Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review What are the best ways to integrate it with salesforce.com? What are the best ways to target our users with this tool? To segment the users? How can I integrate my ads with your adexchange-what sizes are you looking for in terms of banners, skyscrapers and so on. In this way I can plan my in house ad and those for the exchange to be the same size, to avoid duplication of work.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review OpenX is a system that was designed to scale as is evident in some key design decisions found throughout the platform. The multi-server setup that was chosen at Mail.com allowed for a distributed server architecture which separated the front end web delivery nodes from the backend MySQL Database master which replicated data back to each front end delivery node mysql slave. This eased the ability to horizontally scale as needed due to the ingenious separation of the ad impressions data tables on the delivery nodes which were being collected locally on each ad impression and then processed periodically back to to the master database which replicated the aggregated statistics back to the delivery nodes. The ability to load balance across the front end web delivery nodes, add caching at many different layers, utilize a CDN for the static ad images, implement PHP accelerators, and hit memcached instead of the MySQL master made the OpenX platform a service that was very resilient to failures. The ability to optimize the platform is also something that OpenX does very well. This is evident in many of the config key parameters available. In addition to OpenX specific tunable's, optimizations can be made at many different levels in which the system sits. These include hardware and operating system level optimizations, tcp and networking stack optimizations, web server/php-cgi configurations, and database (MySQL InnoDB) tunable's. There are many different optimization knobs that can be tuned to help scale the application for the best performance possible The documentation was simple, to the point, and well written which led to an easy initial implementation and roll out of a multi-server setup. The installation and upgrade procedures were straight forward even for the complexities of the multi-server setup. I also found the OpenX team to be accessible and even got a chance to meet some of the team at their Up Close and Personal events at Cal Tech in Pasadena. Core developers were on hand to answer technical questions and also made themselves available to us via email and irq channels. The open nature of the OpenX platform allows for flexibility in the choice of web serving platform to use (Apache, nginx, Lighttpd) and also the database management systems (MySQL, PostGreSQL) Read full review Cons More reporting options More export options Saved templates per user or oganization Read full review Propagation could be improved; ad units that need to go live immediately could take up to 45 minutes to propagate. Over-complexity can be confusing. There are multiple tiers before assigning ad units per order and it seems unnecessary. Real-time reporting or a status dashboard would be great. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review I no longer work at the company where I was using OpenX, but if I were then I'd certainly stay aboard. Frankly, there are a lot of sunk costs involved with building all of the infrastructure we had put in place, the system was working very well even if reporting was a hassle, and our team was trained on it. Also, I'm not aware of another product that does everything else we'd need it to.
Read full review Usability I was given the system to use as part of setting up a whole new site from scratch in less than 2 months, with a large number of specialty hub pages to run ads on and lots of content I needed to run disease specific ads on. The system was easy for me to learn on the fly in a very compressed time frame. I would have loved more chance to really dig in under the hood to see all that it could do, but given how fast I had to work, I got everything up and running and looking great. And I did it ahead of my launch deadline too. My only reservation might be for people who are not as patient as I am in picking things up, or as hands on. Customer service was great if I needed them, and a quick start guide with the essentials would be ideal for those people.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review They went above and beyond without ever asking for additional money and we met our launch date and immediately started to meet and even surpass our business goals. Nothing was too much trouble, which really stood out compared to other companies I had and was at that time also working with. Customer service can really make or break any business; if i expect my staff to give good customer service, I expect to get it too, and Open X gave it.
Read full review Alternatives Considered AdStage has by far the best UI and custom functionality of any of the platforms we demoed
Read full review OpenX is less focused than
MoPub and it has a bigger reach as it is not limited to the mobile app. Unlike
MoPub that focuses on performance, OpenX comes from the branding world and is pushing into CTV and other areas of the industry more catered to traditional media agencies and not pure ad tech players.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review OpenX made it easy to manage online advertising. At the time I used the product I was the lead developer in charge of implementing the solution but quickly was put into the role of managing the traffic and training other users. It was really easy for a technical user to become a traffic manager. Getting other users trained and up to speed was very efficient. Read full review ScreenShots