at least 100k in revenue over the trailing 12-month period.
Second, investing in sales capacity, marketing, and building out our partnership ecosystem. Third, scaling our newest product, opportunities for. Fourth, launching new products to new markets and new buyers. And fifth, expanding internationally.
Our execution on each of these fronts is contributing to our improved outlook and progress toward our long-term model of greater than 25% revenue growth and at least 20% adjusted EBITDA margins. I’ll discuss the KPIs for each growth driver during the second quarter. Beginning with increasing ARPU and growing scale in customers, last year’s transition to a dedicated hunter-farmer sales team is working very well. Our belief that better customer experience translates to increased platform adoption is best evidenced through the lens of our ARPU growth, increased scaled customer count, and record net revenue retention.
Starting with ARPU, during the second quarter, the average revenue per scaled customer climbed to over 299,000, up 44% year to year. We grow ARPU by increasing platform usage, cross-selling the use cases and upselling more channels on our platform. We have very interesting dynamics driving ARPU, which can be found on slides 13 and 14 in our supplemental earnings presentation on the IR website. These are as follows.
First, the increase between the scaled customers’ ARPU in year one versus year three is greater than five X. This demonstrates the stickiness of our platform and leverage in our revenue model. Second, the increase in scaled customer ARPU for 100k to 1 million customers and greater than 1 million customers is 10 times. This reflects the significant opportunity to cross-sell new use cases and upsell new channels within the installed base.
This opportunity alone is expected to be a $1 billion growth lever. And lastly, through the first half of 2021, we continued the trend of increasing the average number of channels utilized per scaled customers to 1.5 through June 30, 2021, which compares to 1.4 for all of 2020 and 1.2 for all of 2019. This, in the setting of having over a dozen channels available on the platform. So great progress with substantial incremental growth opportunity ahead of us.
In addition to ARPU expanding, we’re also increasing scaled customer count. Scaled customers increased from 333 in the first quarter to 343 in the second quarter, with both our 100k to 1 million customers and greater than 1 million customers, increasing quarter to quarter. And lastly, as you heard from David, during the second quarter, Zeta realized a record net revenue retention rate in total, as well as for scaled customers. Our second core growth driver relates to increasing investment in sales, marketing, and partnerships.
During the quarter, we made solid progress in building repeatable, scalable sales engine, and expanding our sales ecosystem to supplement the direct sales force. First, with respect to our direct sales organization, our 39% year-over-year growth was contributed evenly by hunters and farmers. New customers generated 20.3 points of year-over-year growth, while existing customers made up the balance of 18.3 points. From a sales productivity perspective, win rates through the first half of the year have remained over 50% for total data, as well as for each of the three use cases we sell to our customers.
Third-party validation by Forrester, showing Zeta delivers 50% better results is certainly helping the sales efforts. We’re also realizing the benefit of assigning our sales team by industry expertise. As we gain footholds in specific industries, we’re leveraging those wind plans deeper within the vertical. This has contributed to our strong industry growth rates, with 12 out of 15 industries growing double digits year-to-year in the second quarter.
And as David highlighted, in addition to hiring our first CMO, we also made major strides growing our partnership ecosystem through our announcement with Dun & Bradstreet. Not only does D&B become an important multiyear scaled customer, that our combined capabilities strengthen Zeta’s ability to bring a 360-degree view of the consumer to our customers, and further differentiate Zeta from the competition and opens up new opportunities in B2B and SMB. Our sellers continue to have success using our newest product and third core growth driver Opportunity Explorer as both a wedge product to land new customers and as an expand, extend tool with existing customers. In fact, we’ve seen the number of Opportunity Explorer product sales increased sequentially every quarter since Q1 of 2020.
Importantly, revenue from these customers grow over time, as Opportunity Explorer serves as a door opener to the broader capabilities of the ZMP. And we’ve begun to attach new features to Opportunity Explorer to further accelerate its land, expand, extend contribution to our growth. Launching new products is our fourth core growth driver. And as you heard from David, the pace of innovation and new product introduction by our product, data and engineering teams has never been faster.
