Ads North Star Strategy

Ads North Star Strategy

What this is for. Intake produced facts: what the business sells, what a customer is worth, how long they take to buy, what the user wants from this money. This skill turns them into a strategy the user can read in a minute. Each choice comes with its reason, because the deep check re-reads this file weeks later and has to see what was assumed.

This skill decides. launch-meta-ad-campaign executes. The launch skill already holds the rules for what to optimize for, how big a test the budget buys, and how to structure the campaign. This skill applies those rules and records the answer. It does not restate them. When they change, they change in one place.

The three things most strategies get wrong:

1. Optimizing for a cheaper action than the real goal. Traffic is cheaper than leads. Clicks are cheaper than both. A strategy that picks the cheap action because it is available has decided to buy the wrong people.
2. Splitting a small budget. One audience with 2–3 genuinely different ads beats three audiences that each starve.
3. Ads that differ in colour, not in argument. Three versions of one message teach nothing. The angles have to differ in what they say.

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Where this skill's files are

Paths are relative to this skill's own folder, not your working directory (in GooseWorks: agent-config/skills/ads-north-star-strategy/). The harness docs contract ships with the meta-ad-manager skill and the Stage 2 and Stage 4 rules with launch-meta-ad-campaign; both are installed beside this one.

Choose one mode

Use the first mode that is available:

1. GooseWorks when the GooseWorks tools are callable. Read references/gooseworks-adapter.md.
2. Direct Meta when there is no GooseWorks, but a Meta token and ad account are available. Read references/direct-meta-adapter.md.
3. Planning only when neither is available. Read references/planning-only.md.

"The adapter" below means the file for the mode you chose.

Purpose

Write strategy.md for one campaign: goal, audience, objective and placements, budget, creative plan, test frame, success metric and reasoning. Then propose safety rules for the user to accept. Use it after intake and before any creative is generated. Use it again after a deep check, to revise the strategy and say what changed.

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Inputs

The asking rule. Ask only when both are true: the answer cannot be inferred from research, the catalog or existing campaigns, and a wrong guess changes money, claims or legal exposure. State everything else as an assumption: "I'm assuming X, Y, Z. Tell me if any are wrong." Ask at most four questions per turn, in plain words.

Things that usually pass the rule at strategy time: the budget ceiling, what a lead or sale is worth (when the brief has no ACV/AOV), and whether a named result may be claimed. Things that never pass it: the objective, the optimization goal, the structure and the placements. Those are yours to decide.

Facts that came from intake, not from a tool. An account fact the user or intake stated (lifetime spend, weekly events) has no sync time. Write it as an assumption ("per intake, not yet read from the account"), never as an - Observed: line with an invented sync time. Once the account is read, the observation replaces the assumption.

Composed Atoms

• launch-meta-ad-campaign: its Stage 2 tables (choose the optimization goal, size the test honestly, structure follows the budget) and its Stage 4 test design. Read them before deciding. Do not copy them.
• meta-ads-analyzer: produces the deep-check findings that trigger a re-read.
• The host's campaign-planning and creative-generation tools (the adapter names them).

Workflow

1. Read the brand file, the campaign brief and the product. On a re-read, also read the current strategy.md, the deep-check findings and the campaign's decision log.
2. Fill the gaps with the asking rule. Record every assumption. It goes into Reasoning and, if it matters, into the launch brief's "what I'm unsure about".
3. Decide, in the order of the decision rules below. Write the "because" for each.
4. Write strategy.md in the contract format (below). Increment version on any change.
5. Show the user a one-minute summary in their words. For a novice, explain each term the first time. For an expert, drop the explanations and show the numbers.
6. Propose the safety rules (decision rule 6) and ask the user to accept, change or decline each. Save the accepted ones as pre-approved rules in the campaign state. Record the proposal and the answer in the decision log, including declined rules.
7. Hand off: concepts carry the angles → request creatives sized by the plan (3x) → the judge loop and the user pick the ads that run → launch-meta-ad-campaign.

