AdStage vs. HCL Unica

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

Extremely well integrated in the TelCos and Financial Services areas. Retail & Online Gaming are the next big sectors. Real Time capabilities via IBM Interact are starting to come to the fore as marketers start to understand the necessity for true reactive CRM. Additional functionality using IBM Distributed Marketing is also another very powerful area for the future, allowing regional marketers to fill out web based forms, which initiate and run flowcharts & email delivery automatically.

• 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

• Campaign treats a marketing campaign as a discrete entity that is made up of one or more flowcharts, which are in turn comprised of one or more processes.
• IBM Campaign performs actual data manipulation live.
• Users do not need to know SQL to design campaigns.

Incentivized

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

• Not suitable to small industries even if they really want to use. It would be great to have a lighter version to let any company use in order to make more customers.
• It would really great to have support team available whenever having the issues / difficulties with in the tool itself. At least able to respond asap.

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

I know Unica well and can make it do just about anything I need it to do. I love the abiity to call in custom code along the way for extremely complicated scenarios and optimum performance. Situations that would steer me to other applications are: If already a heavy SAS user with Enterprise Miner and/or Enterprise Guide I would seriously consider SAS CM; if already owning Teradata platform would seriously consider Teradata RM.

Incentivized

I think it is easy to use, if you don't have to do to complex selections.

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

I didn't use the Unica support since it is with IBM, only before.

- We had to rebuild a part of the datamart afterwards to tighten up and simplify the selection process. But as it was too time consuming to rebuild all the existing campaigns, we no run campaigns on different versions of the datamart. - The response tracking of the campaigns never worked out well, it was impossible to implement a direct response where there is a link between the lead and the response in our operational process

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

The contact history and the response history are so powerful. You can track whatever you want to help the call center to push relevant offers to our customer. In addition, predictive models can be built, with patience, in IBM Campaign. If you have some complaints from the call center about any campaigns, you can easily validate it into the contact or response history.

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

• We’ve been able to send out Thousands of communications and generate over 1 billion touches per year because of the speed and flexibility of the tool.
• We’ve helped our marketing partners achieve or exceed some very lofty goals in the past two years because of the tool

Incentivized