ABOUT ME

Personal

My name’s Charlie Conner. I’m originally from Maryland, where I received my bachelor’s degree from Towson University in 2013. I received a major in sports management with a minor in business.My wife and I, along with our two dogs, Oakley and Bodie spent a few years in Florida, followed by a 5 year stint in SoCal. As of 2025, I’m in Connecticut. Needless to say, trying out new places is something we enjoy.

Passion and Interests

I’m a diehard D.C. sports fan, closely following the Nationals, Capitals and Commanders.I’m an avid golfer. Not a great one, but an avid one for sure.I love to surf, snowboard and pretty much any other fun activity that’ll provide a quick boost of adrenaline.

My Story

Upon graduating from Towson University in 2013, I obtained my NMLS accreditation and began my career in the mortgage industry.2013-2022During this period, I held various roles across multiple mortgage companies, encompassing sales, operations management, processing, and underwriting. My final two years in the mortgage sector were spent at Better.com, a mortgage technology startup, where I played a pivotal role in developing major partnerships and pilot programs.At Better.com, I served as a liaison between the product team and our clients, facilitating the collection of feedback and translating it into technical specifications. I found great satisfaction in overseeing the implementation of changes and optimizations based on client insights. After eight years in the mortgage industry, I sought to transition into alternative sectors and roles, with a particular interest in pursuing a more technical career path, including opportunities in product management, data science, or engineering.2022-2025In 2022, I seized the opportunity to enter the realm of product development by joining Pingtree, a nascent bootstrapped SaaS startup.The company had recently acquired the "pingtree.com" domain just weeks before my arrival, and I was excited to contribute to its vision of providing an all-in-one solution for advertisers, publishers, and affiliates to manage their performance marketing campaigns.Pingtree was in the infancy stage however the vision was to provide users with an "all-in-one" solution for advertisers, publishers and affiliates to manage their performance marketing campaigns.Initially, I joined the small team as a project manager, focusing on agency-related services for our existing clients. Recognizing the need to rapidly enhance my knowledge of performance marketing, conversion rate optimization, lead attribution, and lead distribution strategies, I immersed myself in the industry. I dedicated significant time to consuming performance marketing content through blogs, articles, and videos, while also familiarizing myself with the numerous marketing analytics acronyms and KPIs essential for success.As I provided support services in an agency-style framework, I prioritized becoming a product expert on our platform. Although I lacked extensive experience in performance marketing and lead generation, I maximized my contributions by thoroughly understanding the technical and operational aspects of the Pingtree platform.As the company and product evolved, my role transitioned into a more technical product position. While I continued to assist customers in building and optimizing their campaigns, my in-depth product knowledge enabled me to better identify customer needs and devise effective solutions. This understanding also facilitated my ability to forecast new features and product enhancements.Working within a bootstrapped startup environment afforded me unique insights into various business objectives.
Collaborating closely with our engineering teams on a daily basis deepened my understanding of the technical and UX/UI dimensions of product development.
Additionally, in partnership with my CEO, I led go-to-market strategies, including onboarding and implementation workflows, updated pricing plans, partnership acquisition, and other initiatives aimed at driving growth.During my tenure at Pingtree, I was able to navigate the challenges of a fast and agile, client-facing role in a complex environment, successfully growing the user base from 3 clients to over 150 users in less than 3 years.Invoca 2025In February 2025, I took an opportunity with Invoca, an industry leader in the call tracking and revenue execution helping 2,000+ customers including DIRECTV, AT&T, Verizon, AutoNation and others. I help customers architect complex and technical solutions for their marketing strategies.

Experience

While executing a strong marketing campaign does involve a lot of moving parts, the overall goal is a simple concept; Find ways to generate the most amount of sales with the least amount of wasted spend...and repeat.There are a lot of variables that influence how marketers can best accomplish this such as:*What service(s) or product(s) you're trying to market.
*The channels you're marketing through.
*Your target audience.
*The data you're capturing and what you're doing with it.
*Retargeting efforts.Throughout my career I've helped many customers optimize their marketing strategies, especially when it comes to the lead generation component. Whether they were an advertiser, affiliate or publisher, I've helped tailor campaigns to help drive high intent and qualified lead traffic to their businesses or websites at scale. As a product manager who's also worked directly with customers in campaign optimization, I've gained unique insights into developing their campaign strategies while understanding the technology and backend resources it takes to accomplish it.Closing the loop which consists of connecting top of the funnel data with bottom of the funnel data is how I've helped customers curate their winning strategies. Understanding the technical requirements for capturing the data along with the knowledge of which data points to collect are highly important as this can vary depending on the vertical or industry you're in, the marketing channels you're utilizing, and the type of campaign you're running.Information such as:*Where the lead came from.
*The story of the lead.
*How the lead navigates through a web property (the user journey)
*Where the lead data goes.Below I go into more detail about the different areas of the lead generation and marketing funnels I have experience with.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) | Building and Testing Landing Pages & FormsBuilding and launching targeted landing pages and forms while capturing those valuable data insights on the traffic that funnels through is the core of a successful campaign.I have a deep understanding of how to build and deploy effective landing pages quickly in a variety of verticals and industries.Having a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) plan is often overlooked but extremely important in driving a successful digital campaign. This involves deploying variations of landing pages which may contain slight differences in the UX/UI, and performing A/B tests in order to gain better insight into effectiveness of your web properties.Marketing OptimizationThese top of the funnel marketing tactics, when used correctly, will vastly improve media buying strategies.Understanding where your traffic originated from as well as the meta data connected with each lead help advertisers and publishers optimize their marketing ad spend and ultimately increase ROI.Proper source attribution and link tracking will ensure you have a clear picture into your traffic.Lead DistributionThe where, when, why and how lead data is delivered is another important aspect of the lead funnel.
Depending on the structure of a business, lead data may be posted to CRMs, call centers, data lakes and data warehouses, or even other advertisers.Analysis and ReportingWhile having the data is one piece of the puzzle, it's only meaningful if it's being properly utilized.Accurate reporting will connect the remaining dots and provide the blueprint for optimizing current marketing campaigns and developing new campaigns.Closing that loop between the top of funnel marketing data with the bottom of the funnel outcome data reveals trends and patterns that can and should be utilized.Whether you're running a direct mail campaign, Google, SEO, TikTok, Facebook Ads, TV or something else, there's a variety of ways to reduce spend and attract better quality traffic.

Responsibilities of my Role

My Projects

Below are some of the things I've been working on.

Certifications & Courses

Systems & Tools