TechTarget Q2 2026 Earnings Call: Complete Transcript

On Thursday, TechTarget (NASDAQ:TTGT) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.

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Summary

TechTarget reported first half 2026 revenues of $222.2 million, showing a flat performance year-over-year with a modest decline in Q2 against a strong comparative.

Brand-to-Demand revenue grew by 1.2% year-over-year, whereas Intelligence and Advisory revenue declined by 5.5% due to lower consulting revenues.

The company is focusing on AI-related products and partnerships, expanding its opportunity pipeline and enhancing its product offerings to boost future growth.

Adjusted EBITDA for the first half was $22.4 million, with a stable margin of 10.1%, reflecting cost savings and operational synergies amidst inflation pressures.

Management reiterated full-year 2026 guidance, expecting revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth, supported by a strong pipeline and product innovations.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Welcome to the TechTarget Q2 2026 financial results conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press Star-0 on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Charlie Renick. Thank you, Charlie. You may begin.

Charlie Renick, Investor Relations

Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. The speakers joining us here today are Gary Nugent, our Chief Executive Officer, and Dan Norik, our Chief Financial Officer. Before turning the call over to Gary, we would like to remind you that in advance of this call we posted a press release to the Investor Relations section of our website and furnished it on an 8-K. You can also find these materials on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. A replay of today's conference call will be made available on the Investor Relations section of our website.

Following opening remarks from Gary and Dan, they'll be available to answer questions. Any statements made today by TechTarget that are not historical, including during the Q&A, may be considered forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, are based on assumptions and are not guarantees of our future performance. Actual results may differ materially from our forecast and from these forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our most recent periodic report filed on Form 10-Q and the forward-looking statement disclaimer in our earnings release filed earlier today. These statements speak only as of the date of this call and TechTarget undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events that may arise after this conference call, except as required by law.

Finally, we may also refer to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of certain of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, to the extent available without unreasonable efforts, accompanies our press release. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Gary.

Gary Nugent, Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Charlie, and good afternoon, everyone. As always, we appreciate you taking the time to join us today. Now, I'm pleased to share our second quarter and first half 2026 results which reflect progressive execution of our strategy and the fundamentals of our business continuing to strengthen amidst a market environment that remains challenging. Dan will run through the numbers in detail shortly. But in summary, first half revenues were broadly flat year over year at approximately $222.2 million, reflecting the modest growth in Q1 and a modest decline against a stronger comparative in Q2.

At the half year, INA revenues declined by 5.5% year on year, reflecting softer consulting bookings. Intelligence subscription ACV, the annualized contract value, is broadly flat with double-digit growth in our AI, data center and cloud portfolio, offset by weakness in the telecoms market. At the half year, BTD revenues grew by 1.2% year on year. Adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin for the first half were also relatively stable and displayed a similar pattern to the revenue performance between Q1 and Q2, and reflected a reduction in gross margins as a result of changing product mix and inflation, offset by strong improvement in our ongoing operational year on year, benefiting from the delivery of cost savings and synergies as we discussed last quarter. The B2B technology market continues to be challenged by two forces. First is an uncertain macro that's causing customers to be more deliberate in their spending decisions, and second is the acceleration of AI which is changing how buyers research and make buying decisions and how sellers therefore raise awareness, establish thought leadership, and ensure consideration and demand for their business.

Despite this, our go-to-market strategy to focus on our largest clients and the highest growth markets is yielding benefits in terms of revenue growth in those areas and a greatly expanded opportunity pipeline as we roll into the second half. We also enter the second half of the year with an enhanced portfolio of products and services, including AI features to our existing products, new products, and indeed new commercial partnerships. Our audience membership and membership activity continues to grow as decision-makers and influencers seek trusted sources of knowledge to shape buying decisions, and our timeliness, quality and productivity all improved year on year and quarter on quarter as the investments and initiatives that we have made to make ourselves easier to do business with and easier to work for began to deliver. And finally, as the evolving dynamic of this new AI-enabled answering economy takes shape, our role as the indispensable partner to B2B technology companies is becoming even more strategically relevant. During the quarter we continue to see many of the same customer dynamics we discussed on our Q1 call.

