When you decide to partner with Sortable, one of the first teams you’ll encounter is our Onboarding team. They help you get ramped up to launch your site with us.
We are pleased to introduce you to Julie Holm, Team Lead for Onboarding at Sortable. Julie started at Sortable in March of 2017 as a Customer Success and Technical Solutions Specialist. With her expertise working with our publishers, she made the transition to lead our Onboarding team to help them get ramped up right from Day One.
Let’s meet Julie!
What do you do at Sortable?
I am the leader of our Onboarding Team! My team and I help new publishers get up and running with Sortable for their first month. Our goal is to get their site(s) live so they can start generating revenue. When we’re onboarding, it’s a really busy time since we’re hopping on calls with the publisher, figuring out their site, and coordinating with all our teams like Demand Success and Engineering to ensure we’re ready to go live. The onboarding process includes ad layouts, site optimizations, setting up custom dashboards in our Analytics and training. Once they’ve completed onboarding, we introduce them to our Publisher Operations team who handles their account from there.
Favourite part of the onboarding process?
My favourite part of the onboarding process is working with the publishers. We get the first opportunity to really get to know them and their business and take a deep dive into their website(s). It’s a great feeling to work with a publisher who puts their trust in you to launch/run a revenue-generating portion of their business and sometimes, their ad revenue is all of their revenue. Every publisher is different and they have different personalities and how they run things so it helps keep every day different. It’s also inspiring to learn their stories and how they started – some are part of larger corporations or a passion project that is now generating revenue for them! Another part I really love about Onboarding is the need to be efficient and organized which brings me joy because, on our team, we use checklists to keep us organized and to keep on top of all the moving parts.
Why onboarding over other departments?
I initially started work in Customer Success as a Technical Solutions Specialist – it was called Customer Success Specialist when I started. One of my key responsibilities was to help onboard new publishers like I’m doing today. I later moved to a Technical Account Manager role where I continued onboarding new publishers. Over a year ago, Sortable decided it was time to separate Customer Success and Onboarding to have a dedicated team to launch new publishers. That’s where I became lead of the team and it’s been a great experience so far! Onboarding is a great department because I really get to dig into each publisher’s site(s) and use my skills to their full potential since we’re required to really know and understand every facet of the publisher’s ad stack.
What’s the biggest thing you enjoy about working with publishers?
I love getting to know our customers and helping them solve hard problems! We have so many different publishers from various verticals and it’s always interesting to see what their site is about. I love being able to visit our Publisher’s sites at home whether it’s cooking or baking or my kids using their favourite video game tracker. It’s great to see the work we’ve done and how it has translated real life and my own personal life.
What does your typical day look like?
I usually start off with answering Publisher questions or helping a new customer launch for the first hour or two then hop into several meetings both with our customers and with our internal teams. In the afternoon it’s time to prepare new sites for launching and working on our processes. Then I finish my day by answering any new emails that came in throughout the day.
What’s your favourite part about working at Sortable?
The people are amazing! It’s great to be able to work with such great and talented individuals, who I can rely on. I’ve gotten so close with the Onboarding team because I know the skills they have, but also just great people in general that I can joke around with. Onboarding also works with other departments, so we deal with so many other teams and I can rely on them and their expertise when I ask, which is a great feeling. Sortable is big on its culture and everyone at Sortable takes it seriously – “be kind and be smart” are just two of our culture manifestos and everyone at Sortable is kind and smart.
What do you think sets the ideal Sortable publisher apart from the rest?
The best way for a publisher to be successful is to maintain open communication and engagement with our team. At Sortable, we’re always sending product release notes and different optimizations to help publishers improve ad revenue. What we’ve seen is that publishers who are engaged with our content, such as strategy recommendations, tend to do well.
What trend or industry change are you looking forward to the most?
Looking forward to COVID being a thing of the past! COVID has impacted CPMs since it started which greatly impacts publisher revenue. We love seeing our publishers being successful so this was a difficult time for us all. We have seen CPMs rebound on various verticals so we’re very excited for those publishers. Another change I’m looking forward to is seeing how the third-party cookie disappears and how it plays into our publishers’ ad revenue. Cookies play a large role in advertising so I’m interested to see how this will impact each publisher, the different verticals, and the industry as a whole.
What do you like most about Ad Tech? What do you like least?
Since I first started working in AdTech, there are always new trends and industry changes to look out for so it keeps you on your toes! As someone working in it every day, I have to ensure that I’m on the ball and working with our team to stay aware. What I like least is that sometimes it does get difficult to keep up with the constant changes and also ensure that our team and products are able to pivot as quickly the industry does.
What advice would you give someone going into Ad Tech or starting at Sortable?
Learn as much as you can about Ad Tech as the sooner you learn it the easier it will be to understand what is going on. Sometimes the best way to learn is to be thrown into the fire!
As someone who has worked at Sortable so long, what have you enjoyed about seeing Sortable grow?
It’s been great to see the team grow. Obviously, we’ve seen people come and go, and for the people that are still here today, it’s been great to see them grow in their expertise and also their role at Sortable. You see them taking the lead in meetings versus being the new person.
Want to learn more about Sortable’s offering? Reach out to us at hello@sortable.com.