Phil Byrne 0:00
Hi, welcome to Positively Sparking, a podcast on internet marketing, online productivity and business. Hi, today I’m with Guilliame Devinat, the founder of Opteo an AdWords automation tool that helps you create profitable Google Pay per click campaigns quickly. Hi Guilliame, welcome to the podcast.
Guilliame Devinat 0:24
Hey, how you doing?
Phil Byrne 0:25
Very good indeed, we’re excited to have you here today, you’re one of the founders of an app that we use quite a lot. So for those of us who don’t know you, just tell us who you are and what you do.
Guilliame Devinat 0:36
Sure, So I’m one of the founders of Opteo, and we work on AdWords automation tools. So specifically, a lot around day to day optimization that you would do within an AdWords account, we believe that there’s a lot that can kind of be helped or even just automated the machines, and that can kind of free up your time to do some of the higher priority tasks, and some of the more strategic level stuff.
Phil Byrne 1:08
Great stuff. And so this must mean that you at some point got into the world of AdWords, it became something that you discovered in a different way perhaps, how did how did you get into it?
Guilliame Devinat 1:17
Yeah. So this is bringing me back to university days as a naive and probably overly optimistic kid, probably 18 years old, and I knew that fairly early on, I was I was pretty fascinated with the idea of the web, and having kind of discovered that and I started thinking about building businesses and kind of tried and failed the whole bunch at various attempts to basically make money online, you know is a pretty common story kind of started there and kind of learned my way. App and traffic in particular, I had a particular fascination for, because I just kind of felt a little bit like a video game almost or the there was a lot of dials a lot of controls, and it felt like, if I spent enough time and I learned enough, and I spoke and hang out on forums enough, maybe I could figure out this thing, it’s something that appealed to me is something that I could learn and grow into, and kind of beat the system. And as I discovered, that’s not really the way it all happens. But that was the beginning.
Phil Byrne
Very good. And so you mentioned two things, which I think are really important. Number one is, you have this entrepreneurial spirit. So you’re there at college and you’re fascinated by the internet, and you can see something there that you want to be part of. The second thing was that you tried lots of different things, which failed, and we’ve all been there. That’s all part of our journey.
Guilliame Devinat
Yeah, I think it’d be problematic if you didn’t.
Phil Byrne 3:09
Agreed, but then there was something that kept you going, and eventually…
Guilliame Devinat 3:13
Eventually I needed or I was graduating and I needed to tell my parents that I wasn’t going to get a job. And so that kind of sped up my process, and I kind of jumped into whatever I could get and AdWords was kind of the hard skill that I had kind of pieced together and I kind of hustled my way into a couple of like, consulting deals in AdWords and that’s where I really dove deep and started fixing other people’s businesses or specifically the acquisition side of other businesses. So that’s kind of the tail end of my acceleration into the AdWords world Phil.
Phil Byrne 4:00
Great. Fantastic. So when you’re doing that, you’re working on these other businesses, running their AdWords accounts, and you must be realising there’s a common theme to what you’re doing, regardless of whatever business they may have, which then makes you realise there’s an opportunity for an app?
Guilliame Devinat 4:19
Correct, you’ve guessed well. I mean it wasn’t quite as smooth as I wish it was it took a couple of iterations to get here. The first core problem that we attacked was actually like a conversion tracking problem. Like time and time again, maybe it was a little too focused on some of the analytical side and the data analysis side, like that was the piece that I really enjoyed and wanted to stick to and I was routinely frustrated at how a lot of businesses just didn’t have their conversion tracking dialled in and we wanted to fix that problem, and turns out that it’s a very difficult problem that we moved away from. And other businesses have kind of stepped in, there might be segment.io or there’s a couple of other things. But largely, it’s still not an exact science.
Phil Byrne 5:20
It’s not, and you get into this, you know one of the problems with conversion tracking is attribution, isn’t it? It’s really difficult to, unless someone clicks from an ad, whether it’s on Google or Facebook or whatever it is and buys immediately, then we always have this problem of what influence did our advertising have?
