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AdStage

Score8.7 out of 10

10 Reviews and Ratings

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What is AdStage?

The AdStage Platform is a self-serve cross-network online advertising platform with full management and analytics for campaigns across search, social, display, and mobile ad networks like Google AdWords, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, & LinkedIn Ads. It's an all-in-one marketing platform, complete with a suite of first- and third-party apps built on the AdStage API, for advertisers of all sizes.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

AdStage

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features AdStage has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 10 ratings of AdStage's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Ad dashboards

    Dashboards for analyzing and/or optimizing ads are clean, easy to use, and easy to understand.

    Category average: 7

  • Ad conversion tracking

    Tracks ad conversions by campaign and type of conversion—the customer might have clicked on the ad and then purchased a product, subscribed to a newsletter, filled out a form, or downloaded a whitepaper, etc.

    Category average: 6.4

  • Ad attribution reporting

    Generates accurate, detailed reports that attribute conversion to a combination of different touch points (ads, and other factors) leading up to conversion.

    Category average: 6.5

Areas for Improvement

  • Ad display and retargeting segmentation

    Allows users to display and retarget ads to audience segments based on demographics, location, account, role, or other profile aspects.

    Category average: 7.2

  • DSP integration

    Integration with DSP platforms for ad buying

    Category average: 7.8

  • Sequence targeting

    Allows users to create ad sequences that have several stages covering different topics or products; individual viewers are shown ads in a particular order across websites. This provides very fine control over brand messaging and storytelling.

    Category average: 6.8

Reviews

What users are saying about AdStage.
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AdStage - Finally one place to monitor all of those ads on your various platforms.

Verified User
Project Manager in Information Technology (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use AdStage to analyze and automate our paid marketing campaigns for all of our clients, This has allowed us to keep our team small, but scale our operations at an incredible rate. The AdStage tool makes it easy to automate, access the API, analyze, and report on all of our paid social, ppc, and google ads.

Pros

  • Reporting
  • API
  • Google Sheets Integration

Cons

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

Return on Investment

  • Immediate ROI
  • Short ramp up and onboarding
  • Great integration with our social networking team

Alternatives Considered

360social.me, Attribution in Google Analytics (Adometry) and ADSecure

AdStage Changes the Game for Digital Advertisers

Incentivized
J.P. VanderLindenView profile
Director Of Operations in Marketing at EmberTribe (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • AdStage has a great onboarding process. We have a dedicated support rep who walked our entire team through each of the three major sections of AdStage, talked about use cases and even recorded the training so we could provide it to other, future team members.
  • The real power of AdStage for us is in the Automation. You can set up rules for when to do things like increase budget or raise bids on certain ad channels. If something is doing well, push more money to it without ever logging in. Likewise, if something is tanking it gets turned off without you having to be at your computer. It frees up our team to focus on more strategic, creative endeavors by handling the "grunt work".
  • The ability to create custom metrics is a real plus. Sometimes, even with systems as advanced as Google and Facebook are, they just don't understand how to set up what you want to measure. Maybe I want to know the cost for all purchases across apps and my website? AdStage's custom metrics let me design that, and then use it in my reports, dashboards or rules.

Cons

  • It's software, so glitches happen. And when those glitches happen, you need to talk to Support. While the Support team is really helpful, not reading from a script or just looking in the Help docs, there's often a severe lag time of hours or even days. That can be crushing when the glitch is affecting your ad campaigns that are spending money right now.
  • Setting up reports can be really frustrating if you want to customize them at all. If you want your Facebook Ads widget to only report on certain campaigns, there's no ability to filter by a naming convention or launch date, you just have to select every campaign manually. It's a bit like Magento—powerful, but working within the system can be really time-consuming.
  • Right now, AdStage focuses on Google & Facebook. So if you run ads on Snapchat, Pinterest, or Taboola you're kinda out of luck. They rolled out some LinkedIn stuff recently, and they say those other networks are on the way, but it's a little way that the software could get better.

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.

Alternatives Considered

WordStream

AdStage is my BFF. (Saves my team time and $$ on LinkedIn Advertising)

Incentivized
Emily MuhoberacView profile
Chief Operations Officer in Corporate at Sapper Consulting, LLC (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Custom Formulas: AdStage gives users the ability to leverage different data points delivered by the ad platform to create custom metrics. For example, the LinkedIn Advertising platform does not export the data surrounding 'Cost Per Lead,' but we were able to generate that metric in AdStage by creating a formula using two of the data points that are exported. This is a very important metric for us, and I haven't found another reporting software that can do it. I think this adds incredible flexibility to reporting.
  • Custom Grouping: We have gotten incredible value out of the 'grouping' functions in the platform. For example, we wanted to do an analysis of what days performed better for our LinkedIn ad campaigns, but that's not a data point we can export. We created daily campaigns, labeled them as 'DATE [DAY OF WEEK],' and then were able to group the data by the [DAY OF WEEK] label in Adstage. As long as you can create a label for it, you can measure it.
  • Cohesive Product Line: All 3 of their products are incredibly valuable, especially when paired together. While I only currently use AdStage Reporting, I'm doing a trial of Automate and will likely purchase it as we scale more LinkedIn Advertising clients. If you're working with multiple accounts and have a nuanced strategy for your ads (pausing at certain times, only running ads on weekdays, etc.), then automate is a must.
  • Customer Service: I signed up for AdStage exactly a year after my first demo (definitely a slow burn). When I re-emerged many months later, the rep that I had worked with previously not only remembered me, but gave me an additional extended free trial to make sure I was ready to purchase. My CSM has been excellent, not only checking in consistently but also helping me build reports and keeping my account in mind for new features they are rolling out.

Cons

  • I have very little negative feedback regarding this platform. At one point in time, you could create and publish ads to the various platforms via Adstage, but they have started to move away from that functionality. You now have to create campaigns on the platform (for example, LinkedIn) and then automate functions of those campaigns on AdStage. I'd love it to be a one-stop shop where I didn't have to deal with the ad platform at all.

Return on Investment

  • We haven't been using it long enough to have a positive ROI, but I'm confident we will as we optimize our campaigns based on the data we receive from AdStage.
  • AdStage saves myself and my team hours of time each week that we would normally spend preparing reporting or doing ad analysis in excel. This was the reason we purchased AdStage, and it's really living up to its promise.

Alternatives Considered

Kissmetrics, Domo and Klipfolio

AdStage Is Great!

Incentivized
Matthew LloydView profile
Sr. Digital Marketing Manager in Marketing at Pluralsight (501-1000 employees employees)

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.

Cons

  • We were with them in the earlier days and when they were growing larger. We experienced some of that pain with pricing changes that didn't feel quite right. But, they've fixed this now.
  • We didn't really see the usefulness at times of optimizing some of the channels through AdStage, but we loved the reporting features they had for the channels.
  • Better tiers for payment and what fits into those. Again, these are being addressed much better now.

Return on Investment

  • It's saved time for me to easily build out campaigns in Facebook and LinkedIn quickly and in scale
  • It gives people the option to get direct API access to multiple channels without having to build it all in-house
  • It allowed some great optimizations for LinkedIn which allowed us to use our spend there better

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics and Allocadia

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