AdStage Changes the Game for Digital Advertisers
December 15, 2018
AdStage Changes the Game for Digital Advertisers
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with AdStage
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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
We've used tools like Companion Labs and AdEspresso before for Facebook Ads, or Optmyzer or WordStream for Google Ads, and AdStage has so many features that these systems don't. True, it's drastically more expensive than most, but the feature set is leaps and bounds above. From automation to reporting to even campaign monitoring being in a single platform with this level of customization, it's playing at a different level than anything else we've used off-the-shelf.