When you’re evaluating a new PPC platform, the trial period is your best chance to find out whether it actually solves the problems you’re paying someone — or spending hours yourself — to fix manually.
Along with the features, you want proof that the tool can save you time, cut wasted spend, and make account management easier.
That’s why this guide focuses on the real questions PPC managers struggle with every day, like “Why did performance change?”, “Am I paying for irrelevant clicks?”, or “Are my ads really working?”
Each section shows how Optmyzr helps you answer those questions.
If you want the full set of self-serve onboarding modules (with step-by-step instructions), Optmyzr’s self-serve onboarding modules cover the same ground in more detail.
You can also check out our Optmyzr 101 video course via the below YouTube playlist links:
- Optmyzr 101 - Introduction and Housekeeping
- Optmyzr 101 - Monitoring Accounts
- Optmyzr 101 - Setting Up Alerts
- Optmyzr 101 - Competitor Analysis
- Optmyzr 101 - PPC Insights
- Optmyzr 101 - Utilities
Step 1: Get visibility across all your accounts
The question you’re answering: “What’s actually happening across everything I manage, right now?”
Most PPC managers spend the first 20 minutes of their day jumping between platform logins. The All Accounts Dashboard fixes that. It pulls performance data from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Yahoo Japan Ads into a single view, with the metrics that matter most — cost, impressions, clicks, avg CPC, ROAS, conversions, cost/conv, quality score — displayed side by side across all accounts.
To get the most out of it during your trial:
Star your most important accounts.
The star icon on the left of each row creates a filtered “starred” view that persists across sessions. Set this up once and it becomes your daily starting point.
Set monthly target budgets.
Hover over the Monthly Budget column to enter a target for each account. Once set, you can quickly see whether an account is under- or over-pacing against its target, review spend projections, and decide where to investigate further. If you want, you can also configure budget alerts to notify you when spending drifts off track.
Customize your columns and save the view.
Rearrange columns, apply filters, choose your preferred date range, and save the layout as a personal or shared team view. It’s an easy way to create one view for daily monitoring and another for client reporting
Look at the Suggestions column.
The number in the Suggestions column isn’t decorative. Clicking it shows the one-click optimizations Optmyzr has identified for that account — things like fixing conflicting negative keywords, adding missing RSA headlines, or resolving product feed errors. These are fast wins you can evaluate immediately without leaving the dashboard.
Check the Account Health column.
The color-coded health indicator quickly highlights accounts that need attention by surfacing issues like triggered alerts, disapproved ads, failed Optmyzr automations, or other account health checks. Instead of manually hunting for problems, you can immediately see which accounts deserve your attention first.
Use Ask AI to find accounts faster.
Instead of manually filtering long account lists, describe what you’re looking for in plain language and Ask AI filters and surfaces the relevant accounts for you. It’s particularly useful if you’re managing dozens or hundreds of accounts.
Voordeeluitjes, a travel platform managing 12,000+ holiday packages with a team of two, uses this kind of dashboard-first approach to catch performance issues across a large, seasonal inventory before they have time to compound.
Once inside a specific account, the Account Dashboard gives you a fuller picture. A few widgets worth checking immediately:
- PMax Channel Distribution — If you’re running Performance Max campaigns, this widget shows how your PMax budget is distributed across Shopping, Display, Video, and Other (Search, Discovery, Gmail, Maps). You can see which channels are actually driving conversions versus just consuming spend. Most advertisers are surprised by what they find.
- Top Competitors helps you understand which advertisers are competing with you across campaigns, ad groups, and keywords—not just the competitors Google highlights. You can also quickly spot new competitors entering your auctions
- PPC Vertical Benchmarks — Compares your key metrics (Avg CPC, CTR, Impression Share) against other accounts in your industry vertical. Useful context for knowing whether a 9% CPC increase is a problem in your account or an industry trend.
- Sidekick Summary — Before diving into reports, ask Sidekick to summarize your account. It highlights one key strength, one area for improvement, and a recommended next step, giving you a quick starting point for further investigation.
Step 2: Run Optmyzr Express
The question you’re answering: “What are the quickest improvements I can make right now?”
