Adobe Advertising Cloud vs. AdStage

The platform is highly useful for digital ads marketing and campaign management. The platform provides a custom set of templates and tools to your ad production or designer team to create thousand of ads very quickly for your products or brands. To your marketing team, the tool provides full control over campaign strategy in terms of how to present relevant sets of ads to your web and app visitors based on customer behavior, demography, and age group. I could not think about any scenario where this platform is less suitable if you are looking for an advertising platform.

Incentivized

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

• Automation - One of Adobe Marketing Cloud’s amazing marketing solutions is Adobe Campaign. This allows users to implement marketing automation to increase their campaign productivity and deliver an amazing customer experience. I can even set up users so they can build individual customer profiles based on the interests, actions, and preferences that are tracked through different marketing channels.
• A/B Split Testing – Most platforms have this now and most do not know how to even use it. However, the only way for a user to know how their marketing can be improved is to get a clear idea of how it is performing. But if all their data is in separate locations, it’s difficult to know which image, text or video is leading to sales or conversions. Adobe Marketing Cloud helps with keeping all of this clear for everyone on board.
• Social Analytics – when you or your customers are looking to improve their social marketing results, this platform offers Adobe Social, which is a social management platform that allows users to monitor conversations, promote and publish content, and analyze and engage with followers. One of the best parts is that the system automatically attaches tracking codes to users’ social content to identify what content drives engagement. It is a very powerful tool.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• As with most Adobe products, it can be a little tedious to use and requires a bit of extra training and "googling" around to make sure you are getting things right. It has improved over time within the entire Adobe suite, and I anticipate that this will be true of this as well.
• Adobe training and learning platforms can include a lot of technical terminology and jargon that makes it difficult for a novice to understand without feeling like they need a whole new education.

Incentivized

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

As of this writing, we have just discontinued our use of Adobe Media Optimizer. Other vendors gave us a better rate, a better contract option, and the product is just better than what we had with Adobe at the time. We may revisit Adobe again at the future, but it seems like they have a lot of work to do to catch up with the leader in the space

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

It definitely takes some instruction to get to be able to use the system. One would struggle trying to get it to work without any previous experience with it. If you are famailiar with the interface it is actually quite fast and easy to maneuver around.

The reason being that support is extremely hard to reach, after the initial training period was over support became much harder to get from Adobe Media Optimizer's customer service agents which no one wants to deal with and we had to wait a long time for many inquiries to get answered

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

It was difficult initially, but the implementation of the Dynamic Tag Manager was a big help and timesaver.

It was a step up from Marin in terms of UI. Very similar functionality to Marin. Compared to Kenshoo Search and Google Marketing Platform it was probably not as advanced but offered the benefit of integrating with other products in the Adobe stack like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Adobe Media Optimizer delved deeper than other search engines could and actually provided us very useful information regarding how keywords were performing.
• The tool itself at first was quite useful in speeding our days up in being an all in one solution however it has various bugs that caused us to double-check our work basically costing us more time when using this tool.
• A large impact I had to how we were tracking our keywords was a bug with Adobe Media Optimizer informing us that we were not using a few keywords when it turns out we actually were and the tool was in fact incorrect in identifying what we actually were using.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized