How Clark St. James Manages PPC Through Claude with Optmyzr's MCP

When Sean started the agency, it was just him. A growing client list meant a growing management problem, and the options for solving it kept falling short.

Outsourcing was unreliable. Good outsourcers were hard to find when needed, and the best ones left to start their own companies. Hiring was no easier in an industry with little existing experience, so Sean recruited for a mindset instead: analysts who liked getting gritty with data.

The day-to-day work itself was manual. Optimization meant formulas in spreadsheets, click-and-export reporting, and a lot of copy-paste.

"Just a lot of time that you're not using your brain and you're stuck using your hands. But we're on computers. What am I using my hands for?"

The goal was always the same: cope with the volume, maximize revenue, and stop selling the same hours over and over.

1. The MCP: managing accounts through conversation

When Optmyzr released its MCP, it changed how the agency interacts with the platform, and moved him from ChatGPT to Claude in the process.

"For some of the uses of Optmyzr, I'm in there less now, because I don't need to be in there looking at data and looking at screens. I can now have in-depth conversations around data, and I feel very confident in the output."

The biggest win is scope. Platform-native AI tools like Gemini can only see Google Ads, but few businesses run Google alone. With the MCP, Sean can analyze a client's entire paid presence in one conversation.

"Where we have accounts running across LinkedIn, Facebook, Microsoft Ads, and Google Ads, to be able to have the whole conversation around a client's total paid channels, whether we should look at moving some budget from one platform to another, it's been groundbreaking, to be quite frank."

2. The dashboard as the agency's nerve center

The MCP hasn't replaced the platform. Optmyzr is still the first screen the team opens in its daily standup.

"The Optmyzr dashboard is our bread and butter. It's literally our traffic lights of what's good to go and what we need to look at today. That dashboard is our nerve center for our business."

The team pairs the dashboard with major alert rules to catch issues across the portfolio.

3. AI search term clustering as first-line defense

With search moving toward conversational queries, defending against wasted spend is a growing priority for the agency. Optmyzr's AI-powered search term work has become part of that defense.

"That's what we're defending against right now: waste of spend. It does bring a smile to my face to think we've got first-line defense against these behemoths who will spend your money."

4. Sidekick as a stepping stone

Sean is candid about Sidekick's early days. The output was generic at first, and the team used it in light touches for quick answers on top-level data. But he sees it as an important step toward where the platform is now.

"It provoked thoughts and a way of thinking. Sidekick went through an evolution, and it is where it is now because of where it started. It couldn't have just leapt there."

5. Customer support that builds the solution with you

Ask Sean what kept the agency with Optmyzr for nearly a decade, and the answer isn't a feature.

"What made us stick with Optmyzr and not go elsewhere was the human beings. The customer support. Anushka is an absolute star. We'll say the output we want is this, she'll go off, work it with the team, and come back with the solution. We give some feedback, tweak, tweak, and the rules are done."

That relationship is also why Sean keeps testing new features and sending feedback.

Clark St. James set out to do more for its clients without simply selling more hours, and that's what Optmyzr has made possible for a lean team managing a large portfolio.

"Optmyzr has been an absolute boon to us to be able to manage the number of accounts we do between us."

Sean remembers when the platform used to display how many hours each optimization saved, and he says it held up. "Honestly, they were spot on. The time saving is absolutely real. And it was always more than that."

The clearest sign of that is what happened whenever the team wondered about building its own internal version.

"Over the years we've often thought, could we duplicate this somehow? And now with the MCP, it's like, why would we even bother trying? It's so embedded in what we do that it is actually part of our day-to-day business."

Asked for the full picture, Sean puts it simply.

"It saved us time, it's made us efficient, it's given us different processes, but it's also the people behind the company that have supported us literally all the way through the journey."

Parting words

Asked to sum up his Optmyzr experience in a word, Sean picks "enjoyable."

"It is actually a joy to use the system. We discover new things all the time."

On where the industry is heading, Sean is watching the platforms carefully. AI-driven campaign automation needs volume to work, and he worries that small and medium ad spend clients will be underserved while the systems are tuned for the biggest advertisers.

For him, that's exactly where the agency, and Optmyzr, earn their keep.

"I'm just looking forward to the time when I could sit here, talk with Claude, and it goes and sorts Optmyzr out for me, then gives me a shout when there's something I need to look at. And then we can both sit there and drink tea."