Optmyzr Express is the fastest way to review optimization opportunities across all of your accounts. Think of it as your daily PPC to-do list: instead of manually auditing every account, Express brings your highest-priority optimization tasks together in one place so you can review and act on them in minutes.
It surfaces opportunities across search, shopping, Performance Max, and social campaigns—from fixing conflicting negative keywords and improving RSA coverage to identifying budget constraints, underperforming ads, feed issues, placement exclusions, and more. Each recommendation includes the context behind the suggestion so you can decide whether to apply it, snooze it for later, or archive it if it isn’t relevant.
Most accounts have a handful of optimization opportunities that are easy to miss during day-to-day management. Running Express early in your trial gives you a quick way to uncover those opportunities without manually reviewing every campaign, ad group, or product feed.
For a full walkthrough of what Express covers and how optimizations are applied, see the Express optimizations guide.
Step 3: Set up your monitoring baseline
The question you’re answering: “How do I know when something goes wrong before my client does?”
Optmyzr’s alerting system is one of its most consistently useful capabilities. During your trial, getting this set up properly is worth prioritizing — it’s not glamorous, but it’s the kind of thing that saves relationships.
KPI alerts (daily)
From the Alert Settings page, you can set up KPI alerts for any metric — Impressions, Clicks, Cost, CPC, ROAS, Conversions, Cost/Conversion — across any account, campaign, or even at the keyword level. The alert fires when the metric deviates significantly from its historical average, or you can set a specific target threshold instead.
You can create these alerts in bulk across accounts for the same metric, which matters if you’re managing a portfolio. Set up three to five alerts per account — the ones you or your clients actually care about — not everything. It also lets you monitor performance at different levels—including accounts, campaigns, products, merchant feeds, bid strategies, and labels—depending on the platform you’re managing.
Alerts are available across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Amazon Ads, Meta Ads, Yahoo Japan Ads, and LinkedIn Ads, with notifications delivered by email or Slack.
Budget pacing alerts
If you’ve set a monthly target budget, Optmyzr can notify you when an account starts under- or over-pacing. You can also monitor budget thresholds, making it easy to catch overspend or underspend before it becomes a bigger issue. During your trial, setting up these alerts is a good way to see how Optmyzr helps you stay ahead of budget problems without constantly checking your accounts manually.
Hourly alerts via the Anomaly Detector script
For high-spend or time-sensitive accounts, Optmyzr can generate an Anomaly Detector script that checks your Google Ads account hourly for unexpected changes in key metrics. It’s particularly useful during seasonal promotions, product launches, or other periods when waiting until the next day could be too late.
Custom alerts via Rule Engine
The Rule Engine includes pre-built monitoring strategies for scenarios like disapproved ads, Quality Score changes, or search query trends. During your trial, it’s worth exploring these templates to see how they’re structured and testing them manually before deciding whether to automate them later. These are covered in more depth in the Rule Engine section below.
Step 4: Get budget control under your fingers
The question you’re answering: “Are we on track to hit our monthly target, and is the money going to the right campaigns?”
Budget management is one of the easiest areas to evaluate during your Optmyzr trial because you can quickly see whether your accounts are on pace, where spend is concentrated, and which campaigns may need budget attention.
Start with the Budget Control Center, which brings your main budget tools into one place: Budget Dashboard, Spend Projection, and Reallocate and Optimize Budgets. Instead of checking budget health across separate reports, you can monitor pacing, review projections, and evaluate budget opportunities from a single workflow.
Budget Dashboard
The Budget Dashboard gives you a centralized view of budget health across your accounts. You can see target budget, spend to date, remaining budget, spend projection, and current pacing in one place.
The Target vs. Actual Spend widget is especially useful during a trial. It shows whether your accounts are consistently spending above, below, or close to plan, helping you spot whether budget issues are isolated or part of a larger pattern.
You can also review day-of-week trends, media mix, top budgets, and budget monitoring details to understand how spend is distributed across campaigns, accounts, and platforms.
Spend Projection
Spend Projection helps you answer a simple but important question: “If performance continues like this, where will spend land by the end of the period?”
The tool uses recent spend patterns, historical trends, and seasonality to estimate expected, minimum, and maximum spend. This gives you a realistic range instead of a single forecast, so you can identify likely overspend or underspend early.
