

AdStage Raises $6.3M to Put Digital Ad Management on Auto-Pilot - brown
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/08/13/adstage-raises-6-3m-to-put-digital-ad-management-on-auto-pilot/

======
shostack
Congrats on the funding.

I have quite a bit of experience with bid management platforms/DSPs/etc. at a
pretty deep level, and I have a few questions:

1\. Are you still just focusing on smaller, less-savvy advertisers with less
advanced needs, or are you targeting folks like me who know the strengths and
weakness of the various platforms out there, limitations, etc.?

2\. Assuming you are targeting folks like me (which I have a hard time
believing given insanely low pricing...), how would you say you differentiate
from the leading platforms in the space? For the most part I've found there
are few truly differentiating features and a lot of it comes down to
usability, integrations, etc. Bid algorithms are so fickle depending on the
variables involved that I would never recommend picking a platform based on
those alone.

3\. How do you address the challenge of cross-channel attribution analysis and
optimization? If you are touching all channels, and have the data from each
channel, I would presume some level of deduplication is occuring in the
conversion counts and such that you present, but if you are just using a basic
last touch model for this, that's...a fairly outdated way of looking at
things.

4\. How do you handle multiple conversion goals, such as for SaaS companies
with a trial signup, subscription, etc.? Looks like your conversions column in
the dashboard is a single value (much like AdWords unfortunately). Along with
this, how do you handle logic for things like LTV that could enable an
advertiser to bid much more aggressively?

5\. How well do you integrate with other platforms? For example, a search
agency might want to use one thing, but might have to nest their tracking
links in a DFA link that a display agency sends them.

Thanks!

~~~
shostack
Also, would be really curious to learn your story for why you decided to start
AdStage, and what the steps are like for creating a bid management platform
(that also handles display) from scratch. I imagine it might be fairly capital
intensive up front given the engineering costs and the likely commitments
required from networks/exchanges to integrate.

------
byoung2
_Still in beta, AdStage’s software-as-a-service in the past three months has
seen $25 million of ad spending flowing through it._

That is very impressive for a beta! Of the 16 employees (and 10 more on the
way), what is the breakdown of engineers, sales, support, management?

~~~
sahilio
17 people now, 11 engineers. All on our team page
[http://www.adstage.io/company/team](http://www.adstage.io/company/team).
Thanks for the kind words! Similar proportion of dev to biz as we grow as
well.

~~~
byoung2
Quite an impressive team! I expect to see great things from you guys in the
years to come!

------
fumar
I am looking for a tool that improves on double click search's automatic
bidding. It looks like AdStage has some automatic bidding rules. But it is not
a as robust as double click search, as far as I can tell from the landing
page. I would love to try this, but I would have to continue using double
click as back up. Which means to me its not ready yet.

------
cm2012
I use AdStage for LinkedIn. It adds another way of looking at the data - still
missing some key features for me, like dayparting on LinkedIn. It was nice to
be able to serve dark posts before it was allowed on LinkedIn overall, and the
ability to exclude geographies is also useful.

~~~
sammmer
Thanks for being a user! Dayparting is now available for LinkedIn and other
networks through the just released Automated Rules app. More info here
[http://www.adstage.io/features/automation](http://www.adstage.io/features/automation)

------
calbear81
Interesting, would I be correct in saying that this is like Kenshoo / Marin
but with more of a IFTTT approach vs. using complicated portfolio bidding
algorithms to make decisions? I like the flat fee per month vs. % of budget.

------
brown
Congrats to Sahil and co. Great team, great product.

~~~
sahilio
thanks man! just getting started...

------
twrkit
congrats!

incoming Google acquisition in 3... 2... 1... :)

------
aggronn
Curious, why not integrate with Rubicon, etc in particular?

------
jonshariat
Wow putting IFTTT capabilities into Ad marketing is huge.

~~~
sahilio
We're excited about it! It's a great format.

