Recently, we were lucky enough to have a chat with David Miles, CEO of The PPC Machine. 

The PPC Machine is a digital marketing consultancy, that works with mortgage brokers and financial advisors to help them generate more of their own leads using Google Ads. 

Offering more than just PPC management, David provides education and training to his clients, helping them learn about all things PPC, email marketing, lead generation and more. And the tool that David uses, and recommends his clients use, for PPC management? 

You got it, it’s Adzooma. 

“I see it as a good safety net”

Working with Google Ads since 2003, and training hundreds of businesses himself, it’s clear that David knows a thing or two about PPC. 

So, what is it about Adzooma that David likes? 

“Regardless of how long you’ve been using pay per click, there’s a hell of a lot of things to do and to keep an eye on and to be checking and optimising on a daily or weekly basis. And what I like about Adzooma is that it’s able to automate quite a number of things for you. 

“For example, rather than having to check all the time whether I’m in danger of going over a monthly budget for an account, you can have the automation to make sure that that doesn’t happen, but if you do it shuts everything down. 

“And I see it as well as quite a good backstop if there’s something I’ve forgotten to check myself, then the performance reports are going to flag that up and say you’ve missed this.

“I see Adzooma as a good safety net for some of that human error that can inevitably creep in when you’re trying to do lots of things at once.”

We’re sure that’s something every business can appreciate.

“It’s worth way more than saving an hour”

Depending on the size of your campaigns and the number of clients, David says that “Adzooma can easily save you five hours a week”. 

But it’s not about the time that Adzooma saves by applying optimisations, “it’s that avoidance of missing things as well”, David continues. 

“Adzooma is also helping you avoid missing something important, or helping you spot an opportunity that you wouldn’t have spotted otherwise. In a way, that’s worth more than saving an hour of your time”. 

The time saved can then be put to better use “for coming up with new ad copy, or coming up with ideas for things you can change on a landing page”. 

“You’ve got one person trying to basically do what they actually were trained to do, which is give mortgage advice or sell pensions or whatever it is, and yet they’re also expected to be the head of marketing as well. 

“It’s so, so easy to forget to look at your Ads campaigns or any other aspect of your marketing so I think having that the backstop is always more important there. Having that kind of virtual assistant in the background that keeps your eye on things when you’re not there is helpful”. 

“Adzooma’s recommendations are much better than Google’s”

David compares Adzooma to a safety net, which is a great expression. At Adzooma, we’ve always believed in giving users the tools and information they need to grow their business and succeed with their advertising. 

One of these tools is our personalised optimisation recommendations, called Opportunities. Scanning your account, whether it’s a spelling mistake that has slipped through the cracks or pausing keywords that aren’t performing as well. 

When we asked David about these recommendations, he said that they were much better than Google’s own. 

“The danger with any kind of automation is if you just blindly accept everything,” David warned. Although the data might be recommending one thing, it’s up to you to have that final judgement to evaluate the decision as, “at the end of the day you can never override a human’s intelligence and knowledge of their own campaigns”.

Talking about Google recommendations, he explains that “a large percentage of them I tend to ignore because I know if I implement them, it’s going to make the performance worse, or it’s going to put more money in Google’s pocket than in mine or the client’s. 

“It’s definitely better to have a third party recommendation rather than what Google Ads recommends because they’re always going to have a conflict of interest”. 

Using Adzooma removes that conflict of interest. We’ve got nothing to gain if you increase spend or apply optimisations. We just want you to get the best from your campaigns, and will only suggest the best recommendations to help you achieve that. 

In addition, David remarks that because Adzooma’s recommendations are so easy to apply, “you can scale things more and you can probably get more junior people to do stuff that would otherwise have to be done by someone with more experience”, allowing people to save even more time while upskilling their staff. 

How does Adzooma stack up to competitors? 

With over a decade in the PPC industry, we asked David how Adzooma compared to other PPC tools and software out there.

Alongside Adzooma, only Opteo earned his attention, which David said was better at recommended bid adjustments, as they triggered more frequently in Opteo than they did in Adzooma. 

However, David said he preferred the reporting and the automation within Adzooma, stating that it had the edge when it came to usability and presenting the information. And one of the biggest selling points – Adzooma is free. 

“It’s $99 a month minimum for Opteo. So, there’s obviously a big difference between that and no cost at all”. 

Perhaps that’s why David refers his clients to Adzooma to manage their PPC campaigns.

We’ve loved speaking to David, and look forward to having more chats with our customers. If you want to hear what others had to say about Adzooma, take a look at: 

• Why Digital Marketing Manager Alejandra Perdomo calls Adzooma a “phenomenal platform”
• How freelancer Phil Bacon achieved an 1100% ROAS with Adzooma 
• How PPC Agency owner Phil Byrne uses Adzooma to streamline his business’ workflow
• The story of how Joshua Ivars Medina saves at least one day a week with Adzooma. 

Until next time.