AdStage vs. AppNexus

AdStage is great if you're an agency or an in-house marketer managing a lot of ad budget, a lot of campaigns, or a large number of clients and you want to get the day-to-day tasks cleared to focus on higher-brain-stem tasks. Bid and budget management are replaced by rules. Holiday sales are replaced with flighting. All of your team members can log in, access their accounts, set up their reports and have them send to clients without having to lift a finger.

Incentivized

Appnexus is specifically well suited for CTV campaigns. They have the full technology stack to help you scale campaigns in any format, whether you need a lot of volume in traditional formats like banners and interstitials or if you need high-impact formats like video and other alternatives. Appnexus has a very strong set of unique publishers which makes it a great DSP for branding campaigns.

Incentivized

• Easily pulling together API access for multiple channels into one area for in-depth reporting
• Automation. They helped a bunch with features that LinkedIn didn't have.
• The team. They were always super responsive and on the ball with any questions or concerns we had. The customer service was great.
• General reporting and tieing data together.

Incentivized

• As per my experience they have strong support personnel. Solving the issues as and when required.
• We can solve certain issues like campaign performance, inventory optimization and more with the help of AppNexus wiki. We get all the required information in the Wiki itself.
• They have given the right platform to both buyers and sellers to workout and meet their digital marketing needs and goals.

• More reporting options
• More export options
• Saved templates per user or oganization

• The platform is incredibly complex and requires a great deal of understanding of how the platform works that caught us by surprise.
• The wiki is not enough and when we resorted to reaching out to AppNexus it was a nuisance of having several emails going back and forth.
• No phone support is offered which would have made several things easier than exchanging confusing emails.
• Video inventory is still not implemented.

Incentivized

AdStage has been great and the only reason we wouldn't renew is if we decided to build this all out internally for API access. But, customer services is great, the product is great and I'd definitely recommend it.

Incentivized

I love almost everything about AppNexus because I feel like the user data is easy to track because of the identifiers, you can see which adverts got clicked and which were ignored. We can track the location of the ad on the page fold and this makes it so much easier for future campaigns. The only thing I don't like is that the data is only kept for a year, and I'd like it for a longer period of time

Because I think the interface is kind of confusing at the beginning and it confuses you a lot.

Incentivized

I've never had any problems with appnexus - the software is always available

Incentivized

Yes, everything works great in that sense

Incentivized

AdStage had great support. They got back to me quickly every time, they always had or found an answer for what I was looking for, they took my feedback well, and they were knowledgeable with the platform and any issues I had. I have worked with a lot of other companies that are slow and AdStage definitely isn't one of them.

Incentivized

Because the support team does give you support, they take 24hrs to get back to you but once they open a ticket they focus on resolving the issue for you. My only problem is that you don't have a specific account representative assigned to you.

Incentivized

Online training are not user friendly and not easy to understand

Incentivized

AdStage has by far the best UI and custom functionality of any of the platforms we demoed

Incentivized

The TTD platform seems to have better CTV/OLV inventory, so that is typically preferred over AppNexus (APN). Usually, if clients have an internal desk, they will use TTD, which can often lead to us bidding against them, which is also another benefit of running campaigns within AppNexus (APN). Google DSP is typically used to increase the scale for display and build larger re-messaging pools.

Incentivized

Because it's a great DSP but not the best

Incentivized

• In terms of hours saved, it's hard to pin down, but we definitely spend more time on the meaningful, strategic, or artistic tasks now than we used to.
• AdStage is also a great tool to roll out during the sales process because our clients love to hear that we're making decisions automatically with data and automation rather than just hiring more junior people to push buttons.
• During black Friday this year our team all setup campaigns to flight, meaning they weren't sitting around the turkey with their laptops out. That's an ROI in company culture that's hard to measure, but extremely valuable.

Incentivized

• The 1 USD audit fee makes it very hard to A/B test creatives and improve performance, hurting ROI.
• We have been able to reach some users that we weren't able to get before, increasing spending, which is good for ROI.
• We can run campaigns on TV, which is a big boost for the business, and very ROI positive.

Incentivized