There are many reasons why Google is the largest
search engine, not only do they offer a powerful way to search the web for what
you need often with fun doodles for holidays and special occasions, but the
company also provides tools for all of us to use to help make our online
businesses stronger, better optimized, and more successful.
I recently learned about the Google Partner
Gallery, a spot formerly called the Google Application Gallery. This space
offers services and applications from Google Analytics Certified Partners or
experts who can help with things like website testing, conversion optimization,
and analytics. All the partners go through a vetting process to become a
partner verified by Google (DiSilvestro, 2014) . You can find the gallery here: https://www.google.com/analytics/partners/search/all
Services in the gallery range from Campaign
Optimization, Custom Development, and Ecommerce to Tech Support and Training. Google
makes it easy to find services near you by including a mapping feature; this is
useful if you want to have local Google-certified firms to work with
face-to-face.
As for applications, there are nearly 400
available for business solutions like:
- · Business Intelligence
- · Campaign Management
- · Content Management
- · Email Marketing
- · Mobile Reporting
- · Phone Call Tracking
- · Search Marketing
- · Site Audit
- · Social Analytics
- · Surveys
- · URL Building
Options are free and paid and Google lets you
filter for both (Google Analytics, 2014) .
In browsing the many apps that are offered in
Google’s Partner Gallery, it is amazing to see how many tools are available that
could work well for a small business, empower a blog writer to achieve better
results, or enhance a marketing program. Since I currently work in a very small
marketing department, I am always on the hunt for something that can help make
my job easier and also make our marketing budget more powerful.
A Closer
Look: AdStage
While I am tempted by the survey tools being
offered, if I had to choose just one app that I really feel could help enhance
my personal business marketing efforts, I would go with AdStage.
AdStage was started in San Francisco in 2012 and the
company describes itself as “a self-serve cross-network online advertising
platform with full management and analytics for campaigns across search, social
and mobile ad networks like Google AdWords, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, and
Twitter Ads (Fung, 2015) .”
From the company’s website you can determine that the idea for
their project came from frustration with the time and effort needed to monitor
ad campaigns across many platforms with no real solution for checks and
balances between them. Anyone who has ever attempted this while also trying to
manage the other non-digital parts of a marketing job know that you often fall
into set it and forget it mode, never really taking the time to check back in
on your work or making adjustments as needed. AdStage seems to provide a practical
and helpful solution for this issue, giving the user the tools to manage
campaigns much more effectively.
In looking more closely at what AdStage offers,
they can be broken down into three main categories; creation, automation, and
reporting.
Create
The first thing that AdStage allows you to do is
create digital ads across many platforms with ease. They offer a seamless
integration between the popular online advertising outlets, including Google,
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The company is also able to pinpoint the most
popular ad platform for each outlet.
The tool allows you to test headlines, images,
and more and closely analyze how each is working to weed out what isn’t
performing and continue strengthening ads to find what works best for your
audience.
Automate
One great feature of AdStage is the ability to
set performance indicators for your online advertising. For instance you can
pause an ad or increase spending on a campaign automatically by completing
performance guidelines for your ads. You can set the app to discontinue an ad
after a certain number of days without engagement and conversely you can also
make the call that if a campaign is performing well you can raise the dollars
you are spending. All is preset, which makes ad management extremely simple for
a small marketing department.
AdStage also lets you set alerts for campaigns to
get notifications when your performance goals are being missed or exceeded.
Another great feature is the ability to manage
the schedule of online campaigns. Sites like Facebook give you the opportunity
to turn off your ads, but who remembers to do it? With AdStage you can decide
to turn off ads over the weekend, overnight, or whenever you think you won’t be
getting prime viewership.
Report
To me, the reporting aspect of AdStage is really
impressive. You’ve got ads out there in the universe, but what exactly are they
doing and how do they compare with one another? Are there holes in your
coverage? Are some avenues simply not working or costing you way too much per
impression? What platforms are working best for your goals?
As you can see on the chart above, AdStage lets
you organize and compare your campaigns across multiple platforms. You can see
your clicks, impressions, spending, conversion rate, and more and easily take
note of how the outlets stack up to one another.
You can also set up reporting to be delivered as
you want it, a great feature to take advantage of if you need reports for
monthly meetings or even if you want figures sent directly to clients or other
members of your team (AdStage) .
Is AdStage
for You?
Reviewers of AdStage note that it has helped them
to save time in social campaign management and money by keeping underperforming
campaigns limited and helping to increase dollars in areas where conversions
are proving to be much higher.
“AdStage Automate automatically pauses our poor
performing ads and dayparts our campaigns during peak hours. We’ve saved
thousands of dollars from wasted impressions, which ultimately lowered our costs
per conversions.” –Jeremy Bromwell, Zenefits (AdStage)
Another advantage that AdStage has is that it is
ideal for the small business because it is easy to use and allows even the
least tech-savvy users to make it work for them. “Approaching the market from
the bottom up will allow us to design experiences that make sense and work for
the respective advertisers. We don’t plan to force-feed the market with tools
that require training and account managers to use (Rampton, 2013) .”
Pricing for AdStage starts at $159 per month for
their Starter package, this allows for monitoring three platforms and allows ad
spending up to $10,000 per month. Standard bumps up to $239 a month for five
sites and $50,000 in monthly spending and Professional is $399 per month with
10 accounts and unlimited spending limits (AdStage) .
$120,000 a year in online ad spending may be out
of the realm for many small businesses, so AdStage may not be something that a
truly small, small business could or should consider. However, if your ad
spending online is creeping up and campaigns feel out of control or like they
could use some fine-tuning, the yearly cost of a basic AdStage package might be
beneficial for companies who need to hone their messaging and make the most of
their ad dollars. Plus, the yearly cost of AdStage is way less than a social
media manager’s salary, so making room in the budget may be a possibility!
References:
AdStage. (n.d.). All-in-One Advertising Platform.
Retrieved February 21, 2016, from AdStage: https://www.adstage.io/
DiSilvestro, A. (2014, August 4). Google Analytics
Partner Gallery: What's New? Retrieved February 21, 2016, from SemRush
Blog: https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-analytics-partner-gallery-whats-new/
Fung, J. (2015, June 1). AdStage Connects
Advertising and Tracking by Introducing Support for Google Analytics.
Retrieved February 21, 2016, from Yahoo:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/adstage-connects-advertising-tracking-introducing-191500603.html
Google Analytics. (2014, June 24). Introducing the
new Google Analytics Partner Gallery. Retrieved February 21, 2016, from
Google Analytics Blog:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2014/06/introducing-new-google-analytics.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=julyadvanced&utm_content=en_us
Rampton, J. (2013, June 21). AdStage Launches New
Cross-Network Ad Platform Tools. Retrieved February 21, 2016, from Search
Engine Journal:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adstage-launches-new-cross-network-ad-platform-tools/65109/
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