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Pinterest, Inc. (PINS -4.81%)
Q3Â 2019 Earnings Call
Oct 31, 2019, 5:00 p.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Pinterest Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions'
I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jane Penner, Head of Investor Relations for Pinterest. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Jane Penner -- Head of Investor Relations
Thank you. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to Pinterest's earnings conference call for the third quarter 2019. Joining me today on the call are Ben Silbermann, our President and CEO; and Todd Morgenfeld, our Chief Financial Officer.
Now I'll cover the Safe Harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business performance and operations and guidance for full-year 2019 may be considered forward-looking, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent Form 10-Q filed with the SEC and available on the Investor Relations section of our website.
During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures, a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release and letter to shareholders which are distributed and available to the public through our Investor Relations website located at investor.pinterestinc.com.
And now I'll turn the call over to Ben.
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Jane. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining our Q3 earnings call. After the market closed today, we released our latest shareholder letter. In it, you will find a detailed report on our business. We're going to start with some quick highlights and leave the majority of the time for your questions.
In Q3, we saw significant progress as a company. Revenue grew 47% year-over-year. Monthly active users grew 28% to 322 million people, and we had our first profitable quarter as a public company on a non-GAAP basis. So we're seeing a lot of momentum and that progress is the result of a lot of work the team is doing to enhance the Pinterest experience for pinners and for advertisers.
Inside our company, we talk a lot about our mission of bringing everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. And in the third quarter, we took a lot of important steps in service of this goal. To help our users, we improved the relevance of our recommendations, more than doubling the engagement with search recommendations for example of year-over-year. We launched new home feed controls helping people control what they see and what they don't see on Pinterest. This reduced the rates at which people hide pins they don't like by 25%. We simplified the design of our app based on Pinterest feedback and launched dark mode, so people can have a calmer experience as they wind down their days. And we worked with emotional health experts to launch a collection of well-being activities people can do on Pinterest if they're feeling stressed or down,
To help businesses grow, we're now advertising in 9 new markets including Greece, Poland, Hungary and Romania. In total, we now serve ads in 28 countries, up from 19 at the end of Q2. We continue to diversify advertisers on Pinterest by focusing on new self-serve features for small businesses, including 10 Academy, a free e-learning tool for small businesses that want to make better ads on Pinterest, and we continue to make Pinterest more shoppable, the number of Merchant catalogs uploaded has grown 75% quarter-over-quarter. We launched a new business profile and includes a shopping tab for retailers, and we're working with commerce platforms including Shopify to bring merchants and advertisers onto the platform.
The full picture is captured in the shareholders letter and our Investor Relations website. They shows that we're making a lot of progress across the Company. I'm excited about the tremendous opportunities ahead of us . So thank you again for joining and now Todd and I will open it up for questions.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Eric Sheridan of UBS. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Eric Sheridan -- UBS -- Analyst
Thank you so much for taking my question. Maybe two. If I can. One, on advertiser demand and I wanted to separate it between the US, international, there was a little bit of color in the shareholder letter, but I just want to understand what sort of reception you're seeing as the product evolution on the advertising side continues to make progress? And with especially with an eye toward 2020, how conversations with advertisers from large and agency advertisers all the way down to SMBs sort of continue to evolve? Then on the international side, what you're seeing in terms of driving more depth of advertisers on the platform to eventually sort of capitalize on the base of users globally? Thanks so much.
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thanks for the question. In terms of feedback from advertisers, I'll start with the US. There are three kind of generally positive themes that we're hearing from advertisers. One, comes down to sales impact. We're driving net new customers and new occasions to buy more top line sales. Second, we hear advertisers are especially excited about insights, especially about early intent in finding early signal on some of the coming in market. And finally, we hear advertisers universally saying that they want to appear on platforms where the general tone is positive.
Across the board, we're also hearing that the increase in the number of buying tools and targeting options is making it easier to spend. On the flip side, we see a bunch of opportunities to continue improving our product offering. One, on Ads Manager, we want to bring in even more advanced features to manage campaigns, things like customer reporting and simplified workflows. On the measurement side, we want to do more sophisticated measurement modeling like incrementality testing. And on the creative side, we want to make sure it's easy for brands to bring their creatives onto Pinterest and reduce the amount of bespoke work they have to do to appear on the platform. So those are the major themes in the US.
You also asked about SMB. This quarter, we increased our SMB offering, so we added things like quick insights to complement the mobile ad manager that we've already built. And we're seeing great traction for advertisers. Internationally, as we talked about in the past, we're still in the early innings of building out both our go-to-market strategy and we're also expanding into new markets. And so the plan to increase is really a plan to increase our resources that are going into all of those emerging markets.