During your trial, use this to compare your current pacing against your monthly or selected budget period. You can also adjust the simulation budget inside the tool to see how different budget scenarios could affect projected spend.
Reallocate and Optimize Budgets
For accounts where budget needs to move between campaigns, use Reallocate and Optimize Budgets to see where spend may be underused and where additional budget could have more impact.
The tool can help you evaluate budget reallocation opportunities based on campaign performance, shared budgets, and your chosen optimization goal. During the trial, this is a good way to compare Optmyzr’s recommendations against your current manual budget review process.
For agencies or teams managing several accounts, the multi-account budget view can also help you review budget pacing and reallocation opportunities across a portfolio instead of checking each account one by one.
What to focus on during your trial
By the end of this step, you should know:
- which accounts are pacing ahead or behind target
- whether spend is likely to exceed or miss the budget by the end of the period
- which campaigns may need more or less budget
- whether Optmyzr can reduce the time you currently spend checking budget health manually
Budget automations and budget scripts can help teams manage pacing more hands-off after they subscribe, but during the trial, focus on using the budget tools to diagnose, forecast, and validate where budget changes would be useful.
Step 5: Understand why performance changed
The question you’re answering: “Conversions dropped 30% last week. Where do I start?”
Diagnosing performance shifts manually is slow and prone to confirmation bias — you tend to look in the places you already suspect, not necessarily where the problem actually is. Optmyzr has two tools for this, suited to different ways of working.
PPC Investigator
The PPC Investigator follows a two-step workflow. First, you use Performance Comparison to isolate exactly where the change happened — compare last week against the week before across the same campaigns, filter by network (Google Search, Display, YouTube, Search Partners) and device (desktop, mobile, tablet). This surfaces whether the drop is search-specific, mobile-specific, or spread evenly across all traffic.
Once you’ve isolated the segment, you go one level deeper: was it a keyword that stopped spending? A budget constraint? A Quality Score drop? A competitor pushing into your impression share? PPC Investigator walks through these systematically.
Dustin Miller of The PPC Pros described the impact this way: what used to take 30–60 minutes of manual digging on an enterprise account now takes a fraction of that. The tool doesn’t remove the need for expertise — it removes the time spent looking in the wrong places.
This video walks through this workflow in detail if you want to see it in action before running it on your own account.
Sidekick for conversational investigation
If you’d rather start with a question than a report, Sidekick is often the fastest place to begin. You can open it from virtually any account-specific page in Optmyzr and ask something like, “Why did conversions drop last week compared to the week before?” or “Which campaigns contributed most to the decline?”
Sidekick analyzes your live account data and returns a clear summary of what changed, the campaigns or segments driving the shift, and suggested next steps. If you need to dig deeper, you can keep asking follow-up questions, switch between tools, or even change accounts without losing the conversation. Depending on your query, Sidekick can also generate charts and visual summaries to help explain performance trends.
This isn’t a replacement for PPC Investigator’s detailed root cause analysis. Think of it as your fastest way to understand what happened and where to investigate next. Once you’ve narrowed down the problem, PPC Investigator helps you drill into the exact campaigns, keywords, devices, placements, or other contributors responsible for the change.
Step 6: Work faster with Sidekick, your in-platform AI assistant
The question you’re answering: “How do I get faster insights without adding more tools to my workflow?”
Sidekick is Optmyzr’s AI assistant, built directly into the platform. Instead of copying reports into an external AI tool, you can ask questions about the account you’re already working on. Sidekick understands the context of your campaigns, keywords, budgets, search terms, reports, and the tool you’re currently using, so you can move from questions to answers without switching tabs.
Start here: Ask Sidekick to show you around
One of the quickest ways to get comfortable during your trial is to open Sidekick and ask “Walk me through this tool.”
Available from virtually every account-specific page in Optmyzr, Sidekick explains what you’re looking at, what each tool is designed to do, and suggests where to begin. It’s a great way to shorten the learning curve, especially when you’re exploring a feature for the first time.
Ask questions about your live account
Once you’re familiar with the interface, use Sidekick as your first stop for analysis. You can ask questions like:
- Which campaigns are losing the most impression share because of budget?
- What are my top converting search terms from the last six months?
