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Sortable 101: Sorta-What?

We know there are a lot of different ad monetization solutions out there, even under the Sortable umbrella, so we wanted to take the time to introduce you to our solution suite, give you some information that will help you make the best decision for your business, and finally — show you what we like to call the Sortable Advantage and how you can maximize your revenue with us.

The webinar starts by going over the agenda, including our solutions suite, then showing you the main differences between the solutions and why you might choose one over the other for your individual business needs, and answer the nagging question of, “Why Sortable?”. To finish off, we like to look at how you can use our solutions to maximize your revenue! If you want to watch the webinar, feel free!

https://sortable-1.wistia.com/medias/mh7iebjhca?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=800

Note: This has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

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Trish: Alright, with no further adieu, let’s dive right into the Sortable solutions suite. At Sortable, we have three main solutions:

  • Hosted
  • Select

We’ll touch on our Sortable Analytics later.

Trish: If you’ve done any research into Google Account Manager (GAM) and how it works, the sheer number of configurations and metrics to keep tabs on may have been an eye-opener.

In which case you can appreciate how nice it would be to have someone manage it for you. That’s what this solution does! You define how many ad slots you want to have, and where you want them to appear on the page, and we provide you with tags that link to our Google Ad Manager. Our GAM is already configured and optimized, so you can rest assured that it’s working at peak efficiency for your business. 

You’re going to have the control over your ad placement. Rest assured though, you still have access to our industry experts who will give you the best advice regarding your layout and ad formats.

Let’s take a look at one of Sortable’s Hosted clients who has had some positive results:

Neera: As an events coordination and online sign-up platform for: nonprofits, schools, sports organizations, colleges and businesses, SignUpGenius was looking to correct a significant decrease in CPMs that they’d seen in the previous year. 

With the Sortable Hosted service, with thanks to our analytics platform for giving them the insight, they saw a rise in revenue of about 38%. Their overall CPM increased by 42% and their site viewability also went up by 10%. 

Moving onto our third monetization solution, Sortable Select. This solution is for those of you who perhaps have been in the game a little longer. 

You know your way around Ad Ops. You’re running your own GAM. You’ve developed some relationships with Demand Partners. But you’re looking to scale up

Currently, you may have a functioning ad stack, but you want to increase your revenue and your access to demand partners, without necessarily adding more people to your Ad Ops team.

This solution allows you to expand upon your existing ad stack, without having to bring on more staff. 

You can continue running your ad server AND keep your existing demand partner relationships. Select gives you access to Sortable’s server-to-server demand along with a birds eye view of how your entire operation is running in an integrated dashboard. 

We manage the header bidding wrapper, all of the adapter integrations, and provide you with the tools you need to help increase your revenue. Basically, you’re in the driver’s seat—we’re just here to get you over the finish line. How about a little more social proof? Let’s take a look at FlightAware, one of our Select clients.

Trish: As the world’s largest flight tracking data company, FlightAware was looking for a solution that would assist with their already existing ad monetization efforts and increase their fill rates. They already had their feet wet in the ad operations sense and were looking for a way to improve upon their existing ad stack.

Specifically, they needed a header bidding solution that would be more efficient as they were previously using the traditional waterfall method — and they needed to scale their solution with access to new demand partners. They also needed a way to gain insight into which demand partners were performing the best for them, and weed out those that weren’t. Last, but not least, Flightaware was looking for a way to log and report on malicious ads.

With Sortable Select, FlightAware had access to our Prebid solution that addressed their need for a headerbidder solution to replace their waterfall ad service solution.   Sortable was also able to decrease the time required to test a new demand partner by 90% — from one month to only a few days! This, combined with the access to Sortable’s own server-to-server differentiated demand and Sortable Analytics, allowed FlightAware to log and identify malicious ads, as well as see steady CPM levels, ad revenue and insight into their system. 

OK. So now that you know what each of the solutions are, how would you pick one over the other?

