ad-account-diagnostic

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from when this skill was listed. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: ad-account-diagnostic
description: "Diagnose the root cause of an underperforming paid ad account - why the ads stopped working, why CPA went up, why ROAS dropped - instead of defaulting to 'increase the budget'. Weighs tracking, account structure, targeting, creative, bidding and budget, offer, and external forces, and returns a prioritised verdict with evidence and confidence. Covers B2B and B2C on search, paid social, video, and native. Use whenever the user mentions an ad account audit, a campaign structure review, wasted ad spend, rising cost per lead, or says their ads used to work - even if they never say 'diagnostic'. Diagnosis only, and it stops at the click: post-click page problems are mbfinotti/advertising-skills@paid-landing-page-audit and creative decay is mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-creative-fatigue."
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: Maya-Beth Finotti
  version: "1.4.5"
---

# Account Diagnostic

Find the root cause of an underperforming ad account before anyone touches it. The whole discipline is refusing the reflex fix: an account that "stopped working" has at least seven candidate failure layers, and the most common responses - raise the budget, swap the creative, blame the algorithm - each treat one unproven hypothesis as a verdict. This skill works the layers in a fixed order, measurement first, because every downstream number is read off the conversion signal: as Adspirer puts it, the checklist is "ordered the way an experienced PPC manager actually works it: measurement first (because every other number is wrong if tracking is broken)".

It decomposes the metric chain to localise the failing link before naming a cause, compares the account against its own history rather than industry benchmarks, and refuses to issue any verdict the data cannot support. The output is a diagnosis with confidence, evidence, and a prioritised handoff plan - never an executed change.

This skill stops at the account boundary; everything past the click hands off elsewhere, and this skill never becomes a budget skill - it exists precisely because "increase the budget" is the wrong default.

- **Past the click** (message match, page friction, the page fix list): `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@paid-landing-page-audit`. This skill only flags "the evidence points downstream of the click" and hands off.
- **Fragmentation verdict** (merge plan): `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-campaign-consolidation`.
- **Creative-layer verdict** (decay analysis): `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-creative-fatigue`, which hands back here when the cause is not creative - the two are reciprocal.
- **Tracking verdict** (fix checklist): `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-conversion-tracking`.
- **Cross-platform discrepancy quantification**: `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-attribution-gap`.
- **Search-term mining**: `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-negative-keywords`.
- **Targeting design**: `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-audience-targeting`.
- **Budget and bidding decisions**: `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-budget-pacing`, `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-spend-allocation`, `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@paid-media-scaling`, and `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-bidding-strategy`.

## Interview

Ask before opening any data. One question per message; offer multiple-choice answers where possible; skip anything already supplied or visible in the data.

- Which platform(s) does the account run on? (search / paid social / video / native / several)
- B2B or B2C/ecommerce?
- Monthly spend, and roughly how many conversions per month on the event the account optimises to? (Decides whether the Evidence Gate can clear at all.)
- What window is under suspicion - when did performance degrade, and against which prior period is it being judged?
- What changed, and exactly when? (Budget, bids, creative, targeting, optimization event, landing page, site release, consent banner, price, promo calendar - dates matter more than the list.)
- What can you export,