Second quarter continued the trend of more revenue being driven direct from the Zeta Marketing Platform, a major focus of the company. This is important since revenue generated by the ZMP has a higher mix of recurring revenue and a better operating leverage characteristic. We also saw all major channel categories grow greater than 25% year to year, with CTV growing 499% and continuing to hold its position as our fastest-growing channel on the ZMP. Wrapping up the discussion around our last of our five core growth drivers, Zeta’s international revenue grew at a robust 33% year to year in the second quarter.
Of the core growth drivers, international expansion has the longest time horizon, but has significant upside since it represents just 6% of total Zeta’s revenue today. Our ability to replicate our proven blueprint in the U.S. with our existing footprint overseas is an exciting area of future growth and an expected major expansion of our $36 billion U.S. TAM.
Transitioning to guidance, and with our core growth driver momentum as a backdrop, our outlook for the year is improving. We’re guiding third-quarter revenue to 108 million to 111 million, up 13% to 16% year to year, as reported, and up 17% to 20% after adjusting for 3 million of prior-year presidential cycle revenues that does not repeat in the third quarter of 2021. For the full year, we’re taking revenue guidance to 432 million to 436 million, up 17% to 19% year to year as reported, and up 22% to 24% after adjusting for $15 million of prior-year presidential cycle revenue. We believe adjusting out the 15 million impact of last year’s presidential cycle, 3 million in Q3 and 12 million in Q4 of 2020, best produces an apples-to-apples comparison to measure our core growth performance.
From a profit perspective, in the third quarter, we’re guiding adjusted EBITDA to 13 million to 13.5 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 11.7% to 12.5%. For the full year, our guidance for adjusted EBITDA is a range of 55.5 million to 57.5 million, up 43% at the midpoint and representing an adjusted EBITDA margin range of 12.7% to 13.3%, up 225 basis points year over year at the midpoint. Overall, our guidance for the full year is a reflection of continuing to aggressively invest in sales and innovation, while simultaneously expanding adjusted EBITDA margins and making steady progress toward our long-term targets of greater than 25% revenue growth and at least 20% adjusted EBITDA margins. You can refer to our supplemental earnings materials on slides 18 and 19 for further details on our guidance, along with other reconciliations in the appendix.
Now, let me turn the call back over to the operator for David and me to take your questions. Operator?
Questions & Answers:
Operator
Thank you. We’ll now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays.
Unknown speaker
Hey. This is Frank on for Raimo. Congrats on a really strong quarter here. Just one for me on your recent conversations with customers post IPO.
Have there been any noticeable changes there to highlight? Have you seen any further validation in the market opportunity lately just post IPO or even the D&B partnership?
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. I mean, first of all, I think it’s important to note that not only is Dunn & Bradstreet going to be a partner, but they are also a major customer and buyer of our software. So it’s a multiyear, fairly sizable deal that’s on platform with very high gross margin. So it’s emblematic of where we’re going with customers, signing multiyear software deals and really expanding out the relationship.
I think what we’re also seeing, and you saw it in the rebound of sort of growth hitting 39%, if customers are starting to spend more. We really saw a lag coming into this year, specific travel, hospitality, entertainment and financial services. And we’re starting to see those categories begin to come back. It was also nice to see a nice jump in our scaled customers.
That’s a trend that we expect to continue as customers that we’re bringing on now are substantially larger and much bigger financial opportunities than customers we were talking to two or three years ago. Chris, would you like to add to that?
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
No. That’s well said.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you. Any follow-up?
Unknown speaker
No. Great. Thank you, guys.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Frank.
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Frank.
Operator
The next question is from Richard Baldry with ROTH Capital. Please go ahead.
