Most AI tools for PPC fall into two buckets: generic chatbots that don’t understand your account structure, or black-box automation that makes changes without ever explaining why.

Optmyzr’s Sidekick is intentionally built to avoid both. It’s a live, account-aware AI assistant built right on top of your live account data. It works across your Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, LinkedIn, and Yahoo Japan accounts, pulling real performance data and surfacing insights wherever you need them.

Sidekick understands campaigns, budgets, search terms, and performance patterns in the context of your actual account. Instead of exporting reports, switching tools, or digging through spreadsheets, you ask Sidekick a question, and it pulls from your live account data in real time and helps perform actions.

How is Sidekick different from other AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude?

The difference between Sidekick and LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude (or even Google’s recommendations, for that matter) comes down to context and the ability to make quick changes right from the chat. LLMs provide general advice, but they do not know your campaign structure, budgets, or performance history.

For instance, Google’s recommendations have the opposite problem. They operate inside the account but rarely explain tradeoffs or strategy.

Sidekick sits in between. It gives you the intelligence layer without taking control away from you. It understands campaign structure, budgets, search queries, and performance trends across the account. At the same time, it acts as an assistant rather than an automated decision-maker.

To illustrate the difference in approach, here is a quick look at how Sidekick compares with generic AI tools.

Read more: Why (And How) Optmyzr’s AI Beats ChatGPT and Claude at Managing Google Ads

Here’s a practical example comparing ChatGPT and Sidekick

Imagine you want to create a rule that pauses campaigns when performance starts deteriorating.

Your goal is simple: Pause campaigns when the CPA from the last 7 days is higher than the average CPA over the last 6 months.

If you use a generic AI tool like ChatGPT, the process looks something like this:

First, you need to export or gather the relevant data from your Google Ads account. This could be recent CPA performance, historical CPA averages, campaign-level conversions, and spend data. Since the AI tool does not have access to your account, you must manually copy or upload that information.

Next, you need to explain the structure of your campaigns and the logic you want to apply. The AI can help you think through the rules, but it does not know what guardrails your account needs. You must decide questions like:

• What percentage increase should trigger the rule?

• What minimum number of conversions should qualify as meaningful data?

• Should there be a cost threshold to avoid acting on small samples?

You might eventually arrive at logic like: “Pause campaigns when 7-day CPA exceeds the 6-month average CPA by 20%, but only if the campaign has at least 5 conversions and $50 in spend.”

Once you have that logic, you can translate it into a script, rule configuration, or platform workflow. That means opening another tool, recreating the conditions manually, testing the rule, and scheduling it to run. The AI helped with reasoning, but implementation still happens somewhere else.

Now compare that to the same scenario using Sidekick.

Instead of exporting data or describing the account structure, you simply describe the intent:

“I need to create an automated rule to pause bidding when CPA for the last 7 days has increased over the average CPA of the last 6 months.” And here’s what Sidekick did.

Because Sidekick already understands the account context, including campaign structure, CPA history, conversion data, and spend, it immediately generates a rule draft inside Optmyzr.

In this example, Sidekick produced the following strategy:

Pause enabled campaigns when the 7-day CPA rises more than 20% above the 6-month average CPA, with built-in safeguards to ensure decisions are based on meaningful data.

The generated rule also included several safeguards as well, like:

• Condition: 7-day CPA > 1.20 × 6-month average CPA

• Volume safeguards: At least 5 conversions and $50 spend in the last 7 days

• Evaluation cadence: Daily

• Action: Pause the campaign

Sidekick even previews the impact before anything changes.

At this point, you do not need to write scripts or configure logic from scratch. You simply review the rule inside the Rule Engine, and if everything looks correct, you click Apply. If you want to modify the strategy, you can just tell Sidekick, like “Make the threshold 10% instead of 20%.”

And Sidekick updates the rule instantly and regenerates the strategy. The final step is a single click to activate it.

