Ads report → next week's content

Numbers are not the deliverable. A decision about what to write next is. A report that ends at "CTR was 1.4%" leaves the reader exactly where they started.

This skill closes the loop the kit otherwise leaves open: it publishes content, and it schedules content, but nothing tells it which content was worth publishing.

Before you start

Do not invent plausible numbers to fill a report. A fabricated benchmark is worse than no report, because someone will spend money on it. That rule holds in both modes below.

Paid mode. At least one ads MCP server connected — see .mcp.json and docs/18-ads-and-marketing.md.

Organic mode. No ads server, which is where most people start and where this skill used to simply stop — leaving anyone not yet buying reach with nothing at all, even though they have the same question. Ask the user to paste what the platform shows them: views, reach, shares, comments, saves, watch-through, per post, for a period they choose.

Everything below works the same way on pasted numbers, with three differences worth stating in the report itself:

• Say the numbers are self-reported. They came from a screen, not an API. That does not make them wrong; it makes them worth labelling.
• Shares and saves matter more than views here. Without spend data there is no cost per anything, so the useful signal is what people did deliberately rather than what scrolled past.
• The sample is smaller, so the bar for calling something is higher. Two posts are not a trend. Be readier to write "not enough data" than in paid mode.

If mkt-ads-audit is installed (node scripts/install-skills.mjs mkt-ads-audit), read it first — it covers account-level diagnosis in more depth than this does. This skill's job is the handoff from that diagnosis to the content queue.

1. Read

Pull, for the period the user asked for (default: last 7 days, compared with the 7 before):

• spend, impressions, reach, clicks, CTR, CPC, CPM
• conversions and cost per conversion, only if conversion tracking is actually configured — if it is not, say that plainly instead of reporting zeros as a result
• per campaign, per ad set, and per creative, because the creative is the part this kit can change

Record the currency and the timezone the platform reported in. A week boundary in the wrong timezone moves numbers enough to reverse a conclusion.

2. Separate signal from noise

Do this before writing anything.

• Sample size first. Under a few hundred impressions, a CTR difference is noise. Say "not enough data yet" rather than ranking two creatives that differ by a handful of clicks.
• Compare like with like. A creative that ran for two days against one that ran for fourteen is not a fair comparison; normalise or exclude it and say which you did.
• One change at a time. If budget, audience and creative all changed, the result cannot be attributed to any of them. Report it as unattributable rather than guessing.

3. Write brain/ads-report-<YYYY-MM-DD>.md

Keep it to one screen.

# Ads report — <period>   (<currency>, <timezone>)

**Spend:** X  ·  **vs previous period:** ±Y%
**Conversion tracking:** configured | NOT configured — the numbers below stop at clicks

## What worked
- <creative / angle / hook>, <metric with the number>, <how much data it is based on>

## What did not
- <creative>, <metric>, <and what you would change about it — not just that it lost>

## Not enough data
- <anything with too few impressions to judge — listing these stops them being re-tested blindly>

## Recommended for the queue
1. <topic / angle> — because <which number supports it>
2. …

## Do not repeat
- <angle that lost, with the number>

4. Propose queue items — do not add them

Print the exact queue.json entries you would add, then stop and ask. This skill can see ad accounts that spend real money; it does not get to decide the content plan on its own.

If the user approves, append with scripts/append.mjs following the schema in docs/04-state-and-dedup.md.

Writing the recommendations

Every recommendation names the number behind it. "Short hooks did better" is an opinion; "the three posts opening with a question averaged 2.1% CTR against 0.9% for the rest, over ~40k impressions each" is a reason.

Where the data does not support a recommendation, write that. A short honest report gets read next week; a long confident one built on forty impressions does not survive contact with the next set of results.

Safety

The ads MCP servers are read and write. The same connection that reads spend can pause a campaign or change a budget.

• Never change a budget, pause, or launch anything as part of producing a report.
• If the user asks for a change, state what you are about to do — account, campaign, old value, new value — and wait for a yes.
• An irreversible action on a live ad account is spending someone's money. Treat it that way.