SearchFest 2016 Mini-Interview: Frederick Vallaeys

Frederick Vallaeys is speaking on PPC at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I joined Google in 2002 when there were about 400 employees to translate AdWords into Dutch (I was born in Belgium). I was one of the founders of the AdWords Editor, worked on Quality Score for many years, and helped acquire Urchin (now Google Analytics).

In 2012 when there were about 40,000 employees, I decided it was time for a change so I left Google and started doing AdWords consulting. I quickly found there weren’t enough hours in my day to do all the housekeeping work necessary to keep an AdWords account healthy so I started to look for ways to automate. I found the existing tools to be too expensive or too limited in their capabilities so I leveraged my engineering background to build my own automations with Scripts.

That led me to cofound Optmyzr, where we offer our customers prebuilt AdWords Scripts as well as many other time-saving tools to manage PPC accounts.

2) What would you tell people who say, “AdWords Scripting looks really useful but I’ve never done any coding before”?

If you know how to copy-and-paste, you can use AdWords Scripts. But the real power of Scripts is that you can make your own edits to the code to make it do exactly what you want. It’s custom automation without all the overhead and complexity of the Ads API.

You can make very simple changes like add a new metric to a report, or do some very advanced things like build complex bidding rules. In most cases, you can leverage the code someone else has already written so that you save yourself many hours of coding. And if you don’t know how to program, you can still customize the code with a find-and-replace action for example.

3) My biggest fear about scripts is the nagging feeling that making everything automatic causes me to lose my “feel” for the account and that something important might not get done due to an imperfect understanding of what the script is supposed to do. How do you respond?

That’s a legitimate fear so I recommend you use automation as a tool to assist you rather than a tool to replace you. In fact, if you leverage the right type of automation, you can save many hours that you’d otherwise be stuck doing repetitive tasks and use this newfound time to work on new strategies, run experiments, etc.

Here’s an example, if you were to manually do A/B testing for ads or calculating account level Quality Scores, you’d spend hours just downloading the data, putting into Excel, and processing it before you got something useful. With Scripts, you can offload all the processing so that when you arrive at the office, the spreadsheets are ready for your review and then you can spend the whole day acting on your findings rather than waiting for reports to download.