Performance Marketing skills
Performance Marketing Skills-md for Marketers, Claude & Codex
Performance marketing skills are SKILL.md files that turn Claude, Codex and other AI agents into careful paid media strategists. They audit Google, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn accounts, fix conversion tracking under Consent Mode and server-side APIs, govern AI Max, Performance Max and Advantage+, build creative and landing page testing systems, and measure what ads really add with lift tests, geo experiments and marketing mix models. All 13 are below: copy one, download it, or take the set.
13 skills, 20,836 words, version 1.0.0, researched October 2026.
Paid Media Audit
Audit paid media across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn in eight layers (tracking and consent, goals and values, structure, bidding and budgets, audiences, search terms and placements, creative and landing pages, incrementality and allocation), reconcile platform results with GA4, CRM and finance, and replace platform ROAS with blended MER, new-customer CAC, contribution margin and payback.
Media Planning and Budget Allocation
Build media plans and budget allocations from unit economics: maximum new-customer CAC from margin, lifetime value and payback, channel baselines labelled by evidence, response curves and diminishing returns, channel roles across search, shopping, social, video, retail media and affiliates, scenarios, pacing, reallocation rules and a ring-fenced test budget.
Conversion Tracking, Consent Mode and Conversions API
Audit and design conversion tracking for Google Ads, GA4, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Microsoft Ads: one primary conversion per action, Consent Mode v2 in consent-required markets, enhanced conversions, Meta Conversions API and other server-side events with deduplication, revenue, profit or qualified-lead values, offline conversion imports, testing and daily monitoring.
Incrementality Testing: Lift and Geo Experiments
Design and read incrementality tests that show whether ads create sales: platform conversion lift studies, matched-market geo experiments, geo holdouts, on and off tests and brand search tests, with decision rules, power analysis, clean execution, first-party outcomes, incremental ROAS and CAC with intervals, and calibration of plans and MMMs.
Marketing Mix Modelling
Scope, build or review a marketing mix model with Google Meridian, Meta Robyn or PyMC-Marketing: two to three years of weekly first-party data, adstock and saturation, price, promotions and seasonality, calibration with lift and geo tests, validation, contribution, ROI and marginal ROI with ranges, response curves and budget scenarios.
Google Search Ads and AI Max
Build and improve Google Search campaigns in the automated era: conversion goals and values for Smart Bidding, simple structure by economics and intent, AI Max for Search and broad match governed by experiments, brand controls, URL rules and negatives, responsive search ad assets, landing page match, weekly search term reviews and Microsoft Ads equivalents.
Performance Max and Shopping
Set up and improve Performance Max and Standard Shopping: Merchant Center feed quality and custom labels, revenue, profit and new-customer goals, structure by margin and category, asset groups with search themes and audience signals, brand exclusions, negative keywords and placement and customer exclusions, channel-level reporting, and experiments against Standard Shopping and Search.
Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram)
Build, audit and scale Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram: pixel and Conversions API with deduplication and event match quality, consolidated Advantage+ structures with existing-customer controls, creative volume and diversity as targeting, testing campaigns, budgets and scaling rules, incremental attribution and lift tests, and checks against first-party data.
TikTok, LinkedIn and Other Paid Social
Plan and run paid campaigns beyond Meta on TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit and X: platform roles and selection, pixels and server-side APIs, targeting by interest, role, seniority and account lists, platform-native creative, Spark Ads, thought leader and document ads, B2B pipeline playbooks, creative refresh cadence and measurement beyond platform dashboards.
Ad Creative Strategy and Testing
Build an ad creative strategy and testing system for Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Google and LinkedIn: angles mined from reviews, calls and surveys, concept-level tests before iterations, hooks and scripts, stage metrics from thumb-stop and hold rate to CTR, conversion and CAC, creative briefs, a tagged library and substantiated, compliant claims.
Landing Pages and Conversion Rate Optimisation for Paid Traffic
Improve landing pages for paid traffic: message match with ads and search queries, clear value and proof above the fold, objection handling, fewer form fields and simpler checkout, mobile speed, correct conversion tracking, funnel and leak analysis, prioritised test backlogs and A/B tests sized properly and judged on purchases, qualified leads and revenue per visitor.
Audiences and First-Party Data for Paid Media
Build first-party audiences for Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Microsoft: legal basis and consent checks, customer and lead segments, Customer Match and Custom Audiences with automated syncs, existing-customer exclusions and new-customer goals, value-based lookalikes and audience signals, match rate improvements and data governance.