Technology vendors continue to focus on and prioritize AI-related research and development over their go-to-market investments, and as such our customers' go-to-market budgets remain subdued and therefore growth is to be had by growing market share and taking share of wallet. Our clients are all trying to do more marketing with the same or less money whilst looking for strategic partners to help them navigate a changing world. This environment I believe ultimately plays into our strengths as we leverage the breadth and scale of our offering to grow market share and increase our share of wallet.

We continue to see positive momentum in our largest clients, with year-on-year revenue growth as they increasingly recognize the value of the company's breadth and scale. These larger strategic relationships remain an important area of focus. My favorite example from the first half really is a deepening relationship we have with a major global software company. In 2025 this relationship was already a material one but limited to us supporting the demand generation activity in the United States.

Through the tremendous efforts of our dedicated account team, that relationship has grown 303% year on year, expanding to Europe, Middle East and Africa and leveraging our content expertise more broadly. We are encouraged by the significant expansion of our opportunity pipeline across all product segments. This growth reflects the investments that we've made in the product roadmap and the relevance of our value proposition, and it gives us greater confidence as we move through the second half of this year.

Our investment in product innovation continues to bear fruit. Through the first half of the year we brought a whole series of new and enhanced capabilities to market that are directly aligned with the needs of our clients. We launched our new Nurture-as-a-Service product on the BrightTALK platform. This capability strengthens the value of BrightTALK Channels, our video platform offering, by enabling clients to further nurture webinar leads with minimal additional effort, helping convert audience interest into more qualified opportunities before they hand off to sales.

Off the success we had in positioning NetLine as a demand offering for the volume end of the demand market, we enter H2 even stronger with our integration partnership with Demandbase in play and real momentum with our new NetLine HQL, the Highly Qualified Lead product, which is now a multimillion-dollar product with over 50 clients in the quarter. We also announced our partnership with Sherpa, rounding out our end-to-end value proposition to partner professionals.

This is one of those hot markets that we've talked about and we're focused on as over 65% of all value in the B2B technology industry goes through partners—through distributors, value added resellers, systems integrators and managed service providers. It is an essential strategic foothold and since the launch in March we've experienced high demand for our AI visibility and geotropic planning services as our clients address traffic disruption on their owned branded websites.

Now, as we explained on the Q1 call, we do not expect these services to be material revenue generators in and of themselves, but to be demand generators for our broader content portfolio and in Q2 we saw our studio content bookings up double digit year on year. Later this month we'll also release our new Daz Intent offering. This offering complements our platform offering for those clients that are seeking direct access to our rich intent data. During this beta program, we were delighted to successfully integrate our first two clients via our native AI Model Context Protocol, or MCP.

Taken together, these products and platform developments are really important as they further strengthen our customer proposition, broaden our addressable opportunity and demonstrate how we are applying AI in practical ways that improve the value proposition to our clients. On the audience membership side of the business, we continue to focus on quality, engagement and visibility. As AI augments how buyers search for and consume information, our editorial authority, our trusted specialist brands and our first-party audience relationships are becoming even more important.

Audience membership trends remained healthy despite the ongoing broader traffic disruption across the digital media industry, with both our active membership up year on year and notably member activity up significantly quarter on quarter. For existing and prospective audience members, we launched our second-generation AI search across our network of publications. Our new AI-powered search is driving audience circulation across the entire network and in the first few weeks more than a third of search clicks have led readers to different publications than the one they started on, with 78% of our click-throughs happening when a member engages in content from across the network instead of filtering onto a single publication. We continue to adapt our content creation and distribution strategies to support AI visibility while maintaining editorial excellence that has long differentiated our brands, and we're encouraged to see that the two key performance indicators—citations and cited pages—trended positively in the second quarter. That editorial excellence continues to be recognized externally.

