Ask the Expert: Q & A with Ad Lightning's Head of Partner Success

At Ad Lightning, we pride ourselves on our relationships with our customers. As we grow, we're working hard to make sure that our best-in-class service remains that way.

The other day we sat down with Meghan Mark, our Partner Success Manager, to ask her some questions about what makes our support program so special.

Heading into 2019 what do you think were some of the account teams biggest successes over the past year? What do you hope to see continue over the next year?

In the latter half of the year we more than doubled our client base, all while offering the same level of customer engagement and support we’ve always been known for. As a rapidly-growing company with many new clients, we always brace ourselves for growing pains along the way — but that hasn’t yet happened. Knock on wood.

Looking forward into 2019, I expect the adoption of our product suite will steadily increase and my hope is that our team continues to provide topnotch service, especially as we add new members to our organization.

Can you share some client feedback that really stood out to you, either positive or negative? How does ADL respond to client feedback?

When I first started at Ad Lightning in 2017, we had great customers that loved our scanning products - particularly the granularity of the data, visibility into latency and the ease of use of our reporting UI. It was around that time however, that the overtly malicious ads started to become more prevalent across the ecosystem. Our clients wanted a more proactive way to rid their site of malware and mobile redirects, so our product team added a suite of blocking solutions to our offering. Now, when I hear trial clients say things like “this is the most comprehensive solution [in the market],” I’m really proud of our team.

Recently, we were showing a client new updates and they responded, “that's why Ad Lightning is great! You're always adding to the product and working with us on new features.”

As a B2B SaaS company, I think that’s one of the best compliments you can get. No product is perfect, but if you’re willing to take feedback, and act upon that feedback, you can get pretty darn close.

What do your clients care about the most?

The user experience on their properties is top of mind. Our main purpose at Ad Lightning is to rid the ecosystem of disruptive ads that impact websites and disrupt from the site’s content. If we can help make a site more seamless for users to navigate it, we’ve done our job well.

What keeps your clients up at night?

The easy answer is mobile redirects, which have plagued publishers the past few years. Bad actors are constantly looking for new ways to get around the latest technology, so we are always looking for new ways to beat them at their own game. Long-term, I think many of our clients are in watch-and-wait mode to see how the transparency and consent requirements around GDPR play out in Europe—and the possibility that something similar could eventually come to the US.

Which clients are the most successful in using Ad Lightning?

Ad Lightning power-users take the time to learn and understand our product— and push the boundaries by asking us for clever features that are universally beneficial to our entire client base. Often, these requests are simple features that we didn’t realize would make their day-to-day drastically easier. The most successful clients are inquisitive about their data, check metrics often, engage with us on monthly check-in calls and use the chat tool to ask questions in real-time.

ADL is known for service in the industry — what sets you apart? What is your philosophy in terms of service?

Every client is extremely important to us. We don’t treat the smaller sites we work with any differently than we treat our global publishers. If you sign a contract buying our product, we are grateful that you’re putting your faith into our team and are relying on our prompt service and industry knowledge. Many of us have publisher and ad ops backgrounds, which makes it easy for us to put on our publisher hats and empathize with our clients.