Operator
Your next question comes from Mark Mahaney of RBC. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Mark Mahaney -- RBC Capital Markets -- Analyst
Yeah, I'll just ask one question just on the US ARPU and I know it's a bit of an output, but could you talk through the drivers of US ARPU, there was something of a notable deceleration there and help us think about what the trajectory of growth for US ARPU should be going forwards? Thank you.
Todd Morgenfeld -- Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Mark, it's Todd speaking, I think you pointed out the real issue, which is it's more of an output, it's mathematics, and so I'll take the question really back to revenue growth. We posted 47% growth overall in terms of the business, both US and international, and 39% growth in the US and that's driving the ARPU dynamic that you've described. We saw a fair amount of strength in three areas from a customer segment perspective, CPG advertisers, direct-to-consumer advertisers and in the SMB space that Ben had referenced a bit earlier. And so as we think about growth going forward, it's really going to stem, especially in the US, around two new product areas that have been -- we've been focused on now and talked about for some time, but will scale going forward.
They will drive advertiser diversification, and those two areas are shopping and SMB. We -- Ben had referenced some of the product introductions that we've made, but it's still very early days around things like age targeting, region targeting, dynamic retargeting around our products, product ads and then shopping ads, and that stuff is just table stakes for us to be successful. It's basically the plumbing or the infrastructure we need to diversify our advertiser base in the US before we scale and while we've had good success in scaling our share of wallet with the incumbent advertisers, for example, Kraft had three new dessert brands, Jell-O, JET-PUFFED, and Baker's Chocolates that have started to advertise with us that is extended our share of wallet with them.
A lot of those basic tools that small and medium businesses need to see results easily on-board and begin scaling our things that we're rolling out now. I think that will drive growth going forward, because it will increase the relevance of our promoted content on Pinterest which will make ads content for our users and deliver acceptable returns on advertising spend or advertisers and drive more demand. That's sort of where we are, I hope that gets to your question.
Mark Mahaney -- RBC Capital Markets -- Analyst
Thank you, Todd.
Operator
Your next question comes from Ross Sandler of Barclays. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Ross Sandler -- Barclays -- Analyst
Hey, guys. You have two questions. Ben, first, you mentioned that you're doing the redesign, which I think you said in the letter will be neutral to revenue. So I guess as you're rolling this out, what measures are you taking to make sure the process is smooth as some other companies in this space have had problems with redesign. I just wanted to hear your level of confidence around that? And then what will the redesign do in terms of unlocking future revenue opportunities? Is this going to have higher engagement, higher monetization or both?
And then, Todd. Just going back to the US ad revenue, so you came in above our estimate, but it did decelerate from the tougher comp, anything that surprised you guys in the quarter? And then as you look out next year, can you talk about specifically some headwinds and tailwinds that you expect to see in 2020 for our US ad rev? Thanks a lot.
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Ross. I'll start with your question about the redesign. So we spent a lot of time talking to both pinners and folks that don't use the platform yet and we collected a lot of the feedback on their pain points and a lot of those pain points are addressed in the redesign. So some things that we think are going to be a lot better as we continue to roll it out, we simplified the navigation, and so we separated things like Home and Search, we made the product a lot more visual. So we've reduced unnecessary text so the focus really is on the content. And then we've also kind of cleaned it up, so we've given space so we can roll out more features, things like Shopping, and marginalized a lot of those pieces. We take the rollout really seriously, and so we've rolled it out progressively. We've tested each component. And we look at a basket of metrics, we look at engagement, long-term retention, we look at the revenue impact. Because we rolled it out progressively and continue to do so, I feel confident that at the very least we'll be neutral in terms of engagement and it will certainly give our product teams more opportunity to build out a lot of the features that we want to do in the future, things like Shopping and more interactivity on pins.
Todd Morgenfeld -- Chief Financial Officer
I think the second part of the question on our revenue outlook, I'll come back to sort of where we are in this quarter and then discuss a little bit about our guidance for the rest of the year. Number one, I would say that the growth rate that we posted from an overall business perspective at 47% was consistent with our expectations and very much in line with the guidance we gave last quarter and updated again and confirm basically with the guidance we issued in the shareholder letter today.