This is the key difference. Generic AI can help you think through a PPC strategy. Sidekick helps you turn that strategy into a working automation inside your account.

Instead of moving data between tools and translating advice into rules, you move directly from insight to execution.

With that essential context in mind, let’s dive into a few different ways you can use Sidekick for reporting, budgeting, performance analysis, and optimization.

Sidekick for reporting and executive communication

Raw data from native platforms reports overwhelm most stakeholders since clients and executives rarely need every metric. They need context.

Sidekick helps translate campaign data into clear narratives. Instead of piecing together reports manually, you can ask direct questions about performance trends, campaign drivers, or efficiency changes.

This is exactly where Sidekick becomes useful. Instead of making you manually connect the dots between performance and business outcomes, it helps you organize the story.

The key here is that you still bring the judgment. Sidekick just helps you get to the answer faster.

1. Quick snapshot of significant performance changes

Instead of clicking through campaigns one by one, you can ask Sidekick something simple like, “What has changed in the last 30 days?” You’ll get an immediate summary of major swings in metrics like CPA, conversion, spend, or ROAS, along with the campaigns or segments driving those changes.

While this is an example of a Google Ads account, you can also get an immediate health summary of your Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, LinkedIn, or Yahoo Japan Ads accounts.

This is a much better starting point than just staring at a dashboard. If performance improved, Sidekick helps you see what contributed to it. If it dropped, it points you toward the likely sources of the change. That makes your review process faster and more focused from the beginning.

2. Build and download a report inside Sidekick with Canvas

You can use the document mode of Sidekick Canvas to directly create reports in your conversations.

Ask Sidekick to build a performance summary and it pulls in charts, visualizations, and analysis into a single document inside the conversation. You can ask it to add commentary, pull specific metrics, or restructure the layout, and when it’s done, you can just download the report and share it.

When we asked Sidekick to “Build a performance summary for this account for the last 30 days with a chart of spend and conversions, and add commentary on the biggest changes,” it gave a 3-page report with the top campaigns by cost, clicks & conversions trend chart, and top keywords by conversions with a summary of the KPIs at the top.

3. Write reporting emails for clients and stakeholders

Most weekly updates don’t need every metric from every campaign. They need the few changes that actually affected performance. And Sidekick helps filter for that.

You can ask it for a weekly summary and get a concise update focused on what moved the needle, instead of a wall of numbers. For instance, you can ask, “Give me a weekly summary of the key metrics I need to know.” And also ask Sidekick to write an email to your client summarizing the weekly performance.

Some Optmyzr users have been asking Sidekick to draft the weekly update email, and it delivers a ready-to-send email summary, with data and context included.

This is especially useful for internal standups or quick client check-ins where you need to communicate the state of the account clearly.

4. Executive summaries tied to profitability, not platform metrics

Executives care more about the end goals than about impressions, click-through rate, or impression share unless those metrics directly connect to business outcomes. They want to know whether the account is efficient, whether results are improving, and whether performance is tracking against goals.

So, Sidekick helps translate platform language into business language. For instance, we used this exact prompt, “Give me an executive report that I can share with my CFO about this quarter’s performance. Make sure to include only metrics that matter to a CFO and speak their language, give me a message that can go along with this report as well.” And Sidekick not just gave us the key metrics, but also created a quick view of the expenses, like the total spend, its concentration, CPC, and conversions, all explanations CFO would prefer.

That makes it easier to communicate PPC performance in the terms that leadership actually cares about.

5. Turn performance dips into structured client explanations

When ROAS drops or CPA spikes, clients want an explanation. And honestly, the hardest part isn’t finding numbers. It’s explaining what happened in a way that is accurate, clear, and genuinely useful to the client.

Sidekick helps you do that by pulling the underlying account context into one place. If performance dipped because of rising CPCs, a budget shift, a weaker conversion rate, or a broader trend in search demand, Sidekick helps surface those patterns and structure them into a usable explanation.