- Which keywords have a Quality Score below 4?
- Why did conversions drop last week?
Rather than returning generic advice, Sidekick analyzes your live account data, summarizes what it finds, highlights important trends, and suggests where to investigate next. Depending on your question, it can also generate charts and visual summaries to make performance easier to understand.
Continue the conversation as you work
Unlike a traditional chatbot, Sidekick follows you as you move around Optmyzr. Your conversation stays intact while you switch between dashboards and optimization tools, so you can ask follow-up questions without starting over. If you need more room to explore, expand Sidekick into its full-screen workspace to investigate performance, compare accounts, build reports, and work through more complex questions in a single conversation.
Take action without leaving your workflow
Sidekick doesn’t just answer questions—it also helps you get work done. Across tools like the All Accounts Dashboard, Budget Dashboard, Spend Projection, Keyword Lasso, and Reallocate and Optimize Budgets, you can filter data, update settings, explore budget scenarios, and perform other supported actions directly from the conversation instead of navigating through multiple screens.
If you’re exploring Rule Engine during your trial, Sidekick can also help you draft optimization strategies using plain language. For example, you can describe the conditions you want to monitor, and Sidekick will generate a Rule Engine strategy that you can review, test, and refine before deciding whether to automate it after your trial.
Build reports without starting from scratch
Need to prepare a performance update? Sidekick’s Document Mode lets you create reports inside the same workspace where you’re analyzing your account. You can generate summaries, add charts and visualizations, include your own commentary, and refine the report without exporting data into another tool.
Make Sidekick part of your daily workflow
Throughout your trial, try starting with Sidekick whenever you’re unsure what to do next. Whether you’re learning a new feature, investigating a performance change, exploring optimization opportunities, or preparing a report, it’s often the quickest way to find the information you need without interrupting your workflow.
For more prompt ideas, see:
How to Use Optmyzr Sidekick: Real PPC Use Cases Across Reporting, Optimization, and Budgeting
Step 7: Use Optmyzr from your AI workspace (MCP)
The question you’re answering: “I spend most of my day in Claude or ChatGPT — can Optmyzr work from there too?”
If your day starts in an AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT, you don’t have to switch into Optmyzr every time you want to analyze PPC performance. Optmyzr’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) connects your AI client directly to your Optmyzr account, giving it access to the same reporting, analysis, and workflow capabilities available through Sidekick.
When should you use MCP?
Think of MCP as the right choice when your work extends beyond the Optmyzr interface.
For example, you can:
- Analyze performance from your preferred AI workspace. Ask questions about campaign performance, generate Rule Engine strategies, review alerts, or retrieve reports without opening Optmyzr.
- Combine Optmyzr data with other business information. Because you’re working in an external AI assistant, you can bring together Optmyzr data with spreadsheets, planning documents, CRM exports, analytics platforms, or other sources to answer broader business questions. This is especially useful for client reporting, attribution discussions, or cross-channel planning.
- Analyze multiple accounts at once. Unlike Sidekick, which is primarily designed around the account you’re currently working in, MCP can retrieve and compare data across multiple accounts, making it particularly useful for agencies managing large account portfolios.
- Build broader AI workflows. Because MCP works inside external AI environments, you can chain together multiple tasks in a single conversation—for example, analyze account performance, generate a Rule Engine strategy, review existing alerts, draft a client update, or combine PPC insights with information from other systems.
Getting connected
For Claude and ChatGPT, the easiest way to connect is with OAuth, which lets you sign in directly with your Optmyzr account—no API key required. Other MCP-compatible clients can connect using an API key generated from the MCP Integration section in Optmyzr Settings. The setup typically takes just a few minutes.
Google Gemini doesn’t currently support native MCP integrations.
Sidekick or MCP?
During your trial, you’ll probably use both.
Use Sidekick when you’re already working inside Optmyzr and want contextual guidance, account analysis, or help taking action within a specific tool.
Use MCP when your workflow begins in an external AI assistant and you want to combine Optmyzr data with other information, compare multiple accounts, or build broader AI-powered workflows.
As Search Engine Land noted in a recent analysis: AI agents can only be as useful as the data they can actually see. MCP is how you give your AI assistant access to the marketing data it needs to give you accurate, account-specific answers — rather than generic recommendations based on nothing.