And it's probably worth taking a step back to where we were in the last quarter's call when we talked about the outlook. If you rewind the clock back to the third quarter of last year, that was the highest growth quarter we had in the last two years at 64% growth year-over-year and that's just a math. The product reasons why that happened were we were scaling our conversion optimization product in Q3, a trend that continued into Q4 last year, and we were scaling our video awareness product in Q3, again, a trend that continued into Q4. And so when you think about the dynamics that you're referring to in growth for Q3 and our outlook for Q4, that's all reflected in the guidance that we gave last quarter and confirmed again today. It's a tough comp based on the success we had with those products a year ago.
And what I referenced in my prior answer around the things that we're building, so to make this product, to capitalize on the commercial intent of our users, which aligns advertisers with what users are on Pinterest to do, we've got to deliver relevant promoted content and the way we're going to get there is by diversifying our advertiser base so that we can put the right ad in front of the right person at the right time. The things that we're doing to enable that right now are a lot of the product initiatives that Ben had referenced. So our catalog ingestion program and our Shopping Ads where we've increased the amount of catalogs ingested by 75% quarter-over-quarter, the e-commerce partnerships that we referenced in the letter and the tag integrations that are now a tenfold improvement over where we were in May, and the SMB tools that we've done a lot of investment as we referenced last call were an important technology program for us this year. Mobile Ads Manager, Ads Credits, Bid Suggestions, and our Pinterest Academy, those are all making it easier for small and medium businesses to on-board and see results from Pinterest and that's what's going to drive growth going forward.
Operator
Your next question comes from Lloyd Walmsley of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead, your line is open. Lloyd Walmsley, your line is open.
Unidentified Participant
Apologies, I was on mute there, you got Chris on for Lloyd. Can you just talk a little bit about how you guys are thinking about deploying ad dollars with a focus on direct versus brand and then acquiring new users versus new advertisers? And then the second part of our question, you guys have always messaged that [Indecipherable]really hasn't been a constraint for you [Indecipherable] content. So, just curious if you guys are thinking about the possibility of giving away [Indecipherable] new advertisers as a means of acquiring new advertisers? Thanks.
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Well, just to make sure I understand the question, when you're referring to ad spend, are you talking about ad spend to kind of boost enhance the Pinterest platform or ad spend from our customers? Just want to make sure I'm clear.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah, your own ad spend as in spending dollars rather go out and acquiring new advertisers for the platform or acquire new users.
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure. So we're still in the early days of our marketing programs, but we're deploying them in a couple of different ways. First, to your point, we are working on using advertising dollars to acquire small, medium-size businesses. And really what we're looking to do there is build a program where we can make sure that the spend that we're having is can be recouped on a pretty faster clip. So these programs take time, we invest pools of money. We look at the spend and the advertiser yield and then we adjust that and see how it scales over time. We think that's pretty important because it gives us a pipeline of small and medium-size businesses. And then as we improve the offering with things like Mobile Ads Manager, Quick Promote, Credits to make it easier to take the risk out of a small, medium size business getting started, we have a set of advertisers that we can start with.
On the consumer side, we haven't yet done a big brand push, we focused more on opportunities to reengage existing users who might have used Pinterest in the past for one use case and we want to remind them if a seasonal event comes back that we think they are interested in, the Pinterest as a platform that can create value from them. We're talking internally about efforts to sort of build awareness through brand, we haven't deployed big dollars against that just yet.
Operator
Your next question comes from Doug Anmuth of JPMorgan. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Doug Anmuth -- JPMorgan -- Analyst
Thanks. I have two. First, Ben, you're in the early days here of expanding shoppable products on Pinterest. I was just hoping you could share what you've learned so far and how you feel like users are responding to the newer functionality? And then second, Todd, you mentioned that you're serving ads in 28 countries, can you just talk more about what that actually means and in how many of these countries do you have sales people on the ground versus doing things more self-serve? And then can you also just talk about how it sounds like you'll pause expansion into new geos until you build scale in the existing markets and possibly how long that could take? Thanks.
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, so on the question of shopping, we break it into a few different buckets. The first one starts with our growing amount of really high quality products that we have on the platform itself. So, Todd mentioned, we launched catalog uploader a little while ago, we've seen a really nice increase, 75% quarter-over-quarter increase the number of catalogs increasing. We also now allow those businesses to upload their catalog to have a richer profile where they can actually showcase all of their goods.
So a good example of this is BBQ Guys kind of a barbecue focused company in Baton Rouge, they installed grilles and they were able to use products like catalog uploader and they saw a significant increase in the return on their shoppable spend. So it really folds into their ability to promote and grow their business .
