Earlier this week, we showed the AdStage Platform to the world for the first time. Many of the companies at launch are already signed up to get early access and we expect many more sign ups in the coming days. We wanted to cover the basics of the Platform to quickly show how it can help you with your ad campaigns.

Building ad campaigns is a time consuming and tedious process. Assuming you have a basic understanding of your company's goals and the places you can advertise, you will generally start by deciding to use one or more networks - Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook, and Linkedin.

For each network, you'll go into the network-specific interface and set up everything that goes into an ad campaign - ad creatives, targeting, budget, and schedule; and you'll check back into that network frequently to view metrics and optimize your performance by making changes to your campaign.

There's no need to do all that, especially if managing online ad campaigns is how you spent 5-10% of your time, rather than 90% of your time. The Platform takes a different approach. Instead of managing campaigns on the different networks through their particular interfaces, now you have just one place to build, launch, and manage cross-network ad campaigns.

Campaign creation

Once you've selected the networks you wish to run ad campaigns on and the campaign's main language, the skeleton of your cross-network campaign will actually be built across all the networks you select.

You won't have to go in separately to cater to each network's strengths, because you can customize ads and targeting for each network within the AdStage Platform. Following campaign creation, you go straight into building your ads.

Ad creation

You'll notice three key pieces to the ads page below - recommendations, ad creation fields, and ad previews.

You'll want to start by checking the recommendations to give you an idea about what your competitors are doing and how you might want to differentiate.

Then you'll create you base ad with a headline, a good description and image of your product/service relevant to this particular campaign, your display URL, and a destination URL.

Ad Creation - edit your copy, images, display URLs, and destination URLs

Lastly, you may want to customize your ad for each network. Because networks are different, you may have slightly different messages for the audiences on each network. By clicking on the ad previews to the right of your base ad, you'll be able to "fine tune" your ads for each network - customizing your ad headline, ad description, image, display URL, and destination URL. You can also unselect the ad from any network if your particular ad is directed only toward certain networks.

Fine tuning - customize ads for each network

You've created an ad, and now you probably want to build more ads, or you want to move onto targeting. If you choose to add a few more ads with different copy or a new image, you can do that quickly from the ads list page. Once you're satisfied with your ad/ads, the next step is targeting.

Quickly edit, duplicate, and delete any of your ads

Targeting & Keywords