Year to date, our trusted original journalism has received 57 prestigious industry awards. We view this recognition as more than just industry validation. In an environment where AI-generated content is proliferating, trusted original journalism, specialist expertise and direct audience relationships are becoming more valuable, and that reinforces the strategic importance of our audience platform and the relationships it builds and the quality of the data that it generates.

We also continue to apply automation and AI across the business to improve productivity, quality and execution. As we said last quarter, our approach is to adopt a mindset of continuous improvement here, and we continue to see opportunities to simplify workflows, accelerate delivery and improve the customer experience across sales, marketing, research, editorial and operations. A good example of this is the excellent work by our delivery operations team to improve the elapsed time from receipt of a content syndication lead-gen order to its delivery by over 30% quarter on quarter, thus accelerating the time to value for our clients.

At the same time, we remain disciplined on cost. First half adjusted EBITDA margin was stable year over year even as we continue to invest in product development and absorb inflation, with cost savings and synergies helping to offset those pressures. This matters because our financial model is built to scale. As revenues grow and our product and commercial initiatives gain traction, we expect operating leverage in the model to become more visible.

And that's a key reason why we remain focused on our ability to deliver year-on-year growth in revenues and therefore adjusted EBITDA for the full year. The more we learn of this new AI-enabled answering economy and the impact that it's having on how buyers research and make buying decisions and how sellers market their wares, the clearer our role and the indispensable nature of it becomes. The impact on the buying journey is clear. There is a new synthetic member of the buying group.

Like the more junior members of buying groups, they are less a decision-maker and more an influencer, but they are important nonetheless, and as B2B marketers you must reach and influence this member in addition to, not instead of, the human members who still need to be educated and convinced. However, to do that, it is vitally important that others are talking about you. A brand that is talking about itself carries little weight in this new world.

Validation and verification matter, and as such we expect that clients will recast their marketing strategy and dollars from owned platforms where they talk about themselves to earned and paid platforms. And it's our ability to offer a respected analyst voice, a trusted editorial voice, and our ability to amplify our peer, customer and partner voices that makes us indispensable in this new world. In summary, Q2 reflected disciplined execution and strategic progress in a challenging market.

As a result, we're in a stronger position today than we were six months ago and this time last year. Our pipeline has expanded, our membership is growing and more active, and our new AI-enabled products and capabilities are showing encouraging early traction. Our priorities remain clear: grow our top line revenues year on year, build bookings and backlog momentum that will see that growth accelerate into 2027, and deliver upon our adjusted EBITDA guidance for 2026.

Now I'll turn the call over to Dan to discuss our financial results and guidance in more detail, and then we'll be happy to take your questions.

Dan Norik, Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Gary, and good afternoon, everyone. In the second quarter of 2026 we delivered revenue of $116.1 million compared to $119.9 million in the second quarter of 2025, representing a year-over-year decline of 3.2%. For the first half of 2026, revenue was $222.2 million, broadly flat compared with the prior-year period. The quarterly decline reflects the customer behavior Gary described earlier. The market remains cautious and we are seeing customers take longer to make decisions and commit to sales and marketing expenditures.

While this has created some challenges in the month-to-month revenue performance, we continue to invest in improving our customer proposition and positioning the business to benefit from any improvement in the market environment. Looking at the segments, Brand-to-Demand revenue was $85.9 million in Q2, down 1.7% year over year, while Intelligence and Advisory revenue was $30.3 million, down 7.1% year over year. For the first half, Brand-to-Demand revenue grew 1.2% while Intelligence and Advisory revenue declined 5.5%, primarily due to lower consulting revenues.

Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $15.1 million compared with $17.3 million in the prior-year period, with adjusted EBITDA margin of 13%. For the first half, adjusted EBITDA was $22.4 million compared with $23.1 million in the same period. The adjusted EBITDA margin was 10.1%, stable compared with 10.3% in the first half of 2025. The first half margin performance reflects the combination of increased investment in product development and general cost inflation, offset in part by cost synergies.

