Builds and refines audience and segment targeting for paid campaigns – first-party audience construction, lookalike expansion, exclusion lists, platform sizing floors, and saturation diagnosis – and delivers a filled targeting matrix per campaign.
Builds and refines audience and segment targeting for paid campaigns - first-party audience construction, lookalike expansion, exclusion lists, platform sizing floors, and saturation diagnosis - and delivers a filled targeting matrix per campaign. Use when someone asks "who should I target with these ads", "why is my ad set stuck in learning", "my CPMs keep rising but conversions are flat", "should I use a 1% or 5% lookalike", or is launching a campaign, diagnosing poor reach quality, or expanding into a new customer segment. Do NOT use for auditing an entire paid program's structure and spend efficiency - use paid-acquisition-audit instead; do NOT use for defining the ideal customer profile itself - use icp-persona-builder instead; do NOT use for market segmentation strategy outside paid media - use segmentation-strategy instead.This is the skill's description: the text your AI reads to decide when the skill applies.
audience-targeting/SKILL.md
---
name: Audience Targeting
description: Builds and refines audience and segment targeting for paid campaigns - first-party audience construction, lookalike expansion, exclusion lists, platform sizing floors, and saturation diagnosis - and delivers a filled targeting matrix per campaign. Use when someone asks "who should I target with these ads", "why is my ad set stuck in learning", "my CPMs keep rising but conversions are flat", "should I use a 1% or 5% lookalike", or is launching a campaign, diagnosing poor reach quality, or expanding into a new customer segment. Do NOT use for auditing an entire paid program's structure and spend efficiency - use paid-acquisition-audit instead; do NOT use for defining the ideal customer profile itself - use icp-persona-builder instead; do NOT use for market segmentation strategy outside paid media - use segmentation-strategy instead.
---
# Audience Targeting
A perfect ad shown to the wrong audience converts poorly, and the most common budget leak in paid media is not bad creative - it is unexcluded customers, oversized lookalikes, and ad sets too small to ever exit the learning phase. This skill defines who sees the ad, in what order audiences get built, and when an audience is exhausted. Targeting work begins before creative work and gets revisited monthly as audiences saturate.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Gather inputs
Collect before recommending any audience. Label estimates as guesses.
- Platform(s) and monthly budget per platform.
- Campaign objective: acquisition, retargeting, or retention.
- First-party assets available: CRM customer list (with LTV field if it exists), site traffic volume by page type, email engagement data.
- Target CAC or CPA, and the conversion event being optimized.
- Prior campaign learnings: known bad segments, past winning audiences.
### Step 2: Build first-party audiences before anything else
First-party audiences consistently outperform interest and demographic targeting, and they are owned rather than rented. Build in this order and do not launch interest-based targeting until they exist:
… load the full skill through Skill MeClick to play with sound.