Richard Baldry — ROTH Capital Partners — Analyst
Thanks. Can you talk about any of the challenges of trying to grow the sales capacity in this weird quarantine, work-from-home world we have? It’s a fairly specific set of skills you need. How do you onboard those, get people matched up to your culture and productive when you can’t kind of be in person for that early stage of growth?
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Hey, Rich. It’s Chris. I’ll take that, and David can jump in after. We are, first, really, really happy with the pipeline of talents that we have and the people that we’ve hired this year.
We’ve seen better sales productivity than what we had modeled. And I’ll kind of bring that to life through a different set of examples. First, we look at sales productivity through a number of different measures. What is the average pipeline size that each of our sellers are carrying and we look at them through the three different cohorts of pleasing with us less than 12 months? 12 to 24 and greater than 24 months.
When we began to bifurcate the sales force between hunters and farmers, and create an industry focus, that’s when we kind of drew a new line in the sand on the sales team for both our newest class of hires and those that are in the 12- to-24 month cohort, the number of opportunities that are in their pipeline today versus even six months ago is up 60% and 40%, respectively. And the newest class, those hired since the beginning of the year, they have some incredible sales opportunity set. Almost half have already signed their first deal. Their pipelines are as high as their colleagues have been, more tenured with them, both in dollar value and in count.
And I think most impressively, while the company’s win rates have sustained at over 50%, our new hires win rates are also over 50%, which we naturally expect to be lower as they ramp. So I think our sales productivity has been a real highlight, and we’re really happy with the progress we’re making in absolute hiring. David?
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. I think it’s important to note too, that yes, I mean, listen, onboarding a team remotely is always more of a cultural challenge than onboarding people you can have lunch with them every day. But I think what we’re seeing is not only is our HR team doing an exceptional job creating events. We have started getting together.
So because we have so many people in New York and San Francisco, Nashville, Boston, London, Paris and Hyderabad, we’re able to really get people together, even if it’s outside, even if it’s in a more spread out area. The other thing that I think has been maybe not is we’ve learned this over the last few months, and it’s something that I didn’t think of when we first did it. When Steve and Chris sort of rearchitected the sales force into this hunters and farmers, one of the really interesting results was, we could get a higher quality hunter, and we were able to put farmers who are more comfortable working with existing clients into a place where they were happier. They didn’t have to go out and make sales calls.
They were able to just grow existing clients. And it actually created incremental budget to go get higher-quality people. So the answer is, I think we are as happy as we can be with the ramping of the sales force. I mean, obviously, grew 39%, 20%, 23% of that was new logos, right? So that’s really, I think, a solid stack, 20-plus percent growth rate on new logos, including the 18.6% growth on existing logos.
So the farmers are doing their job, and the hunters are really doing their job and we’re very pleased with that. So hopefully, that answers your question.
Richard Baldry — ROTH Capital Partners — Analyst
Yeah, it does. Thanks. I’ll take the rest offline.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Richard.
Operator
The next question is from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair. Please go ahead.
Arjun Bhatia — William Blair & Company– Analyst
Perfect. Congrats on a great first quarter as a public company, guys. My first one, the new customer contribution obviously seemed very healthy in Q2. Can you maybe just give a little bit more color on where those customers are coming from? Were those prior Zeta customers, that were maybe under that 100k threshold that you look at that have now graduated, are they net new to Zeta? And I would love to hear how you’re thinking about that customer count for scaled customers progressing for the rest of the year?
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Yes, awesome. Hey, Arjun. I’ll take it first, and David can give some color on some of the wins and hows. First, you’re right, we had really good success this quarter, signing over 30 new logos to the company.
And you remember, a lot of how we go to market is we land with pilots and then we farm and extend and expand with them on the farmer sales motion. The way to think about the connection from our 30-plus new logos to the scaled customer account increase of 333 to 343, is about half of that increase of 10 scaled customers came from new logos and the balance came from customers that were signed earlier as pilots and went from non-scaled to scaled. Opportunity Explorer, as David mentioned in his prepared remarks, has been a terrific door opener for us and was a big source of the 30-plus new logos that we signed within the quarter. David?
