AdStage unveils an API to help third-party apps integrate with its social ad platform

Social advertising management service AdStage has unveiled new tools and integrations designed to help it grow and become the de facto place where brands can build, manage, and optimize their ad campaigns. Included in today’s announcement is the launch of the company’s App Partnership Program and Platform API to help developers integrate their services with AdStage.

At least several new third-party applications have already been integrated into the platform — specifically, Wordtracker, Optimizely, and Unbounce. AdStage hopes that the release of its API will open the floodgates and motivate ad tech-related services to add support for its platform.

Since making its debut at the 2013 LAUNCH Festival, AdStage says that its business has been gaining traction. Company CEO Sahil Jain tells us that in the first four weeks, more than 1,100 ad accounts were linked to AdStage’s platform and was running more than 8,600 campaigns with some having total active daily budgets of more than $500,000.

To help the company grow, it has also secured $1 million in additional seed funding from its existing investor Digital Garage. Jain believes this will help it expand its engineering team, which ultimately could help it scale.

The industry has historically punished ‘ad tech’ companies because they were really agencies masquerading as tech companies. We’re ushering in a new era of ad technology and using this new capital to pour fuel on that fire, we’re aggressively hiring and pushing forward in full force.

Part of AdStage’s efforts to grow involve bolstering its developer credentials. It has begun laying the foundation for it with its first set of third-party apps, including one it created in-house called Ad Scrambler. This tool allows advertisers to create and conduct A/B testing on dozens of ad variations across multiple networks automatically. Other applications include Wordtracker’s keyword discovery app that lets you find relevant keywords to populate your paid search campaigns within AdStage, along with Unbounce and Optimizely, both which will allow marketers to build and test their landing pages to maximize revenue within the platform.

With regards to AdStage’s App Partnership Program and its API, developers are given the resources to build and manage their integrated apps. The company is opening up its platform for a “promotional beta price” of $99 per month, complete with a 30-day free trial. It claims that more than 6,000 businesses are on the wait list to date.

AdStage launched last year with a product it believed would be of incredible interest to marketers. It believed that current advertising workflows were inefficient — in order to manage campaigns on Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn required someone to log into multiple locations. AdStage believed the answer was consolidation. It allows advertisers to easily customize their messages for different audiences with a single data source.

Before launching its App Partnership Program, the company relied on charging five percent commission fees to businesses. Obviously now it has two different sources to monetize its platform.

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