The second area that we think about is how do you take all of those products and match them to inspiring scenes and that's where our investments in things like computer vision really come into play. What you'll see is more and more scenes will be matched to products that can actually buy. We started in home decor, we recently expanded into areas like fashion.
And then the third and final piece is letting businesses you want to spend money to promote their products, have a richer set of Shopping Ads features and so those continue to roll out. We took Shop To Look, which has always been an organic product for several months. We've brought that into beta as a paid product. So we're giving retailers more and more options to showcase their products, not just showing a product on a white background but actually showing an inspiring scene.
Overall, we think it's going to be a long journey but we're seeing really good progress, the percentage of our users that are engaging with shopping products has increased significantly. So we are seeing engagement roughly double since the beginning of the year.
Todd Morgenfeld -- Chief Financial Officer
And then, Doug, on the second question on international, you referenced how we've now localized our Ads Manager for 28 countries. And that's up from 7 at the end of last year. What that means is that our Ads Manager product is localized meaning people can buy ads in those markets and we can serve ads in those markets, it does not mean that we have 28 regional sales offices spread across each of those countries. In fact, only a fraction of those 28 actually have sellers on the ground in offices and we cover those markets from regional hubs or through the self-service product because that Ads Manager is now localized.
When you referenced a pause that we put in our letter, what that means is that we've got a lot of opportunity in those markets outside of the US, particularly in English-speaking countries and in Western Europe, where while the product is localized and we have sellers on the ground, we have a lot of runway before we reach maturity in those markets and we want to make sure we're executing to potential before we get distracted in other places.
The real reason I put that in the letter was that I didn't want to have the question or react to the question in a quarter, why didn't you add 9 more countries in the fourth quarter. The reason is that we focused on the 28 that we've already started with.
Doug Anmuth -- JPMorgan -- Analyst
Got it. Thank you, both.
Operator
Your next question comes from Brian Fitzgerald of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Brian Fitzgerald -- Wells Fargo -- Analyst
Thanks guys. There is no update on video usage in the letter. So, any color there this quarter, anything you can mention there because you noted it is an an area of strength last quarter, along the same lines you added Video View objective in the quarter in August, so we know it's still early days there, but anything you could say about how the advertisers are engaging with that? And then maybe one last one is really quickly cost of revenue per user, the growth there was 0%. And how are you driving that efficiency there, and then can you perpetuate that? Thanks.
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. Thanks, Brian. So on the video side, it sounds like you're asking specifically about video ads and Q3 revenue from video formats grew significantly year-over-year about 3x. What we find is that advertisers, they want to tell their stories of video and so we're building a lot of the back-end features to improve upload speed, our client performance analytics, we also launched a new cost-per-view objective in Q3 and that's really for advertisers wanting to push that brand awareness goals, I mean really -- step focus our people viewing the majority of their video.
So we're seeing a lot of momentum like a great example would be NARS cosmetics company that launched their new lipstick on Pinterest using that cost-per-video view objective to launch a brand new product. We think it's going to continue to contribute significantly to revenue in the future.
Todd Morgenfeld -- Chief Financial Officer
And the second part of the question was a gross margin related question on cost of revenue per user, I would say that we have had tremendous success. And I'm very proud of our infrastructure engineering team here who has continued to drive optimization programs over the course of the year and that's the principal driver of the 4 point improvement in our gross margin from 67% to 71% in the latest quarter. And so those optimization projects have been many a number and the cumulative impact has been quite impressive. I don't believe that we will continue to run the table on the effectiveness of those programs going forward. But I'm very proud of the success that they posted over the course of the last year.
Brian Fitzgerald -- Wells Fargo -- Analyst
Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Todd.
Operator
Your next question comes from Heath Terry of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead, your line is open. Heath Terry, your line is open.
Heath Terry -- Goldman Sachs. -- Analyst
Sorry about that. Mute button seems to be getting a lot of us today. Just want to dig a little bit deeper into the impact of some of the -- quarterly impact of some of these product developments. You mentioned several of the ones that you had in Q2 sort of impacting the growth rate in Q2. I guess I'm a little surprised that we didn't see more of a follow-on impact into Q3 and so I guess it would be helpful if you could kind of give us a sense of sort of how those impact an individual quarter and particularly as you go as maybe we went from Q2 to Q3, where there was admittedly a few hundred basis point tougher comp, just understanding kind of the deceleration without those new products or those products in Q3, if there is a better way for us to sort of understand the individual contribution in a given quarter like that?