For instance, you can ask Sidekick, “Why did the impression share increase and CPC decrease in the last 30 days compared to the previous period? Help me find the major reasons.”

That’s how you make client communication stronger. You sound informed and in control, not reactive with explanations on what changed, what likely caused it, and what the next step should be.

6. Frame efficiency vs. scale tradeoffs

One of the most common PPC tensions is the tradeoff between efficiency and volume. Sometimes you can hold CPA exactly where you want it, but only by limiting scale. Other times, growth means accepting some drop in efficiency.

That tradeoff is easy to understand internally if you work in paid media every day. But it’s much harder to explain to clients or stakeholders who just want lower CPA and more conversions at the same time.

Sidekick can help frame that conversation clearly. You can ask it to explain what happened when spend increased but efficiency dropped a bit, or what the likely impact would be if the team prioritized CPA control over conversion growth.

For instance, when we asked Sidekick what would happen to the conversion volume if CPA is maintained at $20, here’s how it answered.

Sidekick for budgeting and forecasting

Budget decisions are some of the highest-leverage decisions you make in PPC. They affect scale, efficiency, pacing, and ultimately whether you hit your targets by the end of the month.

A lot of budget management is still reactive, though. Teams notice a pacing issue too late, realize a high-performing campaign was capped after the fact, or move budget only when the month is almost over.

Sidekick helps you shift to proactive budgeting. It doesn’t replace forecasting models or budget planning, but it gives you faster visibility into where things are heading and where budget decisions deserve attention.

7. Project end-of-month spend based on pacing trends

If you want a quick read on where the account is likely to land, Sidekick can help you get there without having to calculate pacing manually. You can ask where spend is projected to end up by month-end based on current trends, and Sidekick will give you a directional view of whether the account is on track, likely to underspend, or at risk of overspending.

That directional signal is often enough to prompt the right next question. If you’re under pace, you can look for places to scale. If you’re overpacing, you can identify where to pull back before it becomes a problem. The value here is speed. You don’t need to build the whole picture manually before you can act.

8. Identify campaigns constrained by budget despite strong efficiency

Some of your best opportunities for growth are hiding in campaigns that are already performing well but can’t scale because they’re budget-limited. Those campaigns often deserve more attention than the ones that are merely spending more.

Here’s a prompt we used to surface these hidden gems: “Can you find campaigns that are performing well with good CTR and conversions but are limited by budget? And suggest budget increases and project the key metrics for the next 6 months.”

Sidekick can surface these quickly by highlighting campaigns that are hitting efficiency targets but are constrained by budget. That helps you make smarter reallocation decisions, especially when the total budget is fixed, and you need to choose where the next dollar should go.

Instead of guessing which campaigns deserve more runway, you can start from a data-backed list of strong performers that are being held back.

9. Map 60–90 day risk trends based on sustained underperformance

Not every problem shows up as a sudden drop. Some accounts slowly weaken over time. A campaign loses efficiency for several weeks, conversion rate drifts down, or volume starts softening in a way that isn’t obvious in a short date range.

Sidekick can help identify those longer-term patterns by looking at sustained underperformance over 60 to 90 days. That is useful because it helps you separate temporary noise from a real trend that needs intervention.

This matters for budgeting because it tells you where continued investment may need a second look. If a campaign has been weakening steadily for weeks, that’s not something to ignore until next quarter.

10. Check and update your portfolio health through Sidekick

You can now ask Sidekick, “Is anything wrong with my portfolio?” and it will actually check by pulling triggered alerts, surfacing what’s off, and telling you what needs attention.

You can also view configured alerts by portfolio ID and can also set up simple alerts in the conversation. For instance, I asked Sidekick to create an alert for a portfolio when the “budget goes over 75%,” and it immediately created an alert with email notification.

Sidekick routes the more complex alerts to the Alerts Management page with context already loaded.

11. Implement reallocation decisions

A lot of budget reallocation happens in the last week of the month, when there’s less room to recover and more pressure to make the right call quickly. Sidekick helps you get ahead of that.