Trish: With our hosted solution, you get 

  • More control for aspects like the overall ad placement and aesthetics of your site
  • And having a hand in your day to day Ad operations

Neera: You would choose our Select option if:

  • You have a dedicated Ad Ops team that has been working pretty well, or
  • You have your own GAM account but want help managing your header bidding stack, including the ability to expand the number of demand partners you have access to
  • Or maybe, you’re looking for even better data analytics to tell you how to fine tune your operation and squeeze every last drop of revenue out of your site(s)
  • Or a combination of all of the above

Trish: The Sortable advantage is multifactorial, in that there are quite a few ways that publishers can benefit from working with us. The ones we’ll focus on today are:

  • Customer Support
  • Analytics
  • Industry Recognized Experience
  • Competitive Rev Share

Neera: Because we were publishers once ourselves, we understand the frustration of dealing with a lack of support and transparency when it came to monetizing websites. That’s why we’re dedicated to client success! We have a world-class team of Publisher Success experts and Technical Account Managers who spent countless hours keeping abreast of the lightning-fast changes within the industry so that our publishers are always operating with the best information and best practices. They’re constantly looking for ways to optimize your site AND your advertising operation to maximize your revenue and just generally keep you happy. If you’re not happy, we’re not either!

Trish: Our analytics platform is one of — if not the most — powerful analytics platform out there in the Ad Ops industry. We know it’s a bold claim, but we’re not aware of any other platform that can give you the kind of insight into individual partner performance, and the ability to compare and contrast your data from every angle. We always say that we were publishers first, so we know exactly what kind of data you need to make informed choices.

We collect a variety of metrics and present breakdowns that are both high level— like device type, the number of ad units, as well as in-depth — like how many times an ad unit has refreshed, and looking at the type of traffic you’re getting; whether it’s organic, from paid, or social media.

Transparency was the name of the game when our analytics dashboard was first designed, and it stays that way today. We believe that if you have access to all the information, it allows you to be empowered and make the best decisions possible for your business. If one of your ad units isn’t performing— we want you to know which one, and why so that you can fix it and optimize your revenue. You should know when changes that you’re making are having a great impact on your business! So you can implement those changes across the board and watch your CPMs and revenue soar. If you’re running an experiment, you should have analytics on that test. We have Technical Account Managers who will help you track those metrics, but you have the data at your fingertips too. You can verify them yourself, you don’t have to take anybody’s word for it, or wait for them to give you the data.

Alternatively, you could use Google Ad Manager. A widely accessible platform that most publishers are familiar with. But setting it up to provide you with the kind of deep analysis you need, can be problematic. 

Why is that? Well, a single impression can be counted more than once depending on the variables you’re looking to analyze. Google counts individual impressions for each key-value, but because each impression can have multiple key values – it can be double, or even triple, counted.

More than that, sometimes comparing more than one variable simultaneously can be really helpful to get the full picture of what’s happening. Unfortunately, with GAM, that kind of reporting isn’t possible. With Sortable Analytics, you can do the kind of multivariate analysis that allows you to dive deeper into your data. Our visualizer* allows you to trend different data points against one another. 

Example:

  • Traffic vs CPMs
  • Traffic vs Revenue
  • Traffic vs Revenue vs CPMs

Our team is made up of people who eat, sleep and breathe ad ops. We’re up to date on the current changes to legislation like CCPA and GDPR, that matter for your business, as well as trends, tips and tricks to make your ad stack the most efficient that it can be. We even include access to our knowledge base — curated content that is consistently updated with information you need to make your operation the best it can be. 

Last, but definitely not least, our team also performs a site audit to let you know the industry best practices that can be put in place to optimize your site. We review your site in both desktop and mobile views to make a list of ad placement optimization suggestions for your home page and other pages on your site to ensure optimal viewability and monetization. Pair that with our holistic review of your ongoing performance that gives you information on how to improve your viewability, increase your ad monetization and generally improve upon your existing ad stack, and we’re a pretty invaluable bunch.

