paid-advertising
Plans, runs, and optimizes paid acquisition across search, social, and display — account structure, targeting, creative, bidding, budget, and the analysis that says whether to scale or stop. Use this to set up or restructure campaigns, write and iterate ad creative, diagnose rising costs or falling performance, decide budget allocation, or judge whether a channel is working.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount /tmp/paid-advertising && cp -r /tmp/paid-advertising/plugins/demand-generation/skills/paid-advertising ~/.claude/skills/paid-advertisingSKILL.md
# Paid advertising Paid is the fastest way to buy a result and the fastest way to buy nothing. The difference is mostly discipline before launch. ## Before spending - **Know the ceiling.** Maximum acceptable acquisition cost, derived from margin and payback period, not from what feels affordable. - **Conversion tracking verified end to end**, with a test conversion confirmed in the platform. Optimizing against broken tracking teaches the algorithm the wrong thing, and that damage persists. - **The destination is ready.** Paid traffic to a page that does not convert is a donation. Fix the page first — it is cheaper. ## Structure Structure follows intent, since intent determines what a click is worth. - **Search** — separate by intent tier: brand, high-intent problem terms, category terms, broad research. Never one budget across all four; the broad terms will consume it. - **Social** — structure by audience, since creative fatigue and audience saturation are the two variables and you need to see them separately. - Enough volume per campaign to exit the learning phase. Over-segmentation starves every campaign of the data it needs. ## Naming conventions Decide the convention before the first campaign, because renaming later breaks historical reporting on every platform. A workable pattern encodes, in fixed order: channel, objective, audience or intent tier, geography, and creative theme — separated consistently, with no spaces. It should be possible to filter a report by any one of those segments without opening a campaign. Apply it to every level: campaign, ad set, and ad. Inconsistent naming is why cross-channel reporting takes a week to assemble and why nobody trusts it when it arrives. ## Creative Creative is the biggest lever on paid social and the most neglected. - Test genuinely different **angles**, not variations of one. Five headlines around one idea is one test. - The first frame or line does the work. Assume the rest is not seen. - Match the ad's promise to the landing page exactly. Mismatch shows up as a bounce you will misdiagnose as a targeting problem. - Expect fatigue and plan refreshes on a schedule; rising cost with flat conversion rate is usually fatigue, not competition. ## Reading performance Diagnose in sequence: impressions (is it serving), click-through (is the creative landing), conversion rate (is the page delivering), cost per acquisition (is it economic), and downstream quality (did those customers stay). Stopping at cost per acquisition is how channels get scaled that are buying bad customers cheaply. ## Never - Scale a campaign on a few conversions. Wait for significance. - Change several variables in one edit. - Let a channel run without a stated read-by date and a kill threshold.
Corporate Strategy (CSO). Owns plugins/corporate-strategy/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Customer Experience (CCO). Owns plugins/customer-experience/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Data & Analytics (CDO). Owns plugins/data-analytics/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Demand Generation (CMO). Owns plugins/demand-generation/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Office of the CEO. Owns plugins/executive/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Finance (CFO). Owns plugins/finance/** and nothing else. Delegate work in this department's remit here.
Corporate IT. Owns plugins/it-operations/** and nothing else. Delegate service desk, systems and network administration, virtualization and cloud, telephony and conferencing, endpoints, assets, identity lifecycle, and backup work here.
Reviewer-class. Read-only review of what other departments commit to — contract terms, privacy and data handling, risk acceptance, and compliance findings. Holds no write surface. Its findings are not overrulable by the department under review.