We continue to manage expenses carefully while investing in areas that support growth, including AI-enabled product innovation, data capabilities and go-to-market execution. On a GAAP basis, net loss in the second quarter narrowed to $21.7 million compared with a net loss of $398.7 million in Q2 2025. The prior-year period included a technical non-cash goodwill impairment charge which is not included in the current quarter. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the second quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $45.8 million.

At quarter end, $120.1 million of our $250 million unsecured 5-year revolving credit facility was utilized. Operating cash flow for the first half of 2026 was $3.3 million and adjusted free cash flow was $20 million. As we have discussed previously, free cash flow can be affected by seasonal dynamics, working capital timing and the phasing of integration and restructuring activity, but we remain focused on improving cash generation as the business scales.

Turning to guidance, we are reiterating our 2026 outlook. While the market environment remains challenging, we remain focused on our strategy and continue to target full-year revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA growth, with adjusted EBITDA expected to be between $95 million and $100 million. Our targets are supported by several factors: the size and quality of our pipeline, the launch of new products, partnerships and AI-enabled capabilities, and the operating leverage we expect to see as revenue scales through the second half.

And with that, we are now happy to answer your questions. Operator, will you please open up the line for Q&A?

OPERATOR

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press Star-1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press Star-2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions.

Our first question is from Jason Crier with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please proceed with your question.

Thomas, Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group

Hey, guys, this is Thomas on for Jason. Thanks for taking the questions. You talked about customer spending challenges and I was hoping if you could expand just a bit more on that. Are there certain pockets or verticals that are seeing these emerging headwinds more than others, or is it pretty broad-based in your view?

Gary Nugent, Chief Executive Officer

It's a good question and certainly I think it's fair to say, as I mentioned, that anybody that's in sort of data center, in cloud, in artificial intelligence, and indeed maybe in cybersecurity, I think those are buoyant markets. Certainly we saw a little bit of software in what you might have called the SaaS software market. And I mentioned earlier on the telecommunications and service providers as a subsegment of the marketplace is soft and was in decline from an ECB perspective.

The other thing I would say is the distinction being maybe between the U.S. market and international markets. I think the U.S. market remains resilient and the macro concerns and some of the kind of geopolitics are more impacting those international markets.

Thomas, Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group

That's helpful. Thank you. Kind of more on the product side, you talked about the new launch of that product on BrightTALK. What specifically are you seeing so far in terms of the client adoption or early performance versus your expectations?

Gary Nugent, Chief Executive Officer

It's a little bit early because it's just come out of the beta program where we had about half a dozen to a dozen customers testing for us. This product is actually specifically at the behest of many of our larger customers who struggle to nurture demand that gets generated before it gets handed off to our clients' Salesforce. And it's also—BrightTALK as the video platform has also been a strong performer for the business as marketers look to leverage more video content in the demand generation activity.

So it's early days, good. We saw good response and adoption during the beta program and we're confident about the program during the rest of this year.

Thomas, Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group

That's excellent. And then maybe last one for me, can you help us understand just a little bit more—I know you touched on it a bit—but a little bit more in the confidence in the reiteration of the growth guidance this year. Seems like somewhat of a lofty expectation relative to kind of what we saw this quarter. If you could help us kind of frame that a bit, that would be great.

Gary Nugent, Chief Executive Officer

Yes, certainly. I mean, we track on a very regular basis kind of four sales velocity metrics. They're the usual things that you would expect. And mostly it's really about the opportunity count and the weighted value of the pipeline that we're carrying into the second half of this year being materially up year on year and materially up from the kind of January 1st opening position in 2026. We're also seeing a slight increase in average deal values as part of that as well.

And we're seeing our kind of win rates and average sales cycle trends holding firm, actually. So with all of those available to us, that's what's giving us the confidence. Backlog as well, rolling into the second half, was broadly flat year on year.

Thomas, Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group

Great. Thank you, guys.

OPERATOR

This now concludes our question-and-answer session. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This does conclude today's teleconference. Please disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.