paid-ads-operator

Imported from okou-ai/vm0-skills (paid-ads-operator/SKILL.md). Install upstream with npx skills add okou-ai/vm0-skills --skill paid-ads-operator. Copyright stays with the author.

Paid Ads Operator

Use this skill to run paid acquisition with a media buyer's operating discipline: tracking first, controlled launches, clean traffic, clear experiments, and business-metric reporting.

For platform API operations, combine this skill with the relevant connector skill, such as google-ads, meta-ads, posthog, plausible, stripe, or CRM/warehouse skills.

Operating Principles

1. Track before scaling. Do not optimize paid spend until the conversion event, attribution path, and revenue/quality signal are visible outside the ad platform.
2. Start paused or low-risk. Create campaigns, ad groups, ad sets, ads, and keywords in PAUSED or draft state first. Enable only after the user explicitly confirms.
3. Preserve budget intent. Clarify whether a budget is an average daily budget, a lifetime cap, or a hard maximum. Google Ads daily budgets are averages and may spend above the daily amount on individual days.
4. Optimize for business outcomes. Treat clicks, CTR, and CPC as diagnostic metrics. Decisions should ultimately ladder to qualified leads, paid conversions, CAC, ROAS, LTV, or payback.
5. Force signal, not churn. Prefer clear hypotheses and meaningfully different tests over tiny daily tweaks to bids, budgets, and copy.
6. Control policy risk. For competitor campaigns, avoid using competitor trademarks in ad copy unless the user confirms legal/policy review. Bidding on competitor keywords can carry jurisdiction-specific risk.

Launch Checklist

Before enabling spend, confirm:

• Objective: purchase, subscription, qualified lead, signup, app install, booked demo, or another measurable outcome.
• Primary conversion event: exact platform event/action name and where it fires.
• Attribution path: UTM parameters, click IDs, first-touch/last-touch behavior, CRM or payment metadata, and cross-domain redirects.
• Budget constraints: daily average, hard cap, test budget, end date, and acceptable loss during learning.
• Unit economics: target CPA/CAC, gross margin, LTV, payback target, trial-to-paid expectations, and minimum conversion quality.
• Audience and geo: countries, languages, excluded locations, demographics, customer segments, and existing remarketing audiences.
• Landing page: message match, load speed, offer clarity, CTA path, payment/signup flow, and analytics coverage.
• Naming and URLs: campaign/ad group/ad names, final URLs, utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, and utm_term.
• Risk controls: negative keyword seed list, brand/trademark rules, excluded placements, spend alerts, and rollback criteria.

Campaign Structure

Paid Search

Structure around intent, not one broad bucket:

• Brand: own branded terms and close variants.
• Non-brand high intent: exact and phrase keywords tied to the product category.
• Competitor alternative: competitor and "alternative to" queries, with conservative copy.
• Problem/solution: use only when the landing page directly answers the query.
• Retargeting/search remarketing: if audience size and platform support make it useful.

Start with exact and phrase match for high-intent launches. Add broad match only after conversion tracking is reliable and there is enough conversion volume for automated bidding.

Include negative seeds for:

• Jobs, salaries, definitions, tutorials, free templates, academic/research terms, unrelated meanings, support queries, and low-intent software categories.
• Competitor legal risk terms if the user does not want competitor conquesting.
• Search terms discovered after launch that do not match buying intent.

Paid Social

Structure around creative and audience signal:

• Prospecting: broad or lightly constrained audiences when pixel/conversion data is healthy.
• Retargeting: site visitors, product viewers, engaged users, abandoned checkout, or CRM lists.
• Creative concepts: each concept should test a distinct hook, problem, proof point, or offer.
• Funnel stage: awareness, consideration, conversion, and lifecycle should not share the same success metric.

On Meta/TikTok-style platforms, creative quality and volume often matter more than micro-targeting. Keep audience changes simple enough that creative signal remains interpretable.

Daily Operating Loop

Use the ad account timezone when reporting "today."

1. Serving and approval: campaign status, ad/ad group status, policy review, disapprovals, limited eligibility, learning status.
2. Pacing: spend vs. budget, hourly/daily pace, remaining budget, abnormal spikes, account-level caps.
3. Traffic quality: search terms, placements, audience breakdowns, geo/device splits, invalid or irrelevant queries.
4. Front-end metrics: impressions, CTR, CPC, CPM, click volume, top impression share, frequency, creative fatigue.
5. Conversion path: landing page sessions, signup/checkout events, conversion tracking health, attribution metadata.
6. Business quality: paid conversions, trial quality, revenue, CAC, ROAS, LTV/payback, lead quality, refund/churn signals.
7. Actions: negatives, keyword promotion, creative refresh, landing-page fixes, bid/budget changes, and documented next checks.

Do not overreact to tiny samples. As rough guardrails:

• Fewer than 100 impressions: usually only check approval and obvious targeting mistakes.
• 100-500 impressions: inspect search terms, CTR direction, and early irrelevant traffic.
• 500+ impressions with weak CTR: test copy, query intent, bid position, and ad relevance.
• Meaningful conversion decisions require enough clicks and conversion volume to avoid noise.

