Paul Koshlap

Director of Paid Media & Growth Marketing | Incrementality · AI-Native | Meta · Google · TikTok · Paid Social | Full-Stack Marketer

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

Claude is amazing for Meta Ads analysis…with a few exceptions that could crash your account.

For example, point Claude at your ad account and ask for your three best performing ads. You’ll get a stunningly detailed breakdown of a wide range of platform metrics with an emphasis on efficient Cost per Result.

Then take a look at spend levels.

There’s a good chance Claude picked 1-2 ads that barely spent anything.

Why?

It privileged CPR and picked ads that looked efficient simply because they hadn’t scaled.

It didn’t understand that spend level is the single most important KPI in your account.

You see, the Meta algorithm isn’t sitting on its hands letting spend flow randomly to ads.

It’s using a mountain of historical inputs, combined with real-time data from your campaigns, to identify which ads have the highest probability of maximizing your goal at scale.

And the more aggressively it spends on these ads, the greater the impact of diminishing returns, causing CPRs to rise (google “The Breakdown Effect” for more on this).

But the CPR isn’t rising because Meta doesn’t know what it's doing. It's rising because it does.

Turn off your highest-CPR ad and you might be turning off the ad scaling your whole account.

And this is exactly the kind of nuance Claude can miss.

The good news? You can fix this with a simple system prompt update.

Here’s a quick hack: copy and paste this LinkedIn post into your project’s chat, have Claude pressure test with online research, and then ask for an updated system prompt that includes a weighted KPI hierarchy that gives spend the proper credit.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

The 7 levers with the biggest impact on paid media ROI:

1.Focus: pushing the right product to the right segment
2.Creative strategy: who you’re talking to, what they care about, and how you speak to it (for each relevant segment)
3.Creative production: the rate at which you can produce quality ads
4.Offer: the actual trade you’re asking someone to make when they buy
5.The data you send to the platform: what the algorithm learns from
6.Cross-platform optimization: the arbitrage opportunities no single platform can see
7.Measuring incrementality: understanding the actual impact of different channels, campaigns, and creatives on business outcomes so you can better allocate dollars.

Put your energy here.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

When answers become a commodity, the value is in asking the right questions.

This is a sea change for what expertise means. In every domain.

The expert of the future isn't the one with the most knowledge. It's the person most equipped to interrogate knowledge.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

@benradack Game changer

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

Why doesn’t Claude have a group chat?

Multiple team members. Multiple agents. One chat.

You get a message from a stakeholder citing insights from Claude. You pressure test your response with research by Claude. You respond to the stakeholder who then gives your answer to Claude.

Why not just add Claude to the conversation?

Technically, you can now do this in Slack, but why not built it directly into the platform?

Everyone in the conversation is talking to Claude.

Claude is the only one who can’t see the conversation.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

@ecomchasedimond Bonuses and bribes is a great band name.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

@garyvee Also, people (and companies) chase near-term money over chasing becoming more valuable.

The latter is not only more satisfying, but a better long-term financial strategy.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

Want timeless, future-proof skills?

Don’t acquire new knowledge.

Deepen your understanding of what you think you already know.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

Want to learn marketing?

Learn persuasion and stats.

That gets you 80% of what matters.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

@TravisHyer @karpathy 😂

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

Ramble my thoughts with voice chat and scan the LLM‘s text response is the most efficient and effective back-and-forth communication style I’ve found.

I also like to finish by clarifying that I want a short response and then I can just continue prompting it as needed if I need more.

Love working this way.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

The 5 questions that can manage any marketing team:

1) What does success look like?
Everything else is downstream of this. If the team can't answer it in one sentence, stop here.

2) How are we measuring it?
Two parts: the number that tells us we won, and the signals that tell us if we're winning. Won is the final score. Winning is knowing you're up or down mid-game — which requires metrics that actually PREDICT the outcome. Most weekly reporting never asks that question. It reports what the platforms surface and hopes.

3) What's the plan?
What are we actually doing to get there. Not the deck version — what's happening this week.

4) What's the argument for this plan over the alternatives?
Demanding an argument forces a logic gut-check. If the reasoning can't be articulated to someone else, you don't have a plan. You have a habit.

5) What new information do we have?
Questions 1-4 gave you a strategy. This one keeps it honest. New data either confirms the plan or updates it — and a strategy that never updates isn't discipline, it's neglect.

Ask the first four and you'll build the strategy. Keep asking the fifth and you'll always have one worth following.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

@nicktheriot_ Love it!

It’s more down funnel, but authentic scarcity can be very effective.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

@benradack Fantastic!

Given these ad types tend to get delivered higher in the funnel, what KPIs do you look at to pick a winner here? Or do you have the budget/time to get sufficient conversion volume to determine winner?

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

Best marketing tool of all time?

The scientific method.

Why?

It’s the only way to tell what's actually true from what just looks true.

And in marketing, that's the difference between real growth and lighting money on fire.

Marketing’s most expensive mistakes aren't people believing obvious nonsense. They're people believing real platform data that’s reasonable, well-dressed, and dead wrong.

The campaign that "drove" sales when it was really just standing next to them.

The channel that looks cheap because it's quietly taking credit for demand you already paid to create.

The “winning” ad with the minuscule sample size.

None of those look like errors. They look like results. That's exactly what makes them dangerous.

The scientist's toolkit is a set of defenses against being convinced by things that aren't real:

A control group, so you can see causation, not just correlation.

Statistical significance, so you don't bet the budget on noise.

Causal inference when running an experiment isn’t an option.

Don’t get me wrong, that platform reporting — that's data. Real, useful data.

But it's missing the one thing that turns data into proof: isolating the variable.

Hold everything else still, ask "what did this specific thing actually cause," and you're measuring impact. Skip that, and you're just measuring what happened nearby and hoping it's the same thing.

That's the gap the scientific method closes; it’s the gap incrementality testing exists to fill.

The marketers who solve this problem aren't smarter. They've just trained themselves to ask one question before they spend, scale, or celebrate:

How do I know this is real, and not just convincing?

Learn to answer that, and you stop making the most expensive mistakes in marketing.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

@weaverobotics @grok how much does this cost?

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

@herrmanndigital And such a scalable format! Get a solid group of talented creators who understand the key beats and you’ve got a heck of a content machine.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

AI is augmented reality for cognition.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

@BillyBroas And hear you on obvious points of agreement.

Do you know @fbinegotiator? Reminds me of what he calls “labeling”.

In negotiation, it refers to reiterating—and establishing a label for—something your counterpart said.

This “repetition” increases trust by demonstrating empathy.

[Paul Koshlap @PaulKoshlap]

Hey @BillyBroas!

QQ:

I have my list of required beliefs, and my list of current customer beliefs.

To begin belief building, I want to identify existing points of agreement and start the conversation there - correct?

i.e. by calling out a belief that is in both lists.

[Billy Broas @BillyBroas]

@PaulKoshlap You nailed it, Paul. You want to identify—and establish—the points of an agreement and start the conversation from there.

I added establish because we've found that it's a safe bet to cover even the "obvious" points of agreement in marketing copy.

It can be done quickly.