AdStage vs. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions vs. X Ads

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

Although it offered great features, we didn't really see a lot of traffic or results from the ads we placed. Working in hospitality, we had to strategically time and place our ads around holiday seasons and it can be difficult to predict a marketing campaign. Depending on your market, LinkedIn may not be the best avenue to advertise with.

Incentivized

I highly recommend Twitter Ads for users looking to establish a strong online presence on the platform and the digital sphere. While a little on the expensive side, the payoff, in the long run, is quite remarkable especially that Twitter Ads will show your content to all the followers gained (while other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, use algorithms that might place your daily content lower or won't even show them to your fans)..

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

• Targeting - they have done a great job of allowing you speak to ideal audiences
• Support - dedicated customer service and account advising is always accessible and very responsive
• Curation of professional audiences - one of the biggest advantages to the platform is that its users are for the most part are professional

Incentivized

• Twitter Ads, just like every form of internet ads, enable us to target users based on their geographical location. This has been very vital for occasions when we are trying to raise awareness about new products specifically tailored for customers and clients from a particular location.
• Twitter Ads is significantly more cost effective than traditional adverts we run on mainstream TV stations and newspapers, especially since most of our campaigns majorly target the younger generation. Of this group, we are aware that the younger generation in South Africa spend more time on the internet than they ever do sitting behind their TV set or even reading newspapers.
• Twitter Ads makes it possible to engage live with Twitter users as they view our ad campaigns. This allows us to clarify information , respond to questions and even qualify leads while our campaign is running. This obviously is not possible with traditional mediums of advertisement.

Incentivized

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

• The Campaign Manager is not good. It seems like the Campaign Manager (where you create and manage your self-serve ad campaigns) is buggy and doesn't have a good flow. Contrast with FB Ad Manager of the Google Adwords/Ads interface, which has a much more simple process to create and edits campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, audiences, budgets, etc. LinkedIn Campaign Manager seems to actively work against you trying to make changes to your campaigns.
• LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers three options: sponsored content, InMail, and text ads. LinkedIn used to offer other ad services that you couldn't access unless you had a "managed ad account" run by LinkedIn Staff with a dedicated monthly ad spend. It seems most of those "hidden" features have disappeared, though you still have to contract with LinkedIn to offer dynamic ads. It would be better if LinkedIn empowered marketers to create the ads they want. (Perhaps with a dedicated acct. manager like how Google Ads works.)
• This is silly, but it isn't easy to navigate to Campaign Manager. I have a bookmark for Campaign Manager because if you want to click there through LinkedIn, it takes 2 or 3 different screens to get to Campaign Manager. In my opinion, when you click the "Work" dropdown from the LinkedIn header (by your profile picture) you should have a link to Campaign Manager.
• LinkedIn, in recent months, has made substantial changes to the Ads platform and Campaign Manager. Though these changes work to address some of the above issues, LinkedIn still has quite a ways to go before their platform is on par with their competition.

Incentivized

• Limitation of characters to only 140.
• While the targeting of Twitter is relevant most of the time, it is not always right and there are some ads that are completely unrelated to the search terms entered.
• Not as many users as Facebook.

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

Twitter ads are not the best way for people to promote things because they do not pop out enough on people's feeds.

in terms of promoted content reporting and usability, the platform is not as flexible or easy to use compared to more established social platforms like Facebook. However, it does offer plug-ins to Google Data Studio which makes pulling and manipulating data easier. My main usability gripe comes when looking at organic performance of a company page. There isn't an easy way to export organic performance data.

Incentivized

Just not for my company and me. Bad environment with too many bots and AI things going on. It isn't worth my while to pay to do anything on this site. I will continue to post for free for the exposure. I hope the company sells and gets better. Need to verify people are real.

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

So, everything what I just said previously adds up to the value of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Definitely recommending it to a friend. It has its things to improve but its nothing major or nothing to worry about. So I give a 9 because it still has that, some user interface glitches that can be improved but do not damage the experience that you have with it.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

If you want more precision in B2B targeting, then LinkedIn is without question the better alternative. However, as I established before, I've rarely seen LinkedIn campaigns be successful for anything other than brand awareness/thought leadership. And that's almost 100% what Twitter is for. Twitter campaigns almost always have a cheaper CPC AND CPM than LinkedIn and accomplish the same thing, so I would say go with Twitter. At times LinkedIn campaigns are just so you can tell someone at a higher level that you did precise targeting to the exact audience they wanted and check that box, because it's easier for them to understand how you'd do well on LinkedIn, and more difficult to tell that story on Twitter. But I honestly prefer Twitter and its platform for B2B awareness campaigns. Heretic, I know, but it's how I feel after several years of experience with both. Facebook is bottom of the barrel for B2B in my mind, so I'm not really going to discuss it. I would take LinkedIn over Facebook for many reasons, but Facebook is an option too, but more for SMB and just covering all bases, not as a primary choice for B2B marketing.

Incentivized

Facebook Ads, Adwords, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube all have ad channels you can use to advertise your product. Some are even tied together. Twitter occupies a part of the market which can be difficult to get right. Mostly, we select other channels for better targeting, cheaper leads, and a better fit for the campaigns we were trying to run. However, there are scenarios in which using Twitter Ads can get you big wins.

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

• We have seen a marked increase in inbound agent calls since we began LinkedIn marketing.
• LinkedIn marketing is an excellent way to put your content in front of people that are actually going to read it, this has led to a major increase in our content being consumed and acted on.

Incentivized

• One Positive Impact has been that having ads running has increased the number of followers we have on Twitter.
• Another positive impact is that due to having more followers, we now have more visits to our site.
• A mixed impact would be that positively, since we have Adwords implemented as well, we can track back the source of our website traffic to being from a social source like Twitter. The negative of it is that Twitter ads does not have the tracking capability and we still need Google Adwords to do so.

Incentivized