Diagnostic Playbooks

Impressions but no clicks

Check:

• Search terms or audience intent do not match the offer.
• Ads are approved but showing in low positions or weak placements.
• Headlines do not mirror the user's query or urgency.
• Brand is unknown and the offer is not clear enough.
• There are too few impressions to judge.

Likely actions:

• Add negatives or placement exclusions.
• Split mismatched keywords into tighter ad groups.
• Rewrite headlines around the exact query intent.
• Check top impression share, CPC pressure, and Quality Score/ad relevance where available.

Clicks but no conversions

Check:

• Conversion tracking is broken or firing on the wrong event.
• Landing page promise does not match ad copy or keyword.
• CTA path is too long, confusing, slow, or blocked by auth/payment.
• Offer is weak for cold traffic.
• Traffic is low-intent despite acceptable CTR.

Likely actions:

• Verify tracking with a real test path before changing bids.
• Compare ad clicks to analytics sessions and funnel events.
• Review landing page copy, speed, CTA, trust points, and checkout/signup friction.
• Separate exploratory traffic from high-intent traffic.

Spend but poor conversion quality

Check:

• The ad platform is optimizing to a shallow event.
• Conversions are low-quality leads, accidental signups, or non-paying trials.
• Attribution stores click source but not revenue or lifecycle quality.
• Automated bidding is using insufficient or polluted conversion data.

Likely actions:

• Optimize to a deeper event when enough volume exists.
• Feed qualified conversion or revenue signals back to the platform where possible.
• Segment reports by campaign, ad group, keyword/search term, creative, geo, device, and landing page.

No impressions

Check:

• Ads are under review, disapproved, limited, or paused.
• Budget, bid cap, audience, or keyword volume is too restrictive.
• Location/language/date schedule excludes the current user base.
• Campaign is learning, newly created, or waiting for asset approval.

Likely actions:

• Confirm statuses and policy summaries first.
• Validate targeting and eligible inventory.
• Increase bid/budget only after ruling out setup mistakes.

Search Term Workflow

For search campaigns:

1. Pull search terms by campaign/ad group for the current day and last 7 days.
2. Classify each term as high intent, adjacent, low intent, irrelevant, or risky.
3. Add irrelevant/risky terms as campaign-level negatives when they should be blocked everywhere.
4. Add ad group-level negatives when the term belongs elsewhere but not in the current ad group.
5. Promote repeated high-intent terms into exact keywords with matching copy.
6. Keep a written change log: term, action, scope, reason, and expected impact.

Prefer phrase negatives for concepts like "free", "jobs", or unrelated product categories. Use exact negatives when the phrase may also appear in useful long-tail queries.

Creative Testing Workflow

For each test, write:

• Hypothesis: what user belief or objection the creative addresses.
• Audience/query: who should see it and why.
• Control: current winning or baseline ad.
• Variant: one materially different hook, proof point, format, or offer.
• Primary metric: CTR for attention, CVR/CPA for conversion, ROAS/CAC for business impact.
• Minimum read: impressions/clicks/conversions required before judging.
• Decision rule: scale, iterate, pause, or keep learning.

Good creative tests are meaningfully different:

• Prompt-to-outcome vs. speed vs. quality vs. integrations.
• Founder/product demo vs. customer proof vs. comparison vs. problem agitation.
• Technical buyer promise vs. executive buyer promise.

Budget and Bidding

• Keep early tests small enough to survive learning mistakes but large enough to generate signal.
• Document whether the user's cap is a hard cap or platform average.
• On Google Ads, average daily budget can overspend on a single day. If the user asks for a daily maximum, set the average lower to account for platform overdelivery.
• Avoid switching bidding strategies repeatedly during learning.
• Use click-maximizing or manual controls only when conversion data is absent or untrusted.
• Move toward conversion-based bidding only when the conversion event is reliable and has enough volume.

Reporting Format

Lead with the current decision state:

• Running normally, learning, limited, under review, wasting spend, tracking broken, or ready to scale.

Then report:

• Spend, impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC/CPM, conversions, CPA/CAC, revenue/ROAS when available.
• Best and worst segments: campaign, ad group/ad set, keyword/search term, creative, geo, device, landing page.
• Actions taken since the last report.
• Recommended next action, with reason and expected effect.
• Open risks: tracking gaps, low sample size, policy review, budget pacing, or conversion lag.

When there is no spend yet, say that directly and focus on approval, eligibility, and setup status.

Safety and Confirmation

• Never enable paused campaigns, increase budgets, widen targeting, remove negatives, or change live bidding without explicit user confirmation.
• Never trigger fake purchases or fake qualified conversions unless the user explicitly accepts data pollution and the test environment is isolated.
• Do not paste access tokens, bearer tokens, cookies, or customer PII into reports.
• Treat platform-reported conversions as delayed and directional until verified against the source of truth.
• If legal, medical, financial, employment, housing, credit, or other regulated targeting could apply, check special category rules before launching.