You can ask where the budget should move to maximize return based on recent performance, and Sidekick can surface the campaigns that are overfunded, underfunded, or simply in a better position to generate stronger results with additional spend.

For example, when we asked Sidekick to “reallocate budget from the underperforming campaigns to the best performing ones,” it suggested precise budget increases and decreases within campaigns of an account. But it didn’t just stop there. Sidekick created a Rule Engine strategy where you can implement the suggested reallocation in just a click of a button.

12. Recommend reallocation based on marginal efficiency

Yes, reallocation is about moving budget from a decent place to a better place. But not every high-ROAS campaign should automatically get more budget, and not every lower-performing campaign should immediately be cut. Context matters.

And Sidekick helps narrow the field so your optimization decisions are based on relative opportunity and marginal efficiency. In simple terms, it helps you see where additional spend is more likely to produce a stronger return and where spend is probably doing less useful work.

Sidekick for search query optimization

Search query optimization is one of the most valuable parts of PPC management, but it’s also one of the most repetitive. It takes time to review query data, separate useful intent from wasted spend, and decide which terms to add, exclude, or promote.

Sidekick doesn’t replace judgment here, and it shouldn’t. But it does dramatically speed up the analysis phase. Sidekick can fetch and analyze search term data across all platforms in a single conversation. You can ask it to surface your highest-spend queries with no conversions, find search terms that are close to your existing keywords but converting worse, or build a list of negative keyword candidates based on match type and performance thresholds.

13. Surface top converting search terms

The easiest place to start is with the terms that are already driving real business results. You can ask Sidekick to show the search queries that are generating the strongest conversion performance, and it will pull them into view quickly.

For example, when we asked Sidekick this question: “help me pick a few search terms that are ranking well to add to my keyword list,” here is what it surfaced.

It gives a complete list of search terms by impression, clicks, CTR, conversions, Cost/Conv, and average CPC. And when you type in “yes,” Sidekick can automatically add those as keywords to the current ad groups. Sidekick can further give a visual n-gram word cloud view of the top converting search terms, which makes it easier to pick & add them as keywords.

It also gives you a strong starting point for expansion, whether that means building new ad groups, adjusting match type coverage, or tightening your messaging around proven themes.

14. Use Keyword Lasso within Sidekick to add top converting search terms as keywords

There are multiple ways to use Sidekick to surface and add your top search terms.

You can tell Sidekick to open Keyword Lasso and it renders the tool right next to the chat, you don’t need to navigate a thing. Then you can give it your criteria. For instance, in this example, I simply said, “add keywords with 100+ clicks as keywords to this account” and Sidekick filters Keyword Lasso based on exactly that and surfaces a list showing the keyword, the campaign, ad group, click data, and match type, all in one table inside the conversation.

Once you’ve reviewed the list, you can just confirm, and Sidekick submits the keywords to your account. The whole flow of opening the tool, filtering down to the right terms, reviewing, and adding all happens inside a single conversation.

15. Flag wasted spend terms to add as negatives

On the other side of the search query report are the terms that cost money but produce no useful results.

Sidekick can identify high-spend, low-return terms that are strong candidates for negative keywords. That helps you tighten traffic quality and reduce leakage without needing to manually sort through every search term report.

This is especially useful in larger accounts where the waste is spread across many campaigns and isn’t obvious until you pull it together. Sidekick helps you see the pattern faster and act sooner.

But it doesn’t stop at surfacing the list anymore. When Sidekick identifies wasted spend terms, it now builds a negative keyword Rule Engine strategy directly in the conversation. You review the list, confirm the terms, and apply the strategy in a single click.

And if you want to move even faster, this is where Optmyzr Express comes in. Sidekick can display Express suggestions, and you can just review the suggestion on Optmyzr Express, click apply, and it’s done.