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. The other really exciting thing, I would say, of the 30 new logos we signed, 30 of them can grow into scaled customers. It’s not like a few years ago, where we would sign a deal with the company knowing that they would really not get to scale. Every one of these companies has the potential to start with a pilot and scale to a scaled customer.
And that’s really where we’re targeting. And it’s one of the reasons that you’re seeing the growth rate of the company accelerate.
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
I think, Arjun, what stood out also to us in the period when you look at the scale of customers and one of your questions was where do we see it going. There was really good balance both on ARPU expansion. You’ll note and you remember that during our pre-IPO launch, we have 100k to 1 million customers in that category and greater than 1 million customers. The ARPU for each grew sequentially in year to year, and the talent of scaled customers improved for each cohort year to year.
So really good balance in production. We’re not going to guide to where we see our scaled customers going, but I think you can hear the optimism from us on how we’re landing and how we’re expanding with the base.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Yes, we obviously are feeling good about what’s going on with Internet Explorer and other pilots and proof of concepts. And we’re seeing that scale, and we expect that to continue. Does that answer your question?
Arjun Bhatia — William Blair & Company– Analyst
Yes, that’s very helpful. And another one, if I can. David, you mentioned you hired Crystal as your first CMO. Can you maybe just flesh out the significance of that, what that means for building Zeta’s brand? What the priorities there will be? And maybe how you just get your name out there a little bit, from a marketing perspective.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. I mean, listen, I think as a team you have to accept what you’ve done well and sort of begin to look at what you have not done well, right? I think we have built some of the world’s best software, backed up with some of the world’s best data, backed up with one of the greatest management teams I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve been doing this for 32 years. What we haven’t done a really good job of is spreading the word. The fact that we won over 53% of the engagements we got invited to anticipate in, in the second quarter alone, when remember, we’re either competing with or displacing Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, to Trade Desk and others in every single deal we’ve opened.
So our big issue, or you say issue, if you do the math, right? So we won 53%. We said we added 30 new logos that would insinuate we had 16 really good shots at the back. How do we make that 120 really good shots at back, right? And Crystal, who did this really successfully at the Trade Desk and prior to that was at American Express and BlackRock, she’s really good at focusing on building brand in the enterprise software space, which, quite frankly, we need to do better at. So you’re going to see us heavily investing as a company into growth over the next few quarters.
And our goal is to continue to accelerate growth. And we feel like we’re very, very well positioned to do that. Chris?
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Perfect. Nope.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Anything else, Arjun?
Arjun Bhatia — William Blair & Company– Analyst
Nope. Thank you, guys, and congrats again.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Arjun. Appreciate it.
Operator
Our next question is from Koji Ikeda with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Koji Ikeda — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Hey, David. Hey, Chris. Thanks for taking my question. Just a couple from me.
I guess you can — real high level here, the Google tracking, the cookie ban, delayed out until 2023. I think that kicked that down the road for another a year or so. I guess, what does that mean for Zeta, the value proposition? And maybe how your customers and prospects are talking about that?
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. I mean, first of all, it’s great to hear your voice. We, as you well know, don’t use third-party components, right? So what we’re doing is we’ve built a Zeta ID that can identify people over the Internet, without the use of that third-party cookie. So what I would tell you is, I don’t think it matters to us that they pushed it out or didn’t push it out.
Right? We never really factored it in, because quite frankly, as I said repeatedly, I didn’t think it was going to happen. But most of our customers are already thinking about a post-cookie world. We’re already seeing that. And quite frankly, there’s a lot of great companies out there that are trying to adapt to a post-cookie world.
We’ve already adapted to it. So I think that when we go in, it’s part of the narrative, but it’s not the main sales point. I think if you look at the Forrester report that published AMA, it very clearly stated that if you use our software, you will get a 50% better return on investment, then if you use our competitor’s software. And to remind you, our competitors are Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, the Trade Desk.