Read More: How to Use Claude + Optmyzr MCP to Manage PPC Accounts Without CSV Exports
Step 8: Clean up your search queries
The question you’re answering: “Am I paying for clicks that will never convert?”
Search query management is one of the highest-ROI activities in PPC, and one of the most repetitive. During your trial, run both the Negative Keyword Finder and Keyword Lasso to see the state of your account.
Negative Keyword Finder
The Negative Keyword Finder scans your search term reports and identifies irrelevant or non-converting queries that should be excluded. It groups candidates by theme, shows you spend and conversion data for each, and lets you add negatives at the campaign or account level with a few clicks.
Run this early in your trial. Most accounts — even well-managed ones — have query pollution that accumulates over time. Identifying and removing it gives you cleaner data for everything else you’ll test.
Keyword Lasso
Keyword Lasso does the opposite: it finds search terms that are already converting but aren’t yet added as keywords, or terms that are hitting the wrong match type. It lets you filter candidates, change match types, and submit them directly to your account — or, if you’re in Sidekick, you can do the same through the chat interface without navigating to the tool.
Both tools support Google and Microsoft Ads accounts.
Step 9: Test your ads properly
The question you’re answering: “Which ad messaging actually works — and how long do I need to wait to know?”
Google’s Ad Strength score tells you whether your RSA has enough variation. It doesn’t tell you which variations perform better. Optmyzr’s A/B testing does.
A/B Testing
The A/B Testing tool compares ads within the same ad group using statistical significance, helping you identify winning and underperforming ads with confidence rather than relying on assumptions. You can choose the confidence level that fits your testing approach (90%, 95%, or 99%), compare ads using metrics like CTR or conversions, and analyze up to 180 days of performance data.
Once you’ve identified a winning ad, you don’t have to start your next test from scratch. The tool recommends high-performing headlines, descriptions, and display URLs from your existing ads, and can also generate AI-powered headline and description suggestions using content from your website. This makes it easy to build the next variation while keeping your testing cycle moving.
Ad Text Optimization
If A/B Testing helps you identify winning ads, Ad Text Optimization helps you improve them.
Instead of reviewing each Responsive Search Ad individually, the tool breaks performance down at the asset level so you can see which headlines, descriptions, and complete ads are performing well across your account. You can quickly identify low-performing assets, edit them individually or in bulk, and generate AI-powered suggestions for new headlines, descriptions, or complete ad drafts—all from one place.
For larger accounts, bulk editing features like Find and Replace make it easy to update seasonal promotions, product names, or branding across multiple ads in a single workflow. If your review process involves clients or other stakeholders, you can also export proposed changes as a CSV for approval before applying them to your account.
During your trial, don’t just look for losing ads.
Use these tools to understand why certain messages perform better than others, generate new variations, and experience how much faster ad testing becomes when analysis, editing, and AI-assisted copy creation all happen in the same workflow
Step 10: Automate what you’re currently doing manually—the Rule Engine
The question you’re answering: “I have a set of optimization rules I run every week. Can I stop doing that manually?”
The Rule Engine is Optmyzr’s most flexible tool and the one that users most consistently describe as where the platform earns its keep. It lets you build custom optimization strategies — IF/THEN logic applied to any metric at any level — and schedule them to run automatically.
The difference from Google’s native automated rules is depth. Where Google’s rules are limited to a handful of conditions and basic actions, Optmyzr’s Rule Engine supports hundreds of metrics, multi-condition logic, lookback windows, custom labels, and actions that Google Ads can’t execute natively (like cross-campaign negative keyword management or quality score–based pausing).
During your trial, the goal is not to automate everything immediately. Instead, use the Rule Engine to see whether Optmyzr can recreate the checks and decisions you currently handle manually.
