Disclosure: I’m the co-founder of Optmyzr. I’ll use one of our open-source skills as the example below, but the frameworks here apply to anything you install or build.
If you’ve used Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini for marketing work in the last six months, you’ve probably hit the same wall I have. The chat is great until you need the same thing done the same way every week. Then you’re back to copying a prompt template into a fresh window, hoping you didn’t forget a step, wondering why a tool this powerful still feels this manual.
Skills are what bring that wall down.
I’ve written before about skills as scalable systems for PPC and why agents are useless without access to your marketing data. This piece zooms out.
- What is a skill, actually?
- Where do you find them?
- How do they work across the three big AI platforms?
- But perhaps most importantly for agency owners: how do you take an existing skill and brand it as your own?
What are ‘skills’ in AI
A skill is a small bundle of files that teaches an AI assistant how to do one specific job well, every time.
In Claude, a skill is literally a folder containing a SKILL.md file with instructions, alongside optional code scripts and reference files the AI can process. Install the folder once, and from then on, when a task matches the skill, the assistant loads the playbook and follows it.
It’s the difference between telling a new hire “audit this account” and handing them your agency’s documented audit process. The output gets much more consistent.
While the concept is universal, implementation varies by platform.
- Claude offers the most seamless experience, allowing you to install and use skills directly within the interface.
- ChatGPT makes similar capabilities available though generally only on paid Business or Enterprise plans.
- Gemini remains the most developer-focused, often requiring the Gemini CLI or specialized environments, which makes it less accessible for the average marketer.
Because of its ease of use, I mostly use skills with Claude, and that’s where we’ll focus.
Where to find prebuilt skills for PPC
Most account managers prefer copy-pasting scripts over writing their own. They’ll also like grabbing skills someone else already built. But finding them can be tricky. There’s no single App Store for skills, and most of the good ones are on GitHub.
For Claude, the Anthropic team ships official skills for working with things like PDFs, and Microsoft Office programs. Beyond that, you’ll find growing collections on GitHub from individual developers and software vendors.
A lot of companies are publishing their own. Ours live at github.com/optmyzr-skills.
A practical rule I’ve landed on: a skill is only as trustworthy as the team that built it. A skill from a known software vendor with its methodology is different from a one-off prompt repackaged as a skill by someone you’ve never heard of.
Ensuring skill usage is consistent across your organization
This is where it gets interesting for agencies and in-house teams.
On a solo plan, you install a skill in your own account and you’re the only one using it. Fine for a freelancer. Painful for a team, because everyone has to install everything separately, and versions drift the moment one person updates and another doesn’t.
On Team and Enterprise plans, an admin can deploy skills across the whole organization. Claude has org-level skill management on Claude for Work and Enterprise.
The practical benefit is that, with a five-person PPC team, you install a shared audit skill at the org level once, and every account manager gets the same version on day one. When you improve it, everyone gets the improvement automatically. No more “which version are you running” on team calls.
I think of it like the moment ad scripts stopped living in each individual ad account and moved to Enhanced Scripts from Optmyzr, which lets advertisers deploy a generic script code to all accounts and shifts script versioning and settings into a centralized management system maintained by Optmyzr. Easy, maintainable, and scalable; all things that matter a lot to account teams who promise a standard of quality to their stakeholders.
The hidden white-labeling engine: Why forkable skills are an agency’s best friend
Here’s the part that should perk up agency owners. Most well-built skills are folders, and the open-source ones live on GitHub. Which means you can fork them, edit them, brand them, and use your modified version with your own clients.
Let me walk you through an example for a 15-person agency. I find an open-source Google Ads audit skill (we’ll get to the one I’m thinking of in a second). The default report it generates has “Google Ads Audit” at the top in plain text. Useful, but generic and probably not shareable with the client.
What I can do in about an hour:
- Clone or download the skill folder.
