Vincent Pilette
Chief Executive Officer at Gen Digital
Thank you, Mary, and welcome, everyone. This was another strong quarter, double-digit growth on both the top and bottom line, and we continue to drive improvements across several key business areas that we believe are critical to our long-term success. Q3 revenue and bookings grew 12% and 11%, respectively. The growth profile we delivered was broad-based, reflective of diversification across our product portfolio, our channels and our geographies, and with 16% growth in EPS, our profitability remains strong, and continues to grow faster than revenue.
Later in this call, Natalie will provide you with more details on our Q3 results, but let's take a step back for one minute. It is clear to all of us that we are living more and more of our daily lives online: shopping, working, learning, creating, sharing, you name it, we are doing it all online. All of it is designed to make our lives easier and better, but it does come with a very real risk of more cyber criminality.
Every day, this team wakes up driven by a singular purpose, making the world cybersafe for everyone and ultimately powering their digital freedom. Today, we are protecting and empowering approximately 80 million users in more than 150 countries, but we are just getting started. Our strategy is built around our customers and their digital lives. We are focused on accelerating innovation, expanding access and reach and relentlessly serving our customers' needs.
Our innovation engine continues to thrive. In Q3, we introduced Avira Breach Monitor, where we actively scan the Internet and alert users if their e-mail is a part of a data breach. In identity and in privacy, we continue to expand our reach internationally, combining Dark Web Monitoring, AntiTrack and ID Navigator and bringing it to over 20 countries. Not only do we bring new products to market, we also improve upon category-leading products that we have offered for years. For example, using machine learning, we rolled out new alerts detecting unusual transactions for LifeLock subscribers, better protecting people from various frauds or unusual activities.
Day after day, this team brings energy and new ideas about how we can better build out the Norton 360 -- integrated platform. Within various plans of Norton 360, our members automatically receive the benefits of our latest innovations, simplified and frictionless onboarding experiences, new device detection and addition through QR codes, EV backup activation, software updater, improved integrated VPN, game booster, cryptocurrency mining and various options, and enhanced identity protection features like Identity Lock and social media monitoring. These are just a few of the new features made available into our Norton 360 platform, over just the last few months.
And it's not just innovation, it is a continued commitment to protecting our users, as highlighted with multiple AV-TEST awards and the most recent, the SE Labs best consumer Anti-Malware awards for 2021. We know we are on the right track has over 14 million customers are now on Norton 360 with more than one million members added since our Investor Day last May. We are thrilled that over 60% of our direct customers are now protecting by the Norton 360 platform and it keeps growing. Whether it's launching entirely new products, bringing these products to more people or improving our industry-leading platform, we know that innovation is a core driver of our success.
When customers make the decision to trust us to help protect their digital lives, they stay with us. We have improved our Net Promoter Score by five points to high 40s in the last 12 months. That strengthening engagement is also reflected in our retention rate, which is something we are particularly proud of. In Q3, it was slightly above 85%. If you exclude the first year customers, retention is at 87% in aggregate, and as high as 90% for some cohort of customers, with the Identity offering. It speaks to the power of our Norton 360 platform with Identity Protection as traditionally in this industry, renewal rates for the first year customers or security-only customers are lower. But even in this category, we believe we have room for improvement. We've already improved Avira retention to 83%, up three points since we acquired them.
Through our evolving and innovative product portfolio and expanding distribution channels, we have now added customers to the platform consistently over nine consecutive quarters. Total direct customers are now over 23.4 million, up 12% or 2.4 million customers added year-over-year and 126,000 sequentially. The growth was broad-based, although slightly higher mix in security as expected for December holiday driven quarter.
In our direct-to-consumer channel, we observed some market pressure on ad prices, that slightly pushed up our customer acquisition costs. We partially offset those increases, with improvement in shopping cart convergence.
One of the key investment areas in our go-to-market strategy is the expansion in indirect channels. The net direct customer count increase that I just shared, does not include customers coming through our partner channels, including employee benefits or through the app store, for example. In those two channels alone, we added almost 0.5 million customers year-over-year and over 100,000 customers sequentially. And interestingly, almost two-third now of our new customer from app stores have installed the Norton 360 app. You will see us continue to expand and invest in our multichannel approach to reach more customers.
While it is great that we've brought innovations to the market, added customers to our platform and retained them, it is also clear that we are delivering value. In Q3, our average revenue per user, or ARPU, was $8.87, but excluding Avira, we achieved a record organic ARPU well above $9, driven by higher Norton 360 adoption and successful cross-sell and upsell activities. Avira's installed base is more focused on traditional security feature, which drives an ARPU at just below $5. But we view this as one of the many opportunities we have, to continue to grow and provide more rounded protection to all customers, Avira and internationally. Natalie will provide more details on ARPU in her section.
To wrap up, I'm also excited to announce that we are driving to an accelerated close date for the merger with Avast. As you will recall, we originally expected to close in mid-calendar year 2022. However, while there remains some outstanding regulatory conditions, that will need to be satisfied or waived before we can close, we currently expect to close on February 24, 2022. We have made great strides towards combining the two companies, including receiving approvals from both NortonLifeLock and Avast shareholders, satisfying regulatory conditions in the U.S., Czech Republic, Australia and New Zealand, and securing permanent financing commitments.
On the remaining regulatory conditions, we have submitted antitrust filings for the U.K., Germany and Spain, and are fully engaged with each of them. We fundamentally believe that this merger will allow us to increase our pace of innovation, and better serve consumers around the world. In the meantime, we'll keep driving our business forward. We've made great progress, and frankly can't wait to merge with Avast. Together, we will accelerate the transformation of consumer cyber safety, and power digital freedom for everyone.
And now, I will pass the call over to Natalie to cover details of the financial results and the activities supporting our merger with Avast.
