TrustRadius Insights for AdStage are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
AdStage is a versatile platform that caters to a variety of user needs, as evidenced by the positive feedback from customers and reviewers. The platform solves efficiency problems by automating tracking, changes, and analytics, saving users time and resources. With AdStage, users can easily access campaign data and monitor key performance indicators, enabling quick decision-making and budget control. The white-label reports and extensive template variety offered by AdStage have been particularly praised by reviewers. Additionally, customers value the platform's ability to scale their business, optimize deployment, and utilize machine learning to automate tasks within LinkedIn.
One of the standout features of AdStage is its customer support, which has received high praise for its prompt responses and helpful assistance. Users appreciate the platform's ability to improve internal reporting and budgeting processes through semi-automation on a daily basis. With AdStage's capability to pull automated analytics reports from different marketing platforms and visualize them in one report, users can easily identify key insights and improve efficiency. This feature also allows for the creation of detailed and professional-looking reports that clients appreciate.
AdStage is widely used for multi-platform ad campaigns, providing users with a positive overall experience. By consolidating reporting and editing PPC campaigns across multiple platforms, AdStage saves users a significant amount of time. The platform’s scheduled reports and ad management features are primary use cases for many users. Furthermore, small agencies benefit from AdStage's ability to unify campaign management and reporting functions.
In summary, AdStage offers a comprehensive set of features that address various user needs. Its ability to streamline campaign management, provide efficient reporting solutions, and save time make it an invaluable tool for businesses of all sizes. With positive user experiences across different industries, AdStage continues to be a go-to platform for optimizing ad campaigns, improving efficiency, and making data-driven marketing decisions.
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
Likelihood to Recommend
We've increased conversions by 25% through budget optimization with AdStage. This was the first time we saw tangible returns on an ad monitoring service and it has allowed us to spend smarter over time by reviewing the ads, seeing what worked, and adjusting on the fly. At the end of the day, the goal is more conversions or at least more information on win/loss. AdStage makes it easy to see all of that in one cute little place,.
VU
Verified User
Project Manager in Information Technology (11-50 employees)
We are currently using Adstage to support our own LinkedIn Ad efforts and are now expanding our use as we bring on clients that are interested in leveraging LinkedIn advertising as well. It is primarily used by our marketing team, as the reporting functionality of Adstage makes it easy for the executive team to stay abreast of results without spending time in the platform.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
AdStage is well suited for:
- Teams with a nuanced campaign strategy that will benefit from the Automate functions (automatically pausing campaigns, raising bids, etc.)
- Agencies running ads and reporting for multiple clients at a time
- Teams with monthly ad budgets consistently greater than $5,000
- Teams investing in LinkedIn Ads that are completely dissatisfied with their reporting (which should be all of you, because it's garbage.)
Adstage is less appropriate for:
- Teams that run long-term campaigns with no daily/weekly changes
- Teams with a monthly ad budget of $5000 or less (it won't be worth the price)
AdStage fills several business needs for our agency. First, it acts as a reporting platform, allowing us to send automated dashboards covering multiple ad channels to clients on a regular basis. Second, it provides automation features such as bid and budget management, pausing ad groups/campaigns, or running certain ads during certain time periods (such as holiday sales).
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.
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.
We used AdStage as a source to bring all of our channels together for reporting, better automation, and better control of our campaigns through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google. We also looked heavily at using them for API access into these channels for more in-depth reporting and so our internal team did not have to do that.
Before using AdStage putting all of this together was a huge pain and some of the channels didn't have great interfaces. AdStage helped ease a lot of those pain points and made campaign building easier. As mentioned, we also wanted to use them for API access but we ended up holding off. We're again looking at using them for that type of reporting.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
AdStage is great for bringing together all of your channels into one place for analytics. They now have easy API access into multiple channels which allows you to really deep dive and get the most out of the data that you often can't without that API access. They also have great ways to surface this data that is easy to digest for leadership.
If you already have this internally or want to build it out internally, AdStage may not be a fit outside of some great automation tools, but it's not easy to have this data done and built out internally so this is a great place to start.