We’re — that’s Forrester, is a third-party independent company saying that. So in every win we have, we are generally displacing one of them, and we are battling it out with others of them. And I think that our ability to have best-of-breed software, where, when people ask me sort of why do you win? It’s the sum of the parts. It’s the ability to take the software, plus the data, plus the activation orchestration, and put it into one place.
And less people are talking about cookies and more people are talking about return on investment. Now, I think that most of our clients are already focused on moving away from being in a third-party cookie identification world, and that’s going to continue to evolve. And it’s even — you’re seeing it in some of the results of companies that are focused on an app, with the elimination of the IDFA. I think you’re going to continue to see, even without the sunsetting of third-party cookies, I think you’re going to continue to see sites focused more and more on that sort of opted in, which is just bringing it more to people’s attention.
Koji Ikeda — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Got it. Got it. Thank you, David, for that. And maybe one follow-up for Chris.
I noticed in the commentary you said about 20% of the growth coming from new, 18% from existing. Is that 18% the right way to think about NRR for the quarter? And if it’s not, could you maybe provide what was the NRR for the quarter? In the second quarter for scaled and for total?
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
You nailed Koji. And NRR is the work with the SEC, it will be an annual metric. However, certainly a great proxy for that in the period for total data, right, would be 118% in that scenario.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Right. So up from what was 100%. And what we can tell you is, our scale customer net retention rates hit an all-time record.
Koji Ikeda — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Got it. Got it. Thanks, guys. Thanks for taking my questions.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. Thank you.
Operator
The next question is from Ryan MacDonald with Needham. Please go ahead.
Ryan MacDonald — Needham & Company — Analyst
Hi. Thanks for taking my question, and congrats on a great quarter. I wanted to dive deeper on the Dun & Bradstreet announcement and the partnership there. Obviously, a really great opportunity in the near term with them being a major customer.
But just curious sort of what your you’re seeing so far in terms of resources allocated to try to go after that B2B and SMB opportunity? And what do you think you need to make or invest incrementally to really build out that motion as that relationship matures?
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
That’s a great question. What we’ve done is we’ve dedicated certain resources to be, what I would call, technical salespeople. So the way it sort of functions is the Dunn & Bradstreet sales team, which, quite frankly, is among the best of the world — you’re talking over 900 full-time sales people — which have some of the deepest and most meaningful relationships with their large-scale enterprise clients, are acting as a relationship manager for us. What I’ve seen in these types of partnerships is, if you try to get a partner to sell your products, it becomes very convoluted.
So what they’re doing is we’ve built a joint pipeline with them. Their people are bringing our people in, quite frankly, on the top 20 of their prospects. Steve Gerber and I paid those sales calls ourselves. So we really wanted to understand how the architecture of the sales motion would work there, and we got together and we sort of helped to write the sales motion there.
So we’re seeing an incredibly strong pipeline there. We do expect to add meaningful logos this year through that partnership. And quite frankly, we’re very excited at the prospect of working together with them. It’s just such a great team, and we love partnering with them.
Ryan MacDonald — Needham & Company — Analyst
Excellent. And then just a follow-up maybe for Chris. Great to see the continued progress on the mix of direct versus indirect channel. Can you talk to an extent of what’s continuing to drive maybe that faster-than-expected shift to the direct platform? And then, is there a bit of a lagging effect as we think about sort of the gross margin expansion opportunity? Obviously, seeing a point this year, year over year now, but would love to understand how that evolves as we look into 2022 as well.
Thanks.
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Yes, totally. We’re thrilled. As you know, it’s a major focus of the company. So going from 16% ending last year to 74% the first, to 77% here now in the second quarter.
What’s driving is very, very strong channel adoption on owned and operated D&B channel. So you heard in the prepared remarks, all of our major channels grew greater than 25%. Think about messaging, display video, site optimization, CTV’s growing 500% effectively, 499% year to year. We’re seeing great adoption of our owned and operated channels.