Guilliame Devinat 5:43
100%? And so having grown and evolved in this space, the truth is, is that it really is part art part science, and as much as the science piece is very attractive, because it feels very like repeatable and solid, there’s definitely like, an art piece to it. Yeah, but going back to having gone after trying to fix conversion tracking, eventually, we kind of realised that there was still a lot of things that were just taking up a lot of my time, and a lot of the people that I worked with, a lot of their time too around data analysis, and there were a lot of tasks that just felt like, they could be evolved into something more pleasant, something more simple, something more productive. And that was just kind of where the idea was born, and quite quickly people recognise that like, ‘hey, wow, I do every day’. Oh, my God, that’s, that’s really cool.
Phil Byrne 6:50
Just one thing you said that I just want to go back to, which was the idea of, it is much an art as it is a science. And I thought that was a really interesting point, because I agree with you there. And I think the reason all marketing has to be a mix of the two is because really, that’s what we are as humans, No one’s 100% scientific.
Guilliame Devinat 7:13
Sure, I hadn’t actually thought about it that way but yeah
Phil Byrne 7:16
It has to reflect those. But having seen Opteo grow, from its early days as that is, it feels like it’s the scientific side of that equation that you focused on?
Guilliame Devinat 7:28
That’s totally correct. Because automating the artistic side is I think kind of doomed, in a way or at least, I haven’t seen it yet. There are other start-ups trying to do like natural language processing and automated ads, or semi-automated ads and creative, and I can’t say that I’m particularly convinced yet, or even same thing with, you know, unless you’re dealing with a very predictable business. There are other sides, like, account structure, and certainly in some of the more human bits around client communication, there is still and I kind of believe, always going to be a human component to AdWords work., and so what we want to do is kind of get the rest out of the way so that you can focus on those high impact human bits,
Phil Byrne 8:30
Which is a great way to describe, I think what you have there in Opteo, the scientific parts are made much simpler for you, because you’re showing them there as improvement, and the artistic side, is there for us to go and play with, because really the artistic side is the play part, isn’t it?
Guilliame Devinat 8:49
It is, and it’s one that I think that if you don’t kind of take away some of these really time consuming pieces, which are essential, they need to get done. But the question is, where do you spend your time. And I think that, for example, writing a really good ad, really takes a little bit, more so than time it also takes some mind space you need to have some space to engage your creative side a little bit, and so it’s really hard to do if you got to crank through like 20 campaigns to figure out your geo bit ads or whatever optimization going through the search query report or running statistical analysis on your ad testing and figuring out which ads to pause. I kind of believe that it can kind of give almost a false sense of productivity almost. So it can be a little risky to believe that Is the AdWords work, it’s definitely one component of it, but then we can’t neglect the other bits.
Phil Byrne 10:10
Absolutely. So one of my questions on our sheet before we chatted, was what will Opteo people do in running their AdWords accounts, and one thing that’s come out of you Guilliame already is this idea that we’re going to look after everything that scientific, so you can give yourself that headspace to be artistic.
Guilliame Devinat 10:33
Yeah, certainly. I mean, I don’t know if Artistic necessarily the perfect word, but certainly the best way I have to describe it as some of the more like human components. So be it like ad writing, or let’s say that you’re doing AdWords work for a client, for example, I would say, spend your time talking to your client about who their clients are. And dig a little bit deeper into the business, dig into the target demographics shoes, do some more research, do a little bit more competitor analysis, figure out, what are the common angles, review your account structure, play with or experiment with new campaign ideas that maybe could unlock a whole new pool of keywords and then traffic and conversions. All of this kind of requires that you’ve got the basics down. I guess in another way to kind of, maybe try and explain, what we’re trying to do is setting a new minimum for, like we don’t really want people to worry about some of these bits that can be largely automated, I say largely because you still want to retain control and still want to make sure that everything’s good. I also kind of don’t believe in taking humans completely out of the equation, even for some of the scientific bits. At least not yet. Maybe we’ll get there one day.
Phil Byrne 12:16
Is it not a scary day?
Guilliame Devinat 12:18
Yeah things do change. The day where it’ll feel completely normal to a generation to have self-driving cars will be an interesting day. And maybe we’ll have some people that say, well back in my day, we used to do our optimizations manually. But we’ll see.