This also works for Meta and LinkedIn accounts. If you’re running social campaigns in Optmyzr, Sidekick surfaces Express optimization recommendations for those accounts directly in chat, with a link to jump to Express Opts and apply them in one click.

16. Recommend promotion of search terms to exact match

When a search term repeatedly converts well, it usually deserves more control. That can mean promoting it into an exact match so you can bid more intentionally, write more tailored ad copy, and separate it from broader traffic.

For instance, you can ask Sidekick to “pull in search terms that convert well, which could be added as an exact match, based on the last 6 months.” What’s truly powerful is that it doesn’t just hand you a list; it provides the complete rationale and recommended actions. This allows you to make an informed, data-driven decision, moving beyond a simple educated guess.

Sidekick can help you identify those terms based on actual conversion history. This is a simple but useful use case because it turns a recurring manual review process into something faster and easier to prioritize.

17. Detect intent shifts affecting conversion performance

Search behavior changes. Sometimes that shift is seasonal, and sometimes it reflects changes in competition, demand, or the kind of users entering the funnel. When that happens, conversion performance often changes too.

Sidekick can help detect those shifts by highlighting changes in the kinds of queries triggering your ads. Maybe there’s a growing share of informational terms. For instance, maybe there’s a growing share of informational terms, broader, less-qualified searches are starting to dominate, or branded intent is weakening while exploratory queries are increasing.

That kind of change matters because it affects everything: ad copy, landing page relevance, match type strategy, and your negative keyword approach, not just search term quality. You can ask questions like:

• What are the major changes in search queries triggering my ads compared to the previous period?
• Highlight any significant shifts in the type of search terms (e.g., informational vs. commercial intent) that are driving conversions.

Sidekick helps you spot the shift before it becomes a bigger efficiency problem.

18. Pause underperforming keywords directly

This is where Sidekick moves from analysis to action on keywords specifically. You don’t need to take the list it surfaces and go apply changes yourself; you can ask Sidekick to act on what it finds.

Ask Sidekick to show your worst-performing keywords by CPA. It surfaces the outliers — both top and bottom performers — with clear data behind each. Then you can take it further: ask Sidekick to flag and pause keywords that exceed a CPA threshold, and it builds the Rule Engine strategy immediately. Review it, confirm the list, and execute in a single click.

This is one of the most direct ways to use Sidekick’s new action capabilities. The insight and the execution happen in the same conversation, with you in control of the final call.

Performance Max-specific use cases with Sidekick

Performance Max can drive strong results, but it also introduces a visibility problem. It compresses a lot of different placements, signals, and asset combinations into one campaign type, which makes analysis harder. The data is there, but the story is often less clear.

That’s where Sidekick can help. It gives you a more direct way to ask questions about how PMax is contributing to the account, where it may be overlapping with other campaign types, and whether the campaign structure is helping or hurting overall performance.

19. Understand Performance Max contribution across your account

A common question with Performance Max is whether it’s actually adding value or simply taking credit for conversions that may have happened elsewhere. To answer that, you usually need to compare PMax with Search and look at efficiency, scale, and trend direction together.

Sidekick can help make that comparison easier. You can ask how Performance Max campaigns are performing relative to Search campaigns, and get a clearer view of where each campaign type is driving volume, efficiency, and conversion quality.

That helps you move beyond surface-level results and ask the more useful strategic question: Is Performance Max expanding performance, or redistributing it?

20. Identify asset group performance patterns

PMax often makes creative analysis harder because you don’t get the same clean view of asset performance that you’re used to in other campaign types. But even within those limitations, there are still patterns worth understanding.

Sidekick can help identify which asset groups are contributing more effectively and where performance appears weaker. That gives you a practical way to review creative structure inside Performance Max without relying only on scattered signals or manual checks.

When we asked Sidekick to “identify the strongest and weakest Performance Max asset groups based on CTR and CPC,” it clearly displayed two tables with both metrics.

This is especially useful when you’re trying to decide whether a weak result is likely caused by budget, asset quality, or product coverage.

