At a time when the human touch comes at a premium, it’s always a relief to find a company or two that reply quickly, politely, and efficiently to customer support requests.
And the two companies that have impressed us with their support? Pubmatic and Assembla – both excellent startups that we highly recommend in their individual fields. Pubmatic is an ad-revenue optimization service that intelligently chooses between different ad providers to maximize your ad impressions and CPM rates. Assembla provides quality hosting of SVN and other services that cover all aspects of the software development cycles for teams & small companies.
A couple of days ago, Kaspersky antivirus began flagging the ad-frames from Pubmatic as possible attempts to download a virus. Kaspersky is, of course, famous for its high false-positive counts (though it’s protection is great, nothing is without its cost). Pubmatic support staff were incredibly quick to respond to our queries, and immediately contacted all the involved parties to resolve the problem in a timely fashion.
As for Assembla – we’d been using their SVN hosting for a couple of years now. It’s thanks to them that we were able to develop software efficiently back before we had our infrastructure and development set up and going. They’ve recently overhauled their accounts system and have suspended free accounts, and they’ve been nothing short of wonderful helping us migrate our data to our own servers (data portability is a sensitive topic these days – but Assembla clearly knows how finicky developers are when it comes to ownership!) and helped us wrap everything up nice and clean.
Thanks to both these great companies for their wonderful customer service and their dedication to their userbase. If you’re looking to outsource your development services or for a better ad management system, there’s no one we recommend more than Assembla and Pubmatic.
I’m using Pubmatic myself, but didn’t see much improvement in the CPM / overall revenue.
Are you using them? How are they performing for you?
Yeah, we’re using them across the board. While the CPM hasn’t improved drastically (we had some serious ad optimization beforehand), we do get a fair number of impressions so even minor improvements translate to some dollars at the end of the day.
Hmm.. I’ve applied for an OpenX ad optimization invite. It looks promising and i’m waiting for their response.
In the meantime, I’ll look into Pubmatic.
Thanks for mentioning them, especially Pubmatic, which is something i’ve been looking for for quite some time. Will take a closer look at them now…
Customer service might mean a lot, but it is very hard to judge a company on it’s customer service simply because it is hard to judge such a thing until you’re a customer.
Prices on the other hand are easy to measure and compare. So I can’t help but think that it is a better idea for businesses to sacrifice good support in order to save money and have more competitive prices.
Sad though..
Thanks for sharing. I was looking for a service like Pubmatic.
If you tried it, can you tell if it actually increased your revenue from ads?
Kaspersky is great, but definitely a touch on the sensitive side. Rather safe than sorry is what I always say, but as a vendor I can only imagine the frustration and hassle if a major antivirus service provider black-flags you, whether guilty or not! The speed with which Pubmatic’s support staff attended to this issue is a great reflection on a business that is focused on customer service. Great reference indeed!