Start with pre-built strategies
There’s a large library of pre-built Rule Engine strategies to choose from. You don’t need to build anything from scratch during your trial. Find a strategy that matches a use case you care about, review its logic, adjust the thresholds if needed, and activate it. Good starting points for trial users:
Pause Non-Converting Keywords — pauses keywords that have spent above a threshold with zero conversions
Report for Disapproved Ads — generates a report of all disapproved ads so you can review and fix them
Monitor Quality Score Components — labels and reports on keywords with low Ad Relevance, expected CTR, or Landing Page Experience
Exclude Expensive Listing Groups — for shopping/PMax, flags listing groups with high costs and no conversions so you can exclude them
Identify and Exclude Underperforming Locations — surfaces geographic areas where you’re spending without converting
Find Expensive Keywords — surface keywords with high CPA or spend without conversions.
Non-Converting Search Queries — identify queries that may need to be added as negatives.
Pick one strategy that matches a real workflow you already run, review the logic, adjust thresholds if needed, and run it manually to see what recommendations it produces.
Build a strategy via Sidekick
If you have a specific use case that isn’t covered by the pre-built library, describe it to Sidekick in plain language and it will generate a strategy for you. “Flag any ad group that has spent more than $200 in the last 30 days with a conversion rate below 1%” becomes a working strategy without you touching the Rule Engine interface manually.
What to evaluate during your trial
By the end of this step, you should know whether the Rule Engine can:
- recreate optimization checks you currently do manually
- surface useful recommendations with the right thresholds
- support workflows across keywords, search terms, ads, locations, placements, and shopping entities
- reduce the time your team spends repeating the same account checks every week
Once you subscribe, you can decide which tested strategies are worth scheduling as automations. During the trial, focus on building, reviewing, and manually testing the strategies that matter most to your workflow.
New in 2026: Google Recommended attributes
Three new Google Recommendation attributes are now available in the Rule Engine: Google Recommended Target CPA, Google Recommended Target ROAS, and Google Recommendation Type. These let you build strategies that respond to Google’s own suggestions — for example, only applying a Google-recommended bid adjustment when your own account data supports it, rather than applying it blindly through the Google UI.
Also new: extended support for “by conversion time” metrics and a new Availability attribute for Shopping Products scope, which lets you exclude products based on availability status.
Automation scheduling
Once you’ve built or selected a strategy, set an automation schedule — hourly, daily, weekly — and it runs without your involvement. You receive a notification of changes made, can review the log, and can turn any automation off at any time. See how to set up automation schedules
For real-world strategy examples, watch the following video:
Matthieu Tran-Van, Google Ads expert and author, manages 20 clients with a combined $350M in lifetime ad spend. After adding Optmyzr’s Rule Engine to his workflow, he saved 20 hours per client weekly and saw a 28% revenue increase at the same ROAS. The Rule Engine automation handled what he was previously doing manually across every account.
For a deeper look at why Optmyzr’s Rule Engine outperforms Google’s native automated rules, see:
Why Use Optmyzr When You Have Google Ads Editor, Rules, and Scripts?
Step 11: Automate shopping and ecommerce campaigns from your feed
The question you’re answering: “I have a large product catalog. How do I stop managing campaigns product by product?”
For ecommerce advertisers, Optmyzr’s Campaign Automator and Shopping Campaign Management tools are designed to turn your product feed into the foundation of your campaign structure. Instead of creating campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and product groups manually, you define the logic once and let your feed drive the rest.
Feed-driven search campaigns with Campaign Automator
Joey Bidner is an independent Google and Microsoft Ads specialist managing roughly 20 accounts, many of them large ecommerce advertisers with catalogs running into thousands of SKUs. One of the ways he scales those accounts is with Campaign Automator, using product feeds to build search campaigns that would be impractical to create manually.
The problem with standard DSA campaigns for ecommerce is that they rely on landing page content for search matching. If your product pages aren’t optimized for search—and many aren’t—that targeting can be broader than you’d like. Joey instead uses optimized product titles and descriptions from the merchant feed as the matching signals, allowing Campaign Automator to build feed-driven campaign structures around the products he actually wants to advertise.
He also uses feed attributes to segment campaigns intelligently. Rather than advertising the entire catalog, he builds campaigns around specific subsets of products—high-margin items, top sellers, products above a certain order value, or products tagged with custom labels. Campaign Automator’s inventory filters make this straightforward, letting him define exactly which products should be included before the campaigns are created.