Phil Byrne 12:38
We’ll see indeed. So you built Opteo on a specific theory of AdWords, and AdWords is such a vast tool now that we have these different methods and these different ways of doing things that people have, and the approach you’ve taken is based on the alpha beta method. So tell us a bit about that.
Guilliame Devinat 12:58
That’s definitely one of the methods, I wouldn’t really say that there’s definitely like typical account structures. I actually in the process of kind of writing an updated 2018 version of that, because I have some modifications to the alpha beta methods to propose, after seeing a lot and a lot in a lot of accounts that I can kind of give you a sneak peek of now. Which is that basically, I think there’s a tendency to undervalue simplicity in an account, so the alpha beta method is fairly intricate, and there’s human error can kind of come in, and you might forget to remove a negative or apply a negative to the wrong, especially if you’re doing this day in and day out, and especially if you’re doing this across many accounts, it’s going to happen that is going to get a little bit messy basically. And another thing that I’ve seen happen with a very traditional alpha beta method is that they can be like, I’ve just kind of seen this, what ends up happening is that there’s an overall loss of traffic sometimes, so you might say, like isolate a keyword into an alpha campaign. I don’t know if we want to give a quick recap on what it is but, when you isolate, I think you can probably look it up if you want to, there’s a bunch of articles if you just Google like alpha beta method AdWords, but if you isolate a keyword and then you negative it, across your beta campaigns. Overall, I am not 100% certain that you are guaranteed better results. Instead, and specifically the piece that I find to be sometimes a little harmful is that negative piece, that’s the piece that’s complicated. And can sometimes result in a loss of volume. So what I still believe in very much, which is part of the alpha beta method, is the idea of isolating a keyword into its own single keyword ad group, and writing an ad specific to that keyword. So that I completely believe in, it’s just the piece of around like, then force all the traffic through that ad group by negativing. I don’t know if that’s really a verb, but by applying a negative across all the other campaigns, I think that’s overcomplicating it. So I think now that I’ve spent even more time and quite a lot more time speaking to account managers speaking to agencies, reviewing a bajillion accounts, I feel fairly confident that basically, and you can kind of almost break it down, where if you’re going to take one of your best keywords, right? Because typically you’re going to do an alpha for a very good keyword, and then you’re going to be kind of swinging that around as a negative in the account but that’s pretty dangerous. So that’s kind of my updated version. But yeah, the core principle of you, you have a pool of keywords that you’re trying out and bit by bit, kind of like a putting something through a sieve, you’re figuring out what works, and you’re neatly organising what works into a little container into a little unit called a single keyword ad group. That’s still very much I think still quite smart and effective.
Phil Byrne 16:50
And I understand what you’re saying there, and I think some of this is also changed because of the way AdWords has evolved. Brought in different ways of doing things brought in better optimization within itself, so AdWords is better now at optimizing our campaigns for conversions, and it was four or five years ago, which to think is maybe when you started, does that sound about right?
Guilliame Devinat 17:16
Yeah, that does sound about right. I remember there was this question of like, what have I seen change in AdWords? Is that the path we want to go down right now? Or are we going to ask another question there?
Phil Byrne 17:29
Yeah, sure, go down that path, you tell us what you feel has changed?
Guilliame Devinat 17:33
Well, the funny thing is, I actually think not that much. I know that we like to, I guess as an industry, there’s definitely a lot of news around changes we like to kind of keep up with the changes that happen, which I think is a fairly natural and healthy habit, but I don’t think they’re very big changes. And I am a guy who very much believes in sticking to the fundamentals of what AdWords is, and I don’t yet see many changes to the fundamentals of the dynamic of someone searching for something, and then being served for them for their query. So in my time, in my relatively short time, obviously, there’s been the extended text ads was a thing, and then recently there was that whole budget thing around, are we going to spend beyond our daily budget? And how is that going to work out in a monthly budget, and there was the whole like exact match is no longer really exact match. Obviously the big shift in the new interface change, but I still don’t really see that as necessarily big changes to AdWords.