- Open SKILL.md and edit the report-generation instructions to swap in my agency’s name, reference my logo, and use my brand colors.
- Drop my logo into the skill folder so the assistant can use it when generating PDFs or HTML reports.
- Add or remove checks based on what I actually care about — if I run only ecommerce accounts, I can tell the skill to weight Performance Max, Merchant Center, and feed health more heavily.
- Repackage and install for my team.
What comes out the other side is a branded, agency-specific audit tool that produces client-ready PDFs with my name on them. I didn’t have to build the underlying methodology. The original author already did that. I just added the last 10% that makes the output feel like mine.
Scripts were powerful because you could tweak them. Skills have the same power. Agencies are no longer capped by what software vendors choose to white-label. If a skill is open source, you can white-label it yourself in an afternoon.
A worked example: the Google Ads Audit skill
Since I keep alluding to it: we recently released a free, open-source Google Ads audit skill at github.com/optmyzr-skills/google-ads-audit. Apache 2.0 license, no Optmyzr login required.
Briefly, what it does. It runs through 14 categories and roughly 42 best-practice checks:
- Account settings
- Conversion tracking
- Campaign structure
- Performance Max
- Budgets
- Bidding
- Targeting
- Audiences
- Keywords
- Quality Score
- Search terms
- RSAs
- Extensions
- Landing pages
- Industry benchmarks
- Competitor analysis
It asks three calibration questions at the start (primary goal, target CPA or ROAS, account maturity) so the scoring matches the kind of account it’s looking at.
If you don’t want to connect anything, there’s a four-paste flow: pull four CSVs from the Google Ads UI, paste them into Claude, and the skill runs the diagnostic. The output is a top-5 findings list with monthly dollar impact, an A/B/C grade with per-category breakdowns, a 7-day action plan, and a wasted-spend estimate.
All the principles I described above apply to it. You can install it for free. You can deploy it across your agency. You can fork it, brand it, and have it generate client PDFs with your logo and your methodology framing. The Apache license explicitly allows that.
If you want it to also pull live account data instead of CSVs, run multi-account portfolio rollups, and trigger automated remediation, that’s where Optmyzr’s MCP server comes in — and that’s the paid layer. But the audit logic itself is yours to use, modify, and brand.
What to do with this
Pick one repeatable workflow your team does manually right now. Audits, search term reviews, ad copy generation, weekly report drafting — anything that runs the same shape every time is a candidate. Find or build a skill for it.
Then move it from individual installs to team deployment. That single change kills a surprising amount of version drift across a team.
Brand at least one skill as your own, even if you never ship the branded version to clients. Going through the fork-and-modify process once changes how you think about what counts as “tooling” for your agency. It’s lighter than you’d expect.
Skills are how a generic chatbot starts to behave like your team’s documented operating system. The agencies that get fluent with installing, deploying, and forking them over the next 12 months are going to operate noticeably differently than the ones still copying prompts into chat windows.
The Optmyzr audit is one example. There will be hundreds.
How to install the audit skill
There are two paths; pick the one that fits your team:
If you have someone technical on the team — an in-house dev, a power-user analyst, anyone comfortable with a GitHub URL — install it as a Claude plugin straight from the repo. One command.
The skill stays in sync. When we ship a new check, tighten a benchmark, or add a category, your install picks it up automatically. For an agency running this across a team, this is the right path. Everyone runs the same version.
If you’re a marketer who just wants the thing to work — no GitHub, no command line — download the zip from the repo’s releases page and upload it via Settings > Capabilities > Skills inside Claude Desktop or claude.ai. Up and running in under a minute.
The tradeoff: it’s a snapshot. When we improve the skill, you’ll need to grab a new zip and re-upload. For a solo practitioner running monthly audits, that’s usually fine.
Either way, the repo is at github.com/optmyzr-skills/google-ads-audit. Once it’s installed, type /audit in any Claude conversation, answer a few guiding questions, and then receive the audit.