Neera: Let’s get down to the money, shall we? In Ad Ops, it’s all about those CPMs and maximizing your revenue. So at Sortable — we offer a very competitive rev share. It’s not something we like to shout from the rooftops, so we’re going to suggest that you book a call with our team to discuss just how competitive we can be. We’re all about putting more money into your pockets. End of Story.

Next up is looking into how you’ll maximize revenue with Sortable’s solutions

With Sortable, you have access to our solutions like:

So, we have various ad formats to choose from. These new advertising types sell at a premium, which translates to more money for publishers. That’s why we support both standard and unique high impact display ads sizes.

Today, we wanted to highlight a few of our ad formats.

In-Stream Video:

In-Stream Video allows you to monetize your videos by providing a hosting solution that enables you to upload your own video content

Sponsored Video:

Unlike In-Stream Video, Sponsored Video doesn’t require you to have your own video content. What id does do is allow video ads to compete in headed bidding auctions against standard display ads in your existing display ad slots. Overall, it helps you benefit from higher CPMs that video content brings without having to do the work of producing the video content yourself!

Prebid Native:

Another new ad format for Hosted clients, Native ad slots provide a more seamless user experience for your site visitors. Often resembling the look, feel, and function of your website’s content, you’ll now have access to unique advertising budgets without having to increase the number of ad slots on your page

Trish: Next way to maximize revenue is through viewable managed refresh. 

Viewable refresh allows you to scale your existing ad inventory while still being in compliance with buyer policies. It is known to increase the overall viewability of slots on your site(s) – it only triggers a refresh when the ad slots are in view and increases CPMs on both counts and therefore, a significant increase in revenue.

Next up we have Sortable’s server to server header bidding infrastructure which is exclusive to Sortable customers. It gives you increased access to DSPs and exchanges without increasing the latency on the page. This, in turn, increases competition and provides incremental revenue, putting more money in your pocket.

Neera: Hopefully you now have an excellent idea of what Sortable brings to the table after this breakdown of our solution suite. 

Depending on your level of Ad Ops expertise and how much assistance you’re looking for — with regards to your current ad stack — we have a specific solution for you. 

We’ve also talked about how our solutions can help different types of publishers through our case studies, as well as what makes us different from the rest with our Sortable Advantage. 

To recap, that includes our: customer support, analytics, industry experience and competitive rev-share. To tie it all together, we discussed a few ways how we help maximize ad revenue through: a variety of ad formats, viewable refresh, and our server-to-server demand. 

Now onto the Q&A.

What are your minimum requirements for publishers?


We get this question a lot, like after our last webinar, so let’s take a look and spell it out. At Sortable, we understand that advertisers want to ensure that the websites their ads will end up appearing on belong to high-quality and trustworthy publishers. That’s why we look for publishers that have about* 1 million monthly page views. We also like to look at things holistically — which is why we’ll also take your traffic analytics into account; where your traffic comes from matters too!

What type of ad formats and placements do you offer?

We touched upon this earlier, but to get into the specifics, we offer the following ad formats: Instream Video, Outstream Video, Sponsored Video, Display, and Prebid Native ad slots. This is done through the use of our sidebar, anchor, in-article, banner, and adhesion player ad placements. You can see how this visually would look on your site by checking out: https://sortable.wpengine.com/ad-placements/

What does it mean that you’re a Google Certified Publisher Partner?

You may have noticed the Google Certified Publishing Partner logo on a lot of our publications and our website. It essentially means that our services have been carefully vetted by Google — and they passed with flying colours. It also means that if you’re hitting the Google AdSense revenue wall, but don’t meet the requirements for Google AdX as of yet — we can help you out there.

Excellent! Well, everyone, we’ve reached the end of our time together and we appreciate you taking yours to learn more about the Sortable solution suite. Of course, if you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us by email at team@sortable.com, or head to www.sortable.com to schedule your own call to see how Sortable can best be used to maximize your revenue.


Editor’s Note: This has been edited to reflect that Managed Services is no longer offered by Sortable.

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