The Grand Open way / Draft / 13 October 2026

Performance campaign taxonomy.

One way to organize every ad, email and page, on every channel. It is built on customer journey tiers: each one gets a number that says how close the person seeing it is to buying. The lower the number, the closer they are.

Someone searching for your business by name is a few minutes from calling. Someone who just bought an RV is years from needing a new mattress. They need different messages, different budgets and different expectations. The tier number keeps all of that straight, on every channel, for every business we work with.

The idea is old. In 1966 Eugene Schwartz wrote that people move through five stages of awareness, from not knowing they have a problem to being ready to buy, and that the message has to match the stage. Customer journey tiers put a number on each stage, add what happens after the sale, and tie each one to where the ads run.

The size of the number tells you the distance to a sale. The digits tell you where it sits.

Inside a number, the hundreds are the tier and the tens are the slot. 530 is 500 - Shopping, slot 3 (near me). Each message written for a slot gets its own number after a period: 530.1, 530.2, and on to 530.12 and beyond, with no limit.

A slot means the same thing for every business. When a business has nothing for a slot, the slot stays empty and keeps its number. Nothing gets renumbered.

Pick a business to see what each tier looks like for it. Search examples are written the way people type them.

Empty is normal. RV mattresses have no 200 - Rushing: nobody needs one tonight. Plumbers and injury lawyers fill almost every tier. A blank tier is information, not a gap to force.

The tens digit splits each in-market tier into slots. These are the same for every business. The examples follow the business picked in the tabs above.

Most accounts don't need a campaign per tier. Ad platforms learn from conversions, and splitting a small account too finely starves them. So tiers roll up into supertiers. One supertier is one campaign by default.

A YouTube ad can be a 1000 - Coping or a 300 - Buying. What decides the number is who sees it and what they are thinking. Each channel has tiers it's good at.

Retargeting is not its own tier. What a person did tells us how close they are now, and the ad is written for that tier.

The loop closes at the bottom. Reviews and referrals from 30 - Recommending become the proof people look for in 600 - Researching.

Budget runs from low numbers to high

Fund the lowest tiers first, because they are closest to a sale and pay back fastest. Move up only when the tier below is working. The higher the number, the cheaper the reach, the longer the payback and the harder it is to trace a sale back to it. High numbers are the first to cut.

When a search fits two tiers

1. It contains your own business's name: 100 - Choosing. (A competitor's name is 400 - Comparing.)
2. It says it's urgent: 200 - Rushing.
3. It names a competitor: 400 - Comparing.
4. It names a marketplace or directory, like Amazon, Angi or Care.com: 540 - Shopping, marketplaces.
5. It names another kind of fix: 700 - Exploring.
6. It asks whether or when: 800 - Wondering.
7. Otherwise, the lowest number that fits wins.

Each search lives in exactly one ad group.

Exclusions run downhill

Every campaign excludes the searches of the tiers below it, so each search lands in the closest tier it matches. Retargeting audiences are excluded from prospecting the same way.

Names carry the number

Campaigns read like CFC | G 500 Win or RVM | FB 1000 Reach. Ad groups read like 530 Near me: Raleigh. The channel goes in the name, never in the number, so results add up by tier across every channel.

The tier and slot say who the person is. The message number says what we tell them. Every ad, email and post gets one.

A message plan

Here is the start of a plan for a business selling RV mattresses. Each row is one message.

• Test messages inside a slot. 510.1 against 510.2 is one test.
• Read results by message, then by slot, then by tier.
• A winning message keeps its number. A losing one is retired, and its number is never reused.

Example business, offer and ratings.

On Google

A campaign is a supertier. An ad group is a slot. An ad is a message.

Google best practices

• Keep 100 - Choosing (your brand) in its own campaign.
• One slot per ad group. Exact and phrase match keywords.
• Each responsive search ad gets 15 headlines (30 characters each) and 4 descriptions (90 characters each). Pin the message's main headline to the first position, so the test measures the message.
• The ad lands on the page for what it shows. An ad for a short queen goes to the short queen page, not the homepage.
• Each campaign excludes the keywords of the tiers below it.
• Track calls and forms as conversions, not just purchases.

On Meta (Facebook and Instagram)

A campaign is a supertier. An ad set is an audience, numbered by its tier. An ad is a message.

Meta best practices

• Keep audiences broad and let the message find the person. The words and picture do most of the targeting.
• Put the hook in the first three seconds of a video.
• Retargeting gets its own campaign. Prospecting excludes everyone retargeting covers.
• Give each ad its message number in the name, so results add up the same way as Google's.
• Test the message, not the button color. A message that wins on Google is the first one to try on Meta.

Where does each search go? Pick a tier. Get it right and pick the slot.

Copy this prompt into an AI assistant or agent and replace WEBSITE.COM with the business's site. It researches the business and plans a Google Search account in this system, down to single keywords and headlines. Click the box once to select all of it.

See a finished plan. The RV mattress example from this page, as campaigns, ad groups and ads you can click through and edit: Open the example in CML studio ↗

Paste an agent's CML into the studio's left panel to see your own plan the same way. Example business and numbers.

None of this is new. These are the ideas it is built on.

Also related: AIDA (E. St. Elmo Lewis, around 1898), the hierarchy of effects (Lavidge and Steiner, 1961), McKinsey's consumer decision journey (2009) and Net Promoter Score (Fred Reichheld, 2003).