TechTarget, which offers both IT media sites and technology sales and marketing intelligence, posted $31.5 million in Q2 earnings, up 18% year-over-year. Growth was driven by their Priority Engine Technology Sales Intelligence service which grew revenues 60% year-over-year. The firm noted that “revenue growth continues to be driven by our leadership position in purchase intent data and our customers’ transition to becoming data driven sales and marketing organizations.”
IT Deal Alerts revenue was up 21% to $14 million as the customer base grew from 500 to 600 clients. The firm also signed more than 40 new Priority Engine clients in the quarter (to approximately 250).
The new Priority Engine enhancements, which were released in early May, have been “well received in the market place.” New features included improvements to the user experience, a new Salesforce widget, persistent URLs, list assignments, user roles, and improved topic filtering.
Furthermore, Priority Engine is shifting the firm to a recurring revenue model with 34% of revenue now attributable to longer-term contracts. Approximately 80% of subscription revenue comes from medium and large firms and 20% from smaller firms, “typically VC-backed start-ups.” The revenue renewal rate for medium and large customers is “well over 100%,” said the firm in its earnings press release. “Those customers are finding great value in our purchase intent data and are renewing and buying more from us at high rates.”
However, TechTarget has a higher churn rate on smaller customers due to common issues inherent to smaller firms such as “changing go-to-market priorities, budget or funding reductions, personnel turnover, etc.” The issue of small customer churn exists for both their core services and longer-term contracts. To reduce churn, the firm is taking three steps: improving the ease of use of products; expanding their Customer Success team which owns customer on-boarding, training and monitoring; and building a dedicated sales team responsible for renewing and upselling. Splitting sales into hunters and farmers will allow the “existing sales team to hunt for new opportunities.”
TechTarget also announced the acquisition of contact data management firm Oceanos.