We saw some mix that was more noise than anything within the channels, direct from ZMP from our percentage of cost of revenue, but I wouldn’t draw a trend line off of it. We still feel very confident for the year. We’ll be at least 75% mix on the ZMP and at least 100 basis points of percentage cost of revenue reduction year over year. David?
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
There is also a lag when you’re putting new customers into that platform. As you onboard them, there’s slightly higher cost of goods sold. So once again, I think we feel very comfortable with a 100% — I’m sorry, 100 basis point-plus growth rate. Let me say this again, 100% low — 100-basis-point lowering of our cost of goods sold per year at a minimum.
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
This is where we give David the words, and I get —
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Sorry, I screwed that up. I was going to say 100 basis points. But I remembered, I can’t say incremental margin. I have to say lowering of cost of goods.
So I totally riled up. Sorry. Any follow-up, or?
Ryan MacDonald — Needham & Company — Analyst
100 basis points. Understood. Thanks again for the questions, and congrats.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you.
Operator
Our next question is from Stan Zlotsky with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Mr. Zlotsky, your line is open.
Stan Zlotsky — Morgan Stanley — Analyst
Oh, sorry about that. Good afternoon, guys, and thank you so much my question. From my end, just a very quick question. Chris, could you help us with — the performance in the quarter, obviously, very strong results.
How much of that came from the recurring part of the business, the 45% that’s recurring, versus the 55% that’s reoccurring, right? How much was there — obviously, we saw strong prints from the Twitters and the Snapchats of the world. How much does this snapback in the recurring transactional component help the quarter? And how did that drive the big increase in your — the full-year outlook for revenue?
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. Thanks, Stan. Good to hear from you as well. We saw a very nice improvement in the amount of contribution from recurring versus what you would have seen maybe six months ago when we were doing the pre-IPO ramp versus reoccurring.
So David mentioned about 85% visibility, but more of that being driven from a recurring stream, again, more multiyear contracts being signed in the period than prior.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Yes, it was among the biggest step-ups, Stan, we’ve ever seen in our recurring business in a quarter. And quite frankly, that’s really where we’re pushing, and we think that we can continue to grow that.
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
And in terms of the second half of the year, if you — we did the analysis to look at the blended 31% growth in the first half of the year. How much of that was driven by more favorable COVID industry comparison. When we did that normalization, it lands the first half growth right around mid-20s. When we look at our second half and you normalize for the presidential cycle, call that mid-teens to high-teens growth.
And that’s just us wanting to be very prudent with our outlook given the macroeconomic environment and wanting to continue to stay conservative but keep our eye on — focused on strong execution.
Stan Zlotsky — Morgan Stanley — Analyst
Got it. Perfect. Thank you so much.
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Stan.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Stan.
Operator
The next question is from DJ Hynes with Canaccord. Please go ahead.
DJ Hynes — Canaccord Genuity — Analyst
Hey, guys. Nice start here. David, I wanted to ask about data conductor. It sounds really nesting.
It was a great example you shared in the prepared remarks. Can you just talk about how this compares to the way you used to stand up customer instances, and is it something that you’re incrementally monetizing? Or is it about kind of competitive differentiation in terms of how fast you can get a new customer into market?
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
That’s a great question. I think that the second part actually does drive the first part, right? So when you can more rapidly onboard a customer at a more accurate rate with — using a low-code solution, you can actually move to revenue generation faster. So what we’ve seen, and I think the best example, was one of our largest clients needed a CDP to bring into one place, multiple data sources. And that might have been point of sale data, CRM data, back-office data, finance data and data from their call center.
Our CDP, using the low code methodology, we would not have won the deal if we couldn’t have committed to move them over within the eight-week period that they decided that if they didn’t get it done in that period, it was too late this year to do it in their cycle. So we were able to do that in one week, which I think really blew them away, and that client is scaling very, very rapidly. I believe that client will be one of our largest clients going into next year. When we put that type of a solution in place, our ability to monetize comes from our ability to have superior software and move faster than our competitors can move.