21. Diagnose PMax cannibalization

One of the biggest concerns with PMax is cannibalization, especially when branded or high-intent Search campaigns start behaving differently after launch.

Sidekick can help investigate that by comparing performance trends before and after PMax launch. If branded Search volume, efficiency, or conversion share changed meaningfully after rollout, that can help you spot those.

It won’t give you a perfect answer to incrementality, because no tool can do that cleanly from interface data alone. But it can help surface the performance clues that make it worth investigating.

22. Surface PMax budget constraints

PMax campaigns tend to either absorb spend very quickly or stay limited in ways that are not always obvious from a quick review. That makes budget allocation harder than it should be.

You can ask, “Are any Performance Max campaigns losing impression share due to budget?” That allows you to make more confident decisions about whether a campaign deserves additional budget or whether it’s already getting enough room relative to the return it’s generating.

This is a better approach than simply increasing spend because a campaign looks strong at a high level. You’re making the decision with more context around constraint and efficiency.

23. Evaluate PMax listing group performance (for Shopping)

If you’re using PMax for Shopping, product-level performance still matters. Even if campaign reporting is more abstract, you still need to know which listing groups or product sets are pulling their weight and which ones are not.

Sidekick can help bring that into focus so you can make smarter feed and merchandising decisions. You can ask Sidekick:

• Which listing groups in my Performance Max Shopping campaigns are getting the most spend and clicks?
• Identify product groups with high spend but weak CTR in Performance Max.
• Which listing groups are driving the most traffic in my Performance Max Shopping campaigns?

This makes Sidekick useful not just for campaign analysis, but for connecting campaign performance back to product strategy.

Sidekick for creative and asset optimization

Creative analysis often takes the most time and usually spans multiple campaigns. But messaging quality has a direct effect on click quality, conversion rate, and how efficiently the account scales. The challenge is that it’s not always easy to spot patterns in creative performance when those signals are spread out.

Sidekick helps by giving you a cross-campaign view of what is and isn’t working. It doesn’t write strategy for you or auto-apply changes, but it can help you understand where your messaging needs attention.

24. Evaluate RSA headlines to surface weak messaging themes

Responsive search ads (RSA) create many combinations, making it harder to diagnose messaging problems from a quick report. A low-performing ad may not tell you whether the issue is one weak headline, a recurring message theme, or a broader mismatch with search intent.

Sidekick can help surface headline patterns that are consistently underperforming, so you can review what those messages have in common.

That gives you a stronger starting point for creative testing because you’re not just replacing underperforming text at random. You’re improving based on pattern recognition.

25. Identify top-performing assets isolated within single campaigns

Sometimes your best creative is doing well, but only in one campaign. The missing opportunity here is that you can scale those to other relevant campaigns to increase conversions. But these isolated assets are easy to miss when you’re focused campaign by campaign instead of looking across the account.

Sidekick can help find those strong performers so you can decide whether they should be reused more broadly. So when we asked Sidekick, “Which ad assets have the highest CTR but are only used in one campaign?” it surfaced ad creatives within campaigns and ad groups that have high clicks, CTR, and impressions. It also surfaced the best combinations of headlines and descriptions that can be scaled across other campaigns.

This is one of the more practical ways to use Sidekick. It helps you carry forward what is already working instead of always starting creative improvement from scratch.

26. Suggest copy aligned with converting queries

When certain search terms consistently convert, your ad copy should reflect that intent more directly. Sidekick helps highlight converting query themes and suggest where your current messaging may not fully reflect what users are actually looking for.

That makes it easier to write ad copy that feels more connected to real demand, not just internal positioning. That often leads to stronger click quality and better alignment between search intent and landing page experience.

When asked Sidekick to analyze and surface “ad copy themes based on the top-clicked search queries,” it not just surfaced themes but also included the reasoning behind them, and even gave example headlines and descriptions for each ad theme that works the best.