Phil Byrne 18:53
Because what will you saying is the idea of people searching for things being shown ads, and on who’s optimizing for and discovering the best keywords for our business Based on solid conversion tracking, that’s the same for you.
Guilliame Devinat 19:08
Yeah, very much. For example, I think something that could be a little bit bigger than all of this, which I haven’t really seen, you know there’s obviously people on forums or publications that they always kind of post a screenshot of the search query report, where you start seeing like, some voice searches from like a Google Home or people using voice assistants to search for things. Like that could be quite interesting. That might be a little bit of a shift of like, I should probably think about that. Kind of in the same way that mobile used to be kind of annoying to cater to mobile, whereas now, I think everybody kind of understands and has the ingrained behaviour ourselves to search for things on mobile, and to care for the mobile experience. So maybe voice is going to be a thing. Again, I think we still have some time before we need to prepare for that. But I would see that as like a behaviour shift and something worth spending and time and consideration
Phil Byrne 20:12
And development time for Opteo, should that happen.
Guilliame Devinat 20:18
Yeah, absolutely.
Phil Byrne 20:20
Right. So do you believe me from everything you’ve seen? Do you believe that AdWords and Opteo can work for any business?
Guilliame Devinat 20:28
I think it probably be pretty silly. If I said, Yes. I think there’s most likely cases where it wouldn’t be a very good fit. As general rules of thumb, So I definitely think that my answer would be most, Yes, I think that AdWords can work and then by extension, optimizing those accounts in a productive and nicer fashion using Opteo, I think for a lot of businesses that can work. The quick rules of thumb are Opteo is obviously a very data driven piece of software, so there needs to be some data there for it to make recommendations. So, a lot of people are kind of, like usually ask, okay so how much do I need to be spending? In reality, there’s not necessarily a bad question to ask, but it’s not so much about the spend as it is about the volume of traffic or of impressions and clicks. So if you’re in an industry where you have 50 cent or 50 P, CPCs, it’s very different to another industry that has, say eight pounds or $8, or $12. And so typically we find that at least like a few, it’s really hard to give an exact figure, but you’d want to be in, at least in the several hundred bare minimums. And I think that kind of makes sense. Primarily, we don’t yet help you build an account from scratch, that’s definitely something that we’re looking at, right. But if you’re absolutely brand new and starting, you probably won’t find that much use for Opteo, once you have something up and running, and you want, help maintaining it and optimizing it, and then feeling secure and good about that. Then Opteo comes into play. So there’s that. And then there’s, AdWords, when people say AdWords, they typically think of search, but AdWords obviously has display, it has YouTube, it has Gmail, has Shopping, shopping is something that’s currently very much on the cards and in development. Display is also something that we help with quite well that we’re pretty thorough about this leaves Gmail and YouTube, which are kind of different beasts. And we have yet to tackle. So I’d say it’s pretty rare that an account has primarily YouTube and Gmail traffic, but I’m sure it can happen. So these are some of the current boundaries of Opteo, The data piece and the channels within the AdWords network.
Phil Byrne 23:09
Definitely so, one of the toughest things, I would say, for someone using Opteo to get used to, is when people ask about budgets, and one of the things that you promote is this idea that there should be no budget on the campaign provided what we spend as a positive return on investment. And that I think, is tough for any small business to get hold of. Is that something that you see continuing as an Opteo recommendation?
Guilliame Devinat 23:41
That’s interesting, I do believe that there’s definitely, if you don’t necessarily know a lot about AdWords, you’re going to stick to the, to the very basic building blocks of how the system works, which might be money in money out. And this question of budget sounds very important. And, of course, like if you’re going to outsource your AdWords channel to an agency, that’s definitely something that needs to be spoken about expectations around how much money in, and also how much money how much money out do we think, right? So it’s definitely important, but in the actual practice of investing that money, I am still very much on board with follow the performance. So, I definitely believe that within a global budget, it should be kind of fairly fluid based on what’s working, if that makes sense.
Phil Byrne 24:48
Yeah, absolutely.