DJ Hynes — Canaccord Genuity — Analyst
Yes, perfect. It makes a ton of sense. And then, Chris, maybe a follow-up for you. I mean one of the stats that you shared that surprised me a bit was the number of channels used for scaled customer.
I think you said it was one and a half out of 12. Obviously, that means there’s still a tremendous expansion opportunity in the base. But I’m going to take the other side of that for a minute and ask, why have scaled customers to date kind of been so slow to increase channels?
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
I think a lot of it, DJ, is that our division of the sales force to create focus. I think you see the best effect of that. Now recognizing that we have an enormous amount of runway ahead of us as far as why we’re so excited about ARPU being such a significant growth driver. But if you think about it, 2019, 1.2 channels per, it really wasn’t until first third or so of 2020, when we really bifurcate the sales force and hardwired in being focused by industry vertical on our largest customers first and then going down the stack, that that improved to 1.4% for all 2020, already through the first half of the year, up to; 1.5 billion.
We have a lot of opportunities. It’s an easier sale for us to sell more channels. You’re typically working with the same buyer. So that’s kind of the heavy focus of the company.
But again, just as big of an opportunity is on use cases, right? We have three use cases we sell to our customers. Everyone’s use case is just like the total company with over 50% win rate in the quarter. So it’s a significant opportunity for it to grow there. 95% of our scale customers are only using one use case today for Zeta.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. I think it’s important to note that just to really explain it, before we bifurcated the sales force, our salespeople were paid substantially more money to go bring in new logos and grow existing logos. So not only were they really focused on that, it was how they made more money. By sort of breaking the sales force into two, it allowed us to pay hunters more money and put farmers in a place where they were more comfortable, and that generally costs less, right? So you were able to do that.
But now, what we’re doing is we’re paying the farmers to drive adoption of additional channels. The interesting thing is if you look at our net retention rate, which is pretty high, even on one channel, most of our clients have scaled dramatically. We have one client who started on a $50,000 pilot, and grew in five years to $20 million a year on one channel. Now that client has added a second and now a third channel, just in the last two quarters.
But the answer is, we’re now focused on it. We do see this as a big opportunity, and it’s something that I personally agree with you, we should’ve done a better job on it, and now we’re focused on it, and we will.
DJ Hynes — Canaccord Genuity — Analyst
Very helpful. Thank you, guys.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you.
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, DJ.
Operator
The next question is from Brian Schwartz with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
Brian Schwartz — Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. — Analyst
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my question this afternoon. Chris, I just wanted to follow up on the net retention rate and the trend moving forward.
Clearly, it was a big highlight here in the quarter. Can you share with us maybe what are the puts and takes that we should be thinking about with the net retention rate here over the next couple of quarters? And then maybe to ask you a little bit differently, or if you’re willing to share it with us, what the net retention rate was for those large scaled customers, the customers that are aggressive adopters of your technology so we can see what the potential net retention rate could look like over a longer period of time. Thanks.
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Hey, Brian. Good to talk to you. You know you’re last because we’re going to talk to you first tomorrow. So I just want to be clear.
I think the best way to think about how we can sustain this level of very strong total data net revenue retention, which is obviously driven by scaled customers, but even the non-scaled are getting better, is through the lens of — if you think about — it’s in the supplemental deck, a scaled customer per data that initially gets onto the platform into the first year is generating around 290k per. And we’ve been successful, the longer we keep a scaled customer, the larger they become. If you go to — kind of zoom out to year three, that same scaled customer on average goes from 290k in their first year to over 1.6 million in the third year and beyond. So for us, the secret sauce is, as Zeta mentioned, focus on the farmers, making sure there’s a very effective handoff from when the pilot occurs, onboard them faster, right, speed and the easy buttons, the data conductor does that for us, that helps.