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks for the question. Heath, I think the basic message is we launched a lot of stuff at scale really aggressively in Q3 and Q4 last year. And while the innovation pipeline has continued and I'm very proud of the product launches that we've made over the course of the last couple of quarters, many of the things that we're talking about are very early stage and not having a meaningful impact today, but I think will drive growth going forward.
The thing to think about is, and this is why I called it out in the guidance last time on the call is the impact of the scaling of our conversion optimization product and our video awareness product last year was far more material in its impact than the newer launches that we made mid quarter in Q2. And I believe things that we announced, like our performance video product are indeed scaling and they're going to be important for our product portfolio. The impact of those wasn't as material as the scaling of our conversion optimization and video awareness products in Q3 and Q4 last year.
Heath Terry -- Goldman Sachs. -- Analyst
Okay, that's helpful and then to -- I realize this is one that certainly further out, but can we get a bit about an update on the commercial adoption that you're seeing with Shop the Look and I guess, not just the commercial adoption but also sort of where you feel the technology is and what kind of progress you feel like you're -- you have in front of you on that product, maybe, particularly as we go into the all important holiday shopping season?
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, Shop the Look, as I mentioned before, it's kind of in an early beta when it comes to the paid product, it's been part of the organic product portfolio for quite a while. Your question more broadly sounds like, how are we doing on shopping as a whole and I think we're making great progress, we're building a lot of the primitives that are building a shopping ecosystem. So we have to take care of the supply side, we can have the right products there that are relevant from trustworthy retailers, there's not a lot we can do, then we have to match them and so we've increased the verticals that we're applying our computer vision to and that's a really significant step forward.
And then some of the things that are new is we're beginning to look at early partnerships with folks like Shopify to bring more inventory in. But all these things work as an ecosystem our ambition over the long term, is that, whenever you see something inspiring with things that you could buy inside of it you can scroll down and tap and find products that are relevant at your price point from a retailer that you trust.
Operator
Your next question comes from Colin Sebastian of Baird. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Colin Sebastian -- Baird -- Analyst
Thank you. Two for me, please. I wanted to ask about the sequential decline in R&D and sales and marketing, I think at least on a non-GAAP basis, was there any timing issue in expenses, a conscious choice to forego some near-term growth or any change in the strategy in terms of balancing growth and investments versus profitability?
And then secondly, the relationship with Shopify just considering a lot of their platform relationships with Amazon, Instagram and others are transactional in nature. Curious if there is a revenue share between you and them or how that relationship works? Thanks .
Todd Morgenfeld -- Chief Financial Officer
Thanks. Colin I'll start on the cost side. We're continuing to invest for growth. Our year-over-year operating expense growth approached 40% in the quarter and so I would say the meta message here is that we're very much focused on scaling the company and we're growing our investments across every line in the income statement, but you rightly pointed out that there is a sequential decline in the non-GAAP expense line and that was entirely driven by IPO expenses. So there were two things in there. One was payroll taxes associated with the RSUs that vested in Q2 and then a couple of other -- a couple of million dollars of other IPO-related expenses, if you strip out $20 million there, you can see that sequentially we continue to increase investment quarter-over-quarter as well as significantly year-over-year.
But I included those payroll taxes because I wanted to be conservative, it's a cash expense, we'll incur it every quarter going forward . And so I didn't back it out last time. But that's why you see that noise in the quarter-over-quarter OpEx line.
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. Your second question is about Shopify and what I can share now is that we're working with Shopify on building unique commerce experiences and we'll have more details to share in the year ahead.
Operator
Your next question comes from Justin Post of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Justin Post -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst
Great, thank you. The guidance for the year suggests a little bit more deceleration in Q4. I know you kind of covered it a little bit, but anything unusual in the holiday quarter you're thinking about this year versus last? And then maybe one for Ben, I know one of the goals for the company is to expand verticals. So maybe you could talk a little bit about activity levels you're seeing on the site and then any new verticals or categories you're seeing adoption and maybe things will be attractive to the male demographic? Thank you.
Todd Morgenfeld -- Chief Financial Officer
So first on the guidance question I would -- I go back to the fundamental principle here is that we're investing in a bunch of new things around advertiser diversification that I think will bear fruit over the coming several quarters and years. Those are principally around international coverage and around our mid-market and SMB presence, which I'm delighted with the progress we're making, but it's just going to be a journey. We're still in the early days of that and it will unfold over a period of time.