Paid Media Reporting and Attribution
Build paid media reporting leadership trusts: business truth from finance and commerce first, blended MER and new-customer CAC, contribution margin and payback, labelled platform attribution never summed across platforms, analytics, incrementality factors from lift and geo tests, MMM inputs, cohorts, naming and UTM conventions, and weekly and monthly reports that end in decisions.
No skill matches that search. Clear it or choose All.
On this page
What performance marketing skills do for an AI agent
Ask a general AI model to “improve our Google Ads” and you usually get a list of tips: add negative keywords, test ad copy, raise bids on winners. That ignores what decides results in 2026. Automation now chooses queries, placements, audiences and bids, so the advertiser’s real levers are the inputs: conversion goals and values, consented tracking, creative, landing pages, exclusions and first-party data. And every platform grades its own homework, so reported ROAS often says little about what ads truly add.
These skills work from business truth. They reconcile platform claims with finance and analytics, replace platform ROAS with blended MER, new-customer CAC, contribution margin and payback, and test whether channels are incremental before money moves. They govern AI Max, Performance Max and Advantage+ with experiments and controls rather than switching automation on and hoping.
Performance marketing in the automated era
Performance marketing means paying for media against measurable outcomes: sales, leads, sign-ups. The skills cover the full system: planning and budgets, tracking and measurement, Google, Meta and other paid social, creative and landing pages, audiences, and reporting. They are platform-neutral and include notes for Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
Where to start: audit and reconcile
Start with the paid-media-audit skill. It checks eight layers, from tracking and consent to incrementality and budget allocation, reconciles platform results with your own data and hands each finding to a specialist skill.
If tracking is broken, fix it first with conversion-tracking-capi, because automated bidding learns from whatever you send it. Before moving budget between channels, use incrementality-testing and media-planning-budgeting so decisions rest on causal evidence and unit economics, not on which platform claims most.
Which skill fixes which problem, and the evidence
Use this table to go straight to the right skill when you already know the symptom.
| Symptom or task | Likely cause | Skill to use |
|---|---|---|
| ROAS looks fine but revenue doesn’t grow | No reconciliation or incrementality evidence | paid-media-audit |
| Nobody knows how much to spend or where | Budget split by habit or platform ROAS | media-planning-budgeting |
| Platforms report different numbers | Duplicates, consent gaps, missing server-side events | conversion-tracking-capi |
| Is retargeting or brand search worth it? | No lift or geo tests | incrementality-testing |
| TV, YouTube or upper funnel can’t be measured | No marketing mix model | marketing-mix-modelling |
| Search CPCs rise and AI Max worries you | Weak goals, controls and search term reviews | google-search-ads |
| PMax is a black box | Weak feed, no exclusions, unread channel reports | performance-max-shopping |
| Meta CPA keeps rising | Fragmented structure, too little creative variety | meta-ads |
| TikTok or LinkedIn spend without pipeline | Wrong platform roles, non-native creative, click goals | paid-social-tiktok-linkedin |
| Ads stopped working | Creative fatigue and untested concepts | ad-creative-testing |
| Good CTR, poor conversion | Landing page mismatch, friction, slow mobile pages | landing-page-cro |
| Paying to reach existing customers | No exclusions or value-based seeds | audience-first-party-data |
| Leadership doesn’t trust marketing numbers | Summed platform claims, no blended metrics | paid-media-reporting |
The evidence behind these skills
Paid media changes every quarter. These are the facts the skills build on, checked on 10 October 2026:
| Finding | Source | Label |
|---|---|---|
| AI Max for Search launched in May 2025; Google says it is becoming the default for new Search campaigns, with the DSA migration delayed to February 2027 | Google, 2025 to 2026 (as reported) | Reported |
| Performance Max now has channel-level reporting, campaign negative keywords and brand exclusions | Google Ads, 2025 to 2026 | Confirmed |
| Consent Mode v2 is required for Google Ads features with EEA and UK users since March 2024 | Confirmed | |
| Google discontinued most Privacy Sandbox APIs in October 2025 and kept third-party cookies in Chrome under existing user choice | Google, October 2025 (as reported) | Reported |
| Open-source MMMs (Google Meridian, Meta Robyn) make mix modelling practical for mid-sized advertisers | Google, Meta | Confirmed |
| Platform-attributed conversions summed across platforms usually exceed actual sales | Practitioner reconciliation | Consensus |
| Retargeting often shows high platform ROAS but low incrementality in geo tests | Published lift studies and practitioner tests | Consensus |
Example prompts for each skill
Each skill triggers on everyday wording. These prompts are good starting points:
- Audit: “Audit our Google and Meta accounts. Exports and Shopify revenue attached.”