Campaign creation has also become much faster. AI can generate an initial template from the feed instead of requiring every field to be configured manually, and when building Performance Max campaigns, existing creatives can be pulled directly from the Google Ads Asset Library or supplemented with AI-generated assets. That means less time setting up campaigns and more time refining the strategy.
The result is a full-funnel structure that layers standard search (for store-level queries), category-level DSA, standard Shopping, and feed-driven DSA for specific products. Each layer captures a different stage of the buyer journey. For the right products, the returns have been “very, very good”—capturing incremental product-specific search demand beyond what Shopping campaigns reach on their own.
Shopping Campaign Management for Performance Max
Building a well-structured Shopping or Performance Max campaign is only half the job. The harder part is keeping that structure aligned with a catalog that’s constantly changing. New products arrive, others go out of stock, and top performers don’t stay top performers forever. Manually reorganizing campaigns every time the feed changes quickly becomes unsustainable.
Shopping Campaign Management approaches the problem from the feed first. Instead of manually creating campaigns and product groups, you define the structure you want and let the feed do the heavy lifting. You can organize campaigns by performance, brand, category, custom labels, price ranges, or virtually any other feed attribute, making it much easier to manage large catalogs without sacrificing control.
If you’re not sure how to structure your campaigns, the tool can recommend an approach based on your account. It can suggest campaign structures using performance data, common feed attributes, or high-performing attribute combinations, while Sidekick can guide you through the setup step by step and recommend settings as you build.
Once the campaigns are live, the structure doesn’t become static. Scheduled refreshes keep campaigns synchronized with your Merchant Center feed, updating product groups and feed-based rules as products are added, removed, or changed. Instead of periodically rebuilding your Shopping campaigns, you’re maintaining a structure that’s designed to evolve alongside your catalog.
Step 12: Manage Performance Max with dedicated tools
The question you’re answering: “PMax is a black box. What can I actually see and control?”
Search term analysis for Performance Max
One of the biggest challenges with Performance Max has always been understanding which search terms are triggering your ads. Instead of relying on spreadsheets or manually reviewing reports, you can now analyze Performance Max search terms directly in the Rule Engine using the Campaign Search Term scope.
Review search terms across individual campaigns or aggregate them across the entire account, identify high-spending queries that aren’t converting, discover new keyword opportunities, and add negative keywords or save reports without leaving Optmyzr. During your trial, it’s an easy way to see whether your Performance Max campaigns are matching the searches you actually want to pay for.
Alerts for product disapproval
From the KPI Alerts tool, select “Feed” as the level to monitor and set a threshold for the percentage of disapproved products in your Merchant Center feed. When disapprovals exceed your threshold, you receive an alert with the underlying reasons, so you can fix the issue before it affects a meaningful portion of your product inventory. These can be set up in bulk across accounts.
Alerts for drops in product performance
A product that was in the top 10% by ROAS last month but has fallen into the bottom 50% this week won’t announce itself. Set up a Product Performance Alert (Level: Products, KPI: ROAS, define the percentile thresholds and comparison window) and Optmyzr will notify you when that shift happens, across any or all accounts.
Shopping Feed Audit
The Shopping Feed Audit grades your Merchant Center feed by category — product titles, descriptions, basic data completeness, identifiers, pricing, availability, and shipping. Each category gets a letter grade, with clickable items in the report that take you to the specific issues. Schedule it to run weekly or monthly so feed hygiene stays on your radar.
Account-level placement exclusions
The Account-Level Placement Exclusion tool identifies mobile apps, YouTube channels, and websites that have accumulated spend with zero conversions over the last 90 days across your PMax and Display campaigns. It suggests adding these to an account-level negative placement list, with the potential wasted spend quantified before you make any changes. Automate this review quarterly and it becomes a passive cost reduction that compounds over time.
Step 13: Run the PPC Account Audit
The question you’re answering: “Are there structural issues in this account that are costing performance?”
The PPC Account Audit is a graded report across 12+ categories: Account, Campaigns, Performance Max, Display, Ad Groups, Ads, Responsive Search Ads, Assets/Extensions, Keywords, Negative Keywords, Advanced Targeting, Conversion Tracking, and Performance. Each category gets a letter grade based on best-practice checks, with specific findings listed under each grade.