Decision Rules

Apply them in order. Each writes its reason into the strategy.

1. Goal → objective (the honest-objective rule)

Decide the objective from the business outcome, not from what is easiest to buy:

Say why the cheaper objective is wrong for this business. For a long-cycle software brand, Traffic buys people who tap ads. Those people rarely book a call and never become a $10k contract. A low cost per click hides the fact that nothing in the pipeline moved.

When the host cannot launch the right objective, do not quietly downgrade. Write three things, in this order:

1. The right objective and why (above).
2. The bridge the host can launch: a Traffic campaign that pays for landing-page views (people who arrive, not just tap) to the page where the real action happens. It is judged on cost per lead from the tracking, never on cost per click. Give it a stopping point: after the evidence threshold, if leads cost more than the target, stop.
3. The limit, in one line: "To have Meta optimize for leads directly, the campaign has to be created in Ads Manager until the host can launch it."

Never write a strategy whose success metric is a click for a business that makes money on a lead or a sale.

The right objective and the right optimization goal are two different claims. Sales can be the right objective while the account is still too thin to optimize for purchases (under ~50 a week, launch Stage 2). Write both: "the right objective is Sales; at 6 purchases a week Meta could not optimize for them yet, so this run pays for landing-page views and is judged on cost per purchase."

Bridge stopping point. Stop the bridge early when it has spent 3× the target cost per result with zero results. Otherwise, judge cost per result against the target at the end of the run, or at the test frame's threshold if that comes first.

2. Optimization goal, test size, structure

Apply the three tables in launch-meta-ad-campaign Stage 2: "choose the optimization goal from those numbers", "size the test honestly" and "structure follows the budget". Record:

• the optimization goal and the account fact that decided it (tracking present? weekly event volume?);
• what this budget honestly buys (plumbing test, traffic test, or real-action optimization). The table has gaps between its rows. A spend that falls between two rows gets the lower row: $20–50 a day is still a traffic test for comparing ads, though it counts results for the campaign as a whole. If the budget cannot measure the success metric, say so in the strategy. Don't let the launch brief discover it;
• one ad set unless there is a concrete business reason to split, such as prospecting versus remarketing, or countries that need separate money. Write the reason for one, or the reason for two.

3. Audience and placements

• Audience: broad (location, age band, exclusions) on a cold or small account, and let delivery find the buyers. Limits the user stated, such as an age range, a gender or a country, are business choices: keep them. "Broad" means no interest targeting inside them. Use interests or lookalikes only when the account has the history to seed them. Always exclude existing customers when that list exists.
• Placements: automatic placements by default. Restrict them only for a reason, such as no vertical (9:16) creative, a linked Instagram account that is wrong, or a claims rule that one surface breaks. The creative formats follow from the placements: 1:1 or 4:5 for feeds, 9:16 for Stories and Reels.

4. Creative plan: count, diversity, and the 3x rule

• Ads that run = what the structure supports. At small budgets that is 2–3 per ad set. More ads split the learning. Fewer leave nothing to compare. If the host caps it, cap to the host.
• Diversity: each running ad argues something different. Use a different angle (the reason to care: speed, cost, fear of missing out, proof, identity), not a different colour or crop. Name the angles. Keep format and destination the same, so the test has one variable.
• Generate 3x. Creatives requested = 3 × ads that run. The judge loop throws out the weak ones, and the user chooses from the rest. Request it as the plan's count, so the tripling is explicit. If the user named a number of creatives, use their number as is and never triple it. Write both numbers, e.g. "3 ads run, chosen from 9 generated (3x rule)", or "user asked for 12; used as is".
• Each angle becomes a campaign concept (person, message, proof). A claim goes into an ad only if it passes the brand's claims rules. When those rules allow no results or named customers, proof is a verifiable product fact from the rendered page: the price, what is included, how long it takes, the guarantee. Never a result.