- Planning: “How should we split next quarter’s budget to grow new customers 30%?”
- Tracking: “Google Ads shows twice as many purchases as Shopify. Fix our tracking.”
- Incrementality: “Design a geo test to see if Meta retargeting adds sales.”
- MMM: “Scope a Meridian model with three years of weekly data.”
- Search: “Should we turn on AI Max? Design the experiment.”
- PMax: “PMax spends mostly on brand. What should we change?”
- Meta: “Our Meta CPA rose for six months. Rebuild the account.”
- Social: “Plan LinkedIn ABM for 2,000 target accounts.”
- Creative: “Mine our reviews for ad angles and plan a concept test.”
- Landing pages: “Our mobile conversion is a third of desktop. Fix the page.”
- Audiences: “Stop paying acquisition prices for existing customers.”
- Reporting: “Build a paid media report finance will trust.”
What the agent needs from you
Paid media decisions depend on data the platforms don’t show. The most useful inputs are:
- Ad account exports: campaigns, search terms, assets, audiences and conversions for 90 days.
- Business truth: revenue, orders, new customers and margins from finance or your commerce platform.
- Tracking setup: conversion actions, Consent Mode, Conversions API and offline imports.
- Unit economics: margins, lifetime value and the payback period you can afford.
- Test history: any lift tests, geo tests or MMM results.
- Creative and landing pages: current ads, production capacity and page performance.
If something is missing, the skill works with what you have and says which findings would change with more data.
What an agent cannot do, and myths to ignore
An agent can audit, plan, write, analyse and design tests, but it can’t change your accounts unless you give it access, and it can’t make legal judgements about consent and data use in your markets. Budget decisions with real money at stake stay with you; the skills give you the evidence and the trade-offs.
| Myth | What the evidence says |
|---|---|
| Platform ROAS shows what ads earn | Platforms credit themselves generously; reconcile with your data and test incrementality |
| Retargeting is the most efficient channel | It often shows high ROAS but low incrementality in geo tests |
| Automation means set and forget | AI Max, PMax and Advantage+ need good goals, exclusions, creative and monitoring |
| Third-party cookies are about to vanish from Chrome | Google kept them under existing user choice in 2025; consent rules still limit tracking |
| More campaigns give more control | Fragmented accounts starve automated bidding of data |
Frequently asked questions
What is performance marketing?
Paid advertising bought and judged on measurable outcomes such as sales, leads or sign-ups, across search, shopping, social, video and other channels.
Should I turn on AI Max for Search?
Test it as a Google Ads experiment with brand controls, URL rules and weekly search term reviews, judged on qualified value or profit, not raw conversions.
How do I know if my ads are incremental?
Run lift studies or geo experiments that compare regions or groups with and without the ads, and measure outcomes in your own sales data.
What is MER?
Marketing efficiency ratio: total revenue divided by total marketing spend. It can’t be inflated by one platform’s attribution, which makes it a useful check.
Do I need Consent Mode v2?
If you advertise to users in the EEA or UK with Google Ads, yes. It is required for key Google Ads features with those users, and it lets Google model conversions where consent is denied.
What is the Meta Conversions API?
A way to send conversion events from your server to Meta, alongside the pixel, with deduplication and consent. It recovers signal lost to browsers and ad blockers.
Is marketing mix modelling worth it?
For advertisers spending across several channels with two to three years of weekly data, yes. Open-source tools such as Google Meridian and Meta Robyn make it practical.
How do these skills relate to the other marketing skills?
Performance marketing brings paid traffic; CRM and lifecycle skills keep the customers; SEO and AEO skills build organic demand that lowers paid costs over time.
Sources and more marketing skills
- About Performance Max campaigns, Google Ads Help
- About consent mode, Google Ads Help
- Meta Conversions API
- Google Meridian and Meta Robyn
- Meta GeoLift
Checked on 10 October 2026. Pair this set with the CRM and Lifecycle Marketing skills to keep the customers ads bring in, and the Content and On-Page SEO skills to build organic demand. See every subcategory on the Marketing Skills-md page.