Guilliame Devinat 24:50
Yeah, but I don’t really believe that budgets should always be unlimited. Certainly not. I mean, that very which is a business, I consider that to be a little bit outside of AdWords around, well, what’s their marketing budget? how is it split up between the various marketing channels? So in that sense, I don’t necessarily believe in an unlimited budget, and so
Phil Byrne 25:19
Good to know, and a lot of that comes down to cash flow, doesn’t it? There’s a difference between profitability and cash flow. And different businesses receive money at different times. So some businesses will do a transaction and the money straight into their account. But if it’s a service based business, then the spend may have happened on AdWords, but their income maybe two, three months ahead in the future, we can pay attention that that process of cash flow
Guilliame Devinat 25:47
Yeah, specific to small business. Absolutely. That’s definitely super-duper important.
Phil Byrne 25:53
Definitely so, which is actually, with us as an agency, this is actually one of the areas that an AdWords account can get into difficulties, it’s not right to say what’s gone wrong, because of cash flow. But it becomes a factor for a business that grows because they want more things and the need to cash flow that. What other things do you find are the most common areas where AdWords accounts go wrong?
Guilliame Devinat 26:23
There’s a lot that can go wrong. Maybe we could start with the macro before the micro. Obviously what I want to specify what I mean by micro is all of the kind of waste that occurs in an account, and that’s very much what Opteo is around for fighting that that waste and then to maximize the efficiency of an account. So beyond micro, of which there’s, again, a lot there’s usually lots of stale ad tests and lots of kind of opportunities that have been missed, or mistakes that are kind of lurking underneath, and have yet to be discovered. But beyond that, I know I touched on this earlier, I think that AdWords accounts can go quite wrong when they’re overcomplicated. I think again, there’s this desire kind of like the mad scientist with a lab coat kind of feeling of, Oh, my God, I have so many dials and controls, I’m going to create the world’s most sophisticated and best AdWords account, here we go, let’s get out the Excel spreadsheet and get the macros out and build this monster. And then eventually it gets rebuilt by another agency, and you end up with this Frankenstein thing that kind of works, where you’re a little bit afraid to touch certain bits of it. And I think there’s a general undervaluing of simplicity in an account. So that’s something that I that I actually see quite frequently is this overbuilding a little bit too quickly, before again, I touched on this, again, is not spending enough time on the fundamentals and on things that we feel are pretty secure to pursue and to start with, that might seem not as practical. This is relating to another question of like, were you to start today, where do you start and I would say start with some of the bits that are, don’t try and get too clever, don’t try and stick with the things that are probably going to work. So like a classic example of this is if you’re starting to account, there’s a desire to hunt for the low CPCs, right, you’re always trying to find the cheap clicks, that’s something that very, very quickly comes as an idea. And I would actually advocate for the opposite, and say go for the expensive clicks, those are the ones that are that are proven to work, those are the ones that other people are making money out of. And so I would I would start with that. And another example around this is around keyword selection, And the idea that, again, there’s a desire to be quite sophisticated and to think laterally and create some things and again, I would say start with the things that are quite obvious. Right? So you know, I don’t really have an offhand example, but let’s imagine for example, you’re doing lead gen for an electrician, and so before you get into, hey, my light bulbs or my circuits don’t look quite right or you know, search terms like that. Start with electrician followed by postcode or location, if that makes sense. It does, like start with things that are really obvious and quite descriptive of again, you got to imagine that somebody else is typing this and they going to see your ad and then go to your website, and does that experience match exactly what they’re looking for? Or is it kind of loose? And if it’s loose? I don’t start with that stuff.
Phil Byrne 30:14
Definitely right. And I think two things from an agency point of view that you so right in saying, things that make everything more complicated, is when we open an account, for a client, and they be setting up themselves or someone else do it with too much thought. It’s just so intimidating to see 100 campaigns with two or three ad groups in each one. And not anywhere near enough spend to justify 100 campaign, and then no one is getting enough data to make any decisions, which are going to be that positive, is just wrong
Guilliame Devinat 30:54
I’m totally used to do this myself earlier on, I used to have things segmented four different ways. And I had my US slash, gender slash age range, slash beta, right, like I had this broken out, and I would always tell myself that, well, it’s okay, because using the dimension’s tab and using tags, I can re aggregate the data and look at that. And really I feel like we forget that if we’re going to make it harder for us in the future, there’s going to be much less of a tendency to keep an eye on it and much less ease, seeing what’s going on. And that’s a very, very high cost to pay for. Probably, in reality, quite little benefit.
