Michael McEuen, Director of Demand Generation at AdStage and Nicholas Lemieux, Director of Marketing at Jebbit , sat down to talk about the importance of having an efficient ad tech stack. As they both have years of experience working with full-stack marketing technology, watch the full webinar where they share strategies and their top choice of tools to optimize ad campaigns.

The webinar covers the following topics: pre-click and post-click ad technology, how to aggregate your existing ad solutions, best practices for efficient spend allocation, and solutions for measurement. It is then followed by an in-depth Q&A session where our experts share their experiences using a variety of ad tech solutions.

Full-Stack Technology

Pre-click and post-click technology work together to complete your marketing funnel. For example, you could use a pre-click solution to engage users and and a post-click solution to nurture them through an experience that will lead to conversion. To ensure that clicks become customers, it is important to design your tech stack with the right tools that meet your goals. The most important thing to consider when choosing tools is productivity and efficiency: how to accomplish more with less. Let’s take a deeper dive into the tools that can help you be more efficient.

Aggregating Your Existing Ad Solutions

Consolidating your top performing PPC channels can be accomplished through a number of different solutions. AdStage, for example, integrates multiple ad networks and data sources to give you one place to create, manage, and optimize campaigns. This saves time, optimizes the budget for the best conversion yield, and gives you the best return on ad spent. In addition, depending on your URL tagging philosophy, conversion tracking, which a must for evaluating performance, can automatically be appended and measured in a single conversion column in AdStage.

Best Practices for Efficient Spend Allocation

Taking a scientific approach by testing various elements of your ad campaigns will help you understand what is and isn’t working. Realized revenue is more important than just leads and the value of the business impact is what matters most. Do not hesitate to get rid of things that aren’t working for you.

Solutions for Measurement

Evaluating the ROI of ad campaigns is what many CMOs focus on. Rather than obsessing over your online marketing metrics like impressions, website visitors, and bounce rate, you can consider whether or not you’re driving new business. A complete tech stack ties together your pre-click, post-click, and marketing automation system metrics. Technologies like AdStage and Jebbit take care of the heavy lifting in order to maximize the return on your ad campaigns.

Q&A

Q: What are your personal favorite tools? You mentioned that some of the pre-click technologies are more sophisticated. Is there one that you’ve found that is better than others?

Michael : Now that you can sync a bunch of APIs together, like segment.io, which are great from a recording standpoint. I think what you’re starting to see now in the Ad tech space, the ability to track things from a performance standpoint but actually make in line edits as well. you see more of these consolidations of that ad tech technology. I think that’s more of the cutting edge today.

Nicholas : I’m a big advocate for the AdStage platform because it saves me so much time from having to go create campaigns in each of those individual platforms and at the end of the week go crunch those numbers. That 8-10 hours we save I spend making content and video productions. It’s been super helpful.

Q: What is your system of truth to reporting? Do you report out of your marketing automation system, or somewhere else?

Nicholas : For the pre-click world, I use AdStage. I can log right in and on my dashboard I have all of my aggregate metrics across all of my channels, all of my conversions, and I can see in real time how they’re performing.

Michael : Recently we hooked our CRM, Salesforce, up to Hubspot. We’re learning a lot more about our users than we ever have. With that, we plan to do more personalized experiences. I’m really excited to take a look at Jebbit. I know it’s done great things for bigger brands. I’d love to see what they can do for some of our advertisers. At the end of the day, Salesforce is our end point for actual contracts being realized and revenue. Which all points back to our marketing automation system, which is Hubspot.

Q: What is a good indication that a technology for a specific marketing channel isn’t performing well and you should consider removing it from your stack?

Michael : Track everything through in the very early stages. After the first sale cycle you should have enough actionable data to better understand how things are performing. Once you have the attribution in place, then you get a full picture -more than just a surface level metrics- where to best invest your ad dollars.

Q: How are post-click marketing platforms different from A/B testing or landing page platforms?

Nicholas : I consider these a part of the post-click solution. But, they tend to lack the technology that can create interactive content or take your existing web pages and content and make it interactive, profile engaged consumers and also push that data back through your ad tech stack.

Q: Michael, have you used these types of platforms in the past? Both post-click vs A/B testing platforms for your landing pages?

Michael : As far as A/B testing, it’s great to reveal things. But, at the end of the day personalized content definitely provides the best experience for the user.When you start looking at true post-click experience, that’s where it’s based on what a type of person they are. Is it an overall better experience? We have seen those turn to higher overall conversion rates.

Nicholas : A/B testing is more of just a numbers game. For start-up, small, or medium sized marketers that don’t quite have that sample size, personalized post-click experiences can be a lot more effective to really come to conclusions.

Have even more questions for Nicholas or Michael for their recommendations on ad tech solutions? Ask them in the comments section below!