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.

Sources

references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.

Tooling

The platforms themselves: Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Microsoft Advertising, TikTok Ads Manager, Reddit Ads, and similar. Each has its own definition of a conversion, and reconciling them against one internal definition is most of the analytics work.

Management and automation layers — Skai, Optmyzr, Smartly, and similar — are worth it at spend levels where a full-time person could not manually cover the account structure, and not before.

Creative volume is the constraint more often than bidding. Budget for producing variants at the rate the platform consumes them.

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.