Phil Byrne 31:47
That’s exactly it, and it’s really looking at that, isn’t it? how much time do we have to manage our AdWords account? And What benefit do we gain from introducing complexity? because once it’s there, it’s going to take time to work with
Guilliame Devinat 32:03
Very much.
Phil Byrne 32:05
Great stuff. So what lies ahead for both yourself and Opteo?
Guilliame Devinat 32:11
I think we’re going to continue what we’re doing, and specifically, I think that there’s some opportunity on the shopping side, like I mentioned, that’s something that we’re interested in, that we want to cover, we also want to explore, again coming back to science versus art or science versus human, we want to explore enabling some of that, that human side. So you were in discussion, and we’re talking a lot about the fundamentals of client reporting, for agencies to clients and that relationship, and how to how to build things around that. That can help. And then back to the science side, I think that we’ve done a pretty good job at covering a lot of the bases. But to go deeper, I think we’re going to need to look at tailoring our algorithms to the different business models that tend to exist with AdWords. So this might be E-commerce versus lead gen. Things like that, maybe certain verticals. So digging a little bit deeper, and optimizations that are slightly more specific to some of these things. Because we not all AdWords accounts are born equal. And certainly not all web businesses, they tend to fall within, at a minimum, certain buckets that that we can cater to a little bit differently.
Phil Byrne
I think that is a great idea. So to develop Opteo to the point where we can say this is an E commerce business. and that you’re looking for sales turnover, as a conversion to metric again, whereas lead generation is much different. It’s really just the beginning of a longer funnel isn’t it? So I think that would be a great move. And there’s so many opportunities opening up in that, in that realm. in both senses, there’s more ecommerce businesses than ever before. And on a lead generation side, that industry is almost becoming service specific to life coaches right now are all jumping all over funnels and different ways of lead generation for themselves. And you can see how that would really work out well for you.
Guilliame Devinat
I mean, from my perspective, you can definitely identify patterns or certainly delineate some big puzzle pieces of the entire web business world. I think that’s kind of the general without revealing too much the general direction that we’re taking at the moment.
Phil Byrne 35:09
Great stuff. So Guilliame, it’s been a lot of fun chatting with you today about AdWords. From your perspective, it’s interesting to hear how you find the platform, from the other side of the fence from the outside as opposed to the agency side, just tell us where we can find you online.
Guilliame Devinat 35:24
You can shoot me an email, I know might be a little bit of a delay before I answer, but, but I do read, and certainly try to answer every email. So my email would be GuilIaume[at]opteo.com. Or another way to reach me is to go to opteo.com and use the intercom chat bubble at the bottom right. The probably be the two easiest ways to get in touch with me.
Phil Byrne 35:53
Right? So Opteo is still running a free trial, I believe.
Guilliame Devinat 35:58
That’s correct. Yeah. And with no intention to change that.
Phil Byrne 36:03
Great stuff. So if you’re running AdWords go along, give it a go. It’s a tool that we’ve used for a number of years now. And it’s a great way to help run your AdWords accounts. And any final message you have for everybody.
Guilliame Devinat 36:18
I mean, keep it up. But it’s a battle every day. But it sure is a lot of fun.
Phil Byrne 36:27
Taking us back to the idea of a game when you describe AdWords Great stuff. Well, thank you so much for being here today. It’s great to talk to the founder of something that we think is a great app. And I look forward to seeing the changes ahead in 2018.
Guilliame Devinat 36:48
Absolutely, we plan on having a lot of them.
Phil Byrne 36:55
This podcast was brought to you by Positive Sparks online advertising and pay per click agency for UK ecommerce businesses. If you would like three free tips on how to use pay per click to grow your business.