We improved the audit flow significantly. Every item in the audit report is now a clickable link that either opens a side editor tray (for direct fixes) or navigates to the relevant tool. For example, clicking on an RSA in the audit opens the Ad Editor on that exact ad, ready to edit. Clicking on duplicate ad content opens the Ad Text Optimization tool where you can resolve the issue immediately.
The audit is the fastest way to get a structural overview of an account you’ve just inherited or an account you haven’t audited in a while. It also surfaces issues that routine performance monitoring misses — like campaigns losing impression share due to budget constraints you didn’t realize existed, or conversion tracking gaps that have been skewing your data for months.
Run it on at least one account during your trial. The results often reframe how you prioritize the rest of what you test.
Step 14: Set up the URL Checker
The question you’re answering: “Are any of my ads pointing to broken or out-of-stock pages?”
The Landing Page URL Checker scans URLs across ads, keywords, sitelinks, and PMax asset groups and identifies broken links (404 errors), out-of-stock product pages, and any other issues you configure it to flag.
Set it up once in automation mode and it runs on a schedule. When it finds an issue, it can pause the affected ad, keyword, or asset group automatically and notify you — so customers clicking on your ads aren’t landing on error pages while you’re asleep.
This is the kind of maintenance work that’s easy to deprioritize and expensive to ignore. One broken product page on a high-spend keyword can waste significant budget before anyone notices.
Step 15: Build repeatable workflows with Blueprints
The question you’re answering: “My team runs the same optimization tasks every week. Can we systematize that?”
If your team follows the same optimization routine every week, Account Blueprints help turn that process into a repeatable workflow. Instead of relying on memory, scattered checklists, or individual habits, you can define the sequence of tasks that should happen for each account and assign ownership clearly.
Think of a Blueprint as a playbook for account management. It can include Optmyzr tasks, like running Keyword Lasso, checking PPC Investigator, reviewing audits, or managing budgets, along with external tasks like client reviews, conversion tracking checks, or internal strategy meetings. Each task can be assigned to a person or role so everyone knows what they’re responsible for.
During your trial, start by creating one simple Blueprint for a workflow your team already runs manually. For example, you could build a weekly search query review, a monthly account audit, or a PMax optimization workflow. You can also start from a pre-built Blueprint or use AI to generate a custom one based on the goal you want to achieve.
The value isn’t just saving time. It’s consistency. For agencies managing several accounts, Blueprints help ensure that important checks don’t get skipped, work is assigned clearly, and every account follows the same optimization process regardless of who is managing it.
Making the most of your 14 days
The tools above cover the full Optmyzr toolkit, but trying to test everything simultaneously means you’ll test nothing properly. Here’s a suggested sequence:
Days 1–2: Foundation
- Connect all accounts you want to evaluate
- Set up the All Accounts Dashboard with your preferred columns and save the view
- Run Optmyzr Express on your priority accounts
- Set up 3–5 KPI alerts per account (cost, ROAS or Cost/Conv, impressions at minimum)
- Set monthly target budgets and enable pacing alerts
Days 3–5: Diagnosis
- Run PPC Investigator on your most important account to see how the investigation workflow compares to your current process
- Open Sidekick and run at least three queries against live account data
- Run the Negative Keyword Finder and review the suggestions
- Set up the URL Checker automation
Days 6–10: Optimization
- Browse the Rule Engine pre-built strategies and activate at least one relevant to your accounts
- If you have an e-commerce account, run the Shopping Feed Audit and set up a Product Disapproval alert
- Run the PPC Account Audit on at least one account
- Use Sidekick’s full-screen view to generate a Rule Engine strategy for a custom use case
Days 11–14: Depth
- For e-commerce accounts: explore Campaign Automator and Shopping Campaign Management
- Set up Budget Automation if you’re on a Premium plan
- Connect MCP if you use Claude or ChatGPT regularly
- Run the Account-Level Placement Exclusion tool and review the suggestions
If you get through all of that and still have questions, the full self-serve onboarding modules are at this link, and the support team is at support@optmyzr.com.
The signal you’re looking for in 14 days: did PPC Investigator cut your diagnosis time? Did Sidekick surface something you’d have missed? Did the Rule Engine handle something you were doing by hand? If yes, the platform is worth keeping.
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