And then sell the channels, present a measurable ROI. We’re hearing from our sales team, why we’re winning is we drive a substantially lower total cost of ownership because everything is in the single platform, from the data to the software, to the orchestration capabilities. And that’s something that our competition, that we are displacing and beating, can’t offer.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
And to be quite frank, we’ve got 85% visibility into our revenue today, with now more than half of that being recurring versus reoccurring. And what we’re seeing in the sort of growth of the net retention rate is just even greater visibility into revenue. Our goal is to get up to 90%. And as we look at the growth of the recurring versus reoccurring, that just makes our job easier, to continue to drive growth rates that we’ve been driving and want to continue to drive.
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
And then from a — not projecting or forecasting net revenue retention, Brian, but want to be responsive to your question, I think a good model for us to think about is about half of our growth continuing to come from new customers, and the other half from existing. And you kind of back into that what we’d expect given our guidance, excluding presidential cycle.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. And I think it’s important to note that when we add new customers, we’re now adding new customers that can really scale. If we don’t think a client can really scale, we’re generally not going after them. So that new customer add should lead to big growth in net retention rates.
Does that answer your question?
Brian Schwartz — Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. — Analyst
It does. If I could sneak one — it does. But Chris, if I can just sneak one more in here, since it’s the first quarter here that you’re reporting. I just wanted to ask you if you spent.
If you invested in everything that you wanted to during the quarter. The reason I ask is because that the EBITDA upside was so strong in the quarter. And if you did spend everything that you could, is this the way that maybe we should be thinking about your model when you have upside in the quarter here, that it’s pretty much going to flow to the bottom line?
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
I would tell you we spent everything we possibly could in a COVID environment. So if we could have invested more into T&E, getting in front of people in more events, I think we would have done that. But outside of that, I think we really are making — we had a senior leadership meeting in person, I guess, about a month ago, where we were able to get 40 of our senior leaders in one place, and we had another 30 or 40 on Zoom who just couldn’t enter the country or others. And the homework was, how do we invest even more for growth? And we’ve got some great ideas, and we’ll look at them and we’ll focus on them.
But the truth of the matter is that we’re investing for growth, and we’ve been able to deliver sizable profit gains as a part of that. But we are focused on revenue growth. And where we can invest, we will continue to invest. And I think, quite frankly, that’s one of the reasons you see revenue growth growing faster than EBITDA growth in projections, because we want to make sure we leave the room that we need to invest as much as we have to.
And don’t get me wrong, we’re still growing EBITDA, naturally. We expect to grow EBITDA by 40-plus-percent this year in the projections that Chris put out. But at the end of the day, we think we can grow EBITDA by that 40% and still make the investments we need to make.
Brian Schwartz — Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. — Analyst
That’s great.
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
What I’ll do now, just — thank you, Brian. Appreciate it. So listen, just to finish, I think it’s important to think about that when you think about Zeta, we’ve got one of the world’s best teams. We are really thinking long term.
And over 85% of our revenue is either recurring or reoccurring. I want to say today, that our five-year strategy is to be the largest marketing cloud in the world. And we absolutely, positively, believe we can be that. We have the software, the data, and the activation orchestration capabilities to do that.
And we appreciate all of you joining us on this journey as we sort of evolve to who we want to evolve to be as a company. Thank you very much.
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, everyone.
Operator
[Operator signoff]
Duration: 68 minutes
Call participants:
Idalia Rodriguez — Investor Relations
David Steinberg — Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Chris Greiner — Chief Financial Officer
Unknown speaker
Richard Baldry — ROTH Capital Partners — Analyst
Arjun Bhatia — William Blair & Company– Analyst
Koji Ikeda — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Ryan MacDonald — Needham & Company — Analyst
Stan Zlotsky — Morgan Stanley — Analyst
DJ Hynes — Canaccord Genuity — Analyst
Brian Schwartz — Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. — Analyst
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