To compare however versus a year ago was off of quarters where we are already scaling those two products, we talked about earlier And so there is a bit of a sequencing and timing difference there. It's driving the real issues that you're seeing -- the points that you're making about Q3 and Q4. There is a shorter holiday shopping period this year, and I know that's been cited on a number of calls, I don't know how to quantify that exactly but it's not upside for us.
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
And your second question. Justin was really about how we're thinking about expanding use cases. The way that we think about it is, we know that there is a core set of use cases that Pinterest is really good at, think of your core lifestyle use cases like what do I wear? What does my home look like? What do I want to eat at a special event? But we also know that a lot of users who come into Pinterest use it for one use case, but they don't go to the second or third or fourth or fifth use case and partly that's because the machine learning and personalization that we've built in the past would actually recommend more of what you've seen. So if you're using it for cooking, we're going to send you more and more cooking recommendations. We're doing a couple of things to change that. One is we're introducing more diversity into the home feed. So we're building machine learning models that focus not only in the quality of recommendations based on what you've seen in the past, but we're beginning to introduce things that are adjacent, that you might like to see in the future and as you ramp that up we'll get more and more sophisticated. We're also looking to add more functionality, a lot more utilitarian functionality. The first example being making it easy to buy the things you see, we're looking at things like collaboration so it's easier to work on group projects.
Justin Post -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst
Great. Thank you.
Operator
Your next question comes from of Ygal Arounian of Wedbush Securities. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Ygal Arounian -- Wedbush Securities -- Analyst
Hey, thanks guys. Just when we think about the growth I guess in 4Q and just kind of look out into next year, what do you think is the right way to think about the balance between the efforts you're putting behind engagement, the inventory growth opportunity that you have and then pricing and new product growth? And then second, we await to hear more on the Shopify partnership sounds really interesting. Just wondering if there are any other e-commerce platforms or marketplaces, things like that that you're focused on and developing relationships in other areas of the market? Thanks.
Todd Morgenfeld -- Chief Financial Officer
Thanks. When I think about the mix of effort and investments we're putting behind things like monetizable supply growth product innovation, sales coverage, etc, we're investing in all of the above. We're trying to make Pinterest more useful for our users and Ben talked about the catalog feed ingestion to make shopping, which has been one of the primary user questions for us and asks to make Pinterest more shoppable. We think that will bring new users onto the platform and drive supply.
We've got a concerted effort around use case diversification and Ben talked about tuning our home feed recommendations and personalized searches before that will convince people to use Pinterest for more things in their life and the comprehensive marketing that we're beginning to test we think will bring churned users who probably had a great experience planning a wedding but need to be shown what else Pinterest can be used for their life to come back.
All of those things will drive monetizable supply and our product teams are focused on them. At the same time, we've got a lot of work to do as we talked about earlier on just the blocking and tackling behind building and ads business and a lot of the introductions that we've made on the product side have been designed to build the plumbing, that we think we can scale over time.
And the third thing we're investing in is the right go-to-market engine whether that self-service tools and marketing associated with that or the direct coverage model to address those very deep markets outside of the US where we have a monetizable audience that's quite under monetized today but has enormous potential.
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
The other question was what other e-commerce players, we are working with. And there are a number of other e-commerce players that we're working with on tag integration and for us tag integration is important because it's how if you're spending money you can measure whether a transaction, actually happened, improved your return on ad spend, so some of the folks that we've done integrations with included Google Tag Manager, PixelYourSite, WooCommerce, Square and all of these again are with intend to making sure that when an advertiser spends money, particularly on a retail objective, they can really understand the return on ad spend from that.
Ygal Arounian -- Wedbush Securities -- Analyst
Thank you.
Operator
This completes the allotted time for questions. I will now turn the call over to Ben Silbermann for closing remarks.
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Well, I just want to thank everyone again for taking the time to join us. We appreciate the questions, and we look forward to continuing the conversation down the road. Thanks.
Operator
[Operator Closing Remarks]
Duration: 34 minutes
Call participants:
Jane Penner -- Head of Investor Relations
Ben Silbermann -- Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Todd Morgenfeld -- Chief Financial Officer
Eric Sheridan -- UBS -- Analyst
Mark Mahaney -- RBC Capital Markets -- Analyst
Ross Sandler -- Barclays -- Analyst
Unidentified Participant
Doug Anmuth -- JPMorgan -- Analyst
Brian Fitzgerald -- Wells Fargo -- Analyst
Heath Terry -- Goldman Sachs. -- Analyst
Colin Sebastian -- Baird -- Analyst
Justin Post -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst
Ygal Arounian -- Wedbush Securities -- Analyst
