SMX West 2018: Interview with Frederick Vallaeys

This interview is part of our SMX West expert interview series taking place between March 12th and 16th, 2018.

During our expert interview series at SMX West, we were able to sit down with AdWords expert Fred Vallaeys, CEO of Optmyzr. Fred is a good friend of ours, and a regular contributor to our annual Digital Predictions series – so we knew we just had to catch him between sessions. Luckily, Fred wanted to snap a photo with our robot friend Meccanoid, so he wasn’t too hard to find!

As a renowned PPC expert in the industry, Fred was a big part of SMX this year, participating in multiple talks throughout the conference, including ‘Faster & Smarter: Moving From Manual to Automated SEM Campaign Management’ and ‘SEM Tune-Up Clinic With The SMX Mechanics’ to help paid search marketers improve their campaign results through automation.

Check out what Fred had to say about Optmyzr, his experience at SMX, and what he thinks about Microsoft’s latest (surprisingly free) endeavor:

Transcript:

Chandal: Hi everyone, this is Chandal at SMX West 2018. Im here with Fred Vallaeys, CEO of Optmyzr. Thanks so much for taking a few minutes to talk with us today.

Fred: Thanks for having me!

Chandal: For anyone who doesn’t know, can you tell us a little bit more about Optmyzr?

Fred: We have a PPC tool , mostly for PPC experts to make managing accounts easier. We have anything from data insights to help you understand what is changing in your account and why to offering suggestions on optimizations that you can do to make your account better. We also do a lot of reporting and AdWords scripting. AdWords scripting I really love, that’s my session that I’m going to be talking about. A lot of people think you have to know how to program to do scripts, and we’ve taken a lot of the programming out of it so you can actually get started with custom automation without writing a single line of code. So that’s what Optmyzr does.

Chandal: So anyone interested in working with some custom automation but not feeling comfortable with that yet, definitely check out Optmyzr’s tool. What brings you this week to SMX West?

Fred: First of all, it’s in my backyard practically, so I drove here – it took me 20 minutes. Usually I have to fly across the world to get to a conference.

Chandal: We’re jealous!

Fred: A lot of people complain about the jet lag and being sleepy, I think the weather is not helping – this feels a lot like SMX Advanced with the rain we’re having. But what brings me here.. I’m going to be talking about automation and really how to get started with automation, kind of leading into scripts. Also, how you frame the question for your organization – like when should you automate, what should you automate, are there people you need to hire to be able to automate? Sort of giving people a thought process around it.

Chandal: Definitely. There’s been a lot of great data, a lot of great insights coming out of SMX West this week for PPC marketers and marketers in general. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve heard about so far?

Fred: I went to a session about tool vendors. Very good tools like Acquisio, Optmyzr being mentioned, but the one thing that I really hadn’t seen in the past was Microsoft, who has a BI solution which from what they said doesn’t actually cost any money (which is pretty amazing!). You can do live dashboards and what’s exciting for me about that is the fact that we have all these tools and automations but they tend to be relatively cookie cutter in a way, so you get bound to what the vendor gives you. With BI dashboards, you can really start formulating the questions how you want to ask them and get the answers the way you like to get them. Anytime there is a new vendor in that space or a new technology that makes it really easy. That kind of gets me excited. A couple of months ago, I tried Data Studio, that was the free solution from a big vendor Google. I’m curious now about what Microsoft is doing to have that comparison against Data Studio.

Chandal: Stay tuned in the coming months, we’ll see what Microsoft is up to and how that plays out in the field. We really appreciate you taking a few minutes to talk to us today, Fred. Thanks so much.

Fred: My pleasure!

Stay tuned for more coverage of SMX West to come!

Image Credits

Feature Image: Unsplash/Anthony Airoldi

Video property of Acquisio by Web.com