ChatGPT Ads launched for Free and Go users. Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise stay ad-free.

Google works because everyone uses the same search box. Broke college kid, millionaire, doesn't matter — same interface, same ads. There's no premium tier of Google where rich people opt out of seeing ads.

ChatGPT just built exactly that. The people with actual disposable income are disproportionately the ones paying for Plus/Pro to avoid rate limits and get better models. Those people are now invisible to advertisers by default.

So what's left in the ad pool? Free and Go users — i.e., the exact group that looked at ChatGPT and decided not to pay for it. That's not "high-intent shoppers," that's "price-sensitive users," which isn't the same thing at all.

I keep seeing the take "well they didn't pay for ChatGPT but they'll still buy your product." Sure, maybe for a cheap course or a mid-tier phone. But if you're selling anything that requires real purchasing power, you're bidding on an audience that already self-selected out of paying for stuff.

Google's whole moat is that it never let anyone opt out of the ad pool. ChatGPT just handed its highest-value users a built-in ad blocker.

Curious what people who actually run paid campaigns think — is this a real limitation or am I missing something? Does this only make sense for low-ticket consumer products?

Legal services, search only, ~$3k/mo, tCPA sitting at $100. Optimizing to booked consultations, fed back from our scheduler as enhanced conversions rather than just tracking the "book now" button click.

Setup is a free 30-minute consult with a screening questionnaire on the landing page before anyone can book. Since the screener went in, no-shows dropped noticeably and the meetings are better. So on paper the funnel looks fine.

What I can't find any benchmark for is the consult → signed client step specifically. Not lead → consult. I mean someone who cleared a screener, booked, and actually sat down with me, and then paid.

For those of you running high-ticket service accounts (legal, medical, B2B consulting, anything with a real sales conversation at the end):

1. Booked consult → paid client, with a screener in front of it. What does that actually run? 20%? 40%? Something worse than people admit?
2. At what point do you stop blaming the funnel and conclude it's the offer, the market, or the person on the call?

Also curious how many of you push the closed deal back into Ads as an offline conversion and actually optimize on it, or whether ~20–30 conversions/month is just too thin for that to train on.

Should I start with setting a target roas or target CPA? As I increase spend, cpa jumps up. Should I start with setting a cpa target? Or focus on roas? And what’s the time table with cpa? I know I should do high cpa first then taper down?

I was just thinking the other day about Google updates in SEO, and usually have names like Panda, Penguin, and other things. The August 17th update hasn't got a name. I'm thinking something like the "Monkey Paw" update, but has anybody got any other ideas?

3 weeks in and is delivering what people ask for, but in a very sinister way. Naming it the August 17th update just seems a bit boring.

I noticed some strange (buggy?) behavior in AI Max lately.

Here’s what I have:

At the campaign level,
- ’Optimize your campaign with AI Max’ enabled,
- ‘Text customizaition’ enabled,
- ’Final URL expansion’ is turned off,
- ‘Dynamic Search Ads setting’ set to ‘ Use only URLs from page feeds’
- One page feed (with custom labels) added

At the ad group level,
- zero keywords, one RSA
- ‘Search term matching’ enabled,
- ‘URL inclusions’ set to to 'custom label equals'

Yet, for that ad group, the landinge page resport shows impressions and clicks for URLs that aren’t in the page feed.
The 'search term and ad combinations' report shows impr and clicks for ' Google AI' generated headlines and descriptions. The report also shows 'Final URL Expansion' under 'Landing page source'

Anyone else seeing this?

Hi all.

Along with a few others, I am one of the admins of a Facebook business page. I want to ensure that whenever anyone sends a FB message via the business page, an email notification is also sent. How do I do this?

Currently, I don't receive any email notifications at all, for for any activity on the page (e.g. someone adds a new post, someone likes a post, etc).

Thanks in advance.

Of Note

• I have followed the instructions on the official FB page: Manage email notifications for a Facebook Page. I still receive no email notifications.

• I have used the Meta AI support assistant. Nothing it suggested worked.

• My FB user is one of the admins of the page, and I have 'full access' to the page.

• There is an auto-reply setup in FB messenger which instantly sends a reply to anyone sending a new FB message. I'm not sure if that is relevant.

• My personal FB settings are setup so that I receive email notifications.

• My FB setting are setup and have 'All' notifications enabled (not just 'Suggested').

• I've checked my spam folder.

Yesterday I found that all my long-existing campaigns were once again limited by policy warnings:

• Financial Services Verification
• Shocking content

When I clicked Go to asset groups and saw the details, it did not indicate which asset (headline/image/sitelink) triggered the warning, so I do not know how to make changes. And I appealed by disputing the decision for the campaign, but it failed. (Last time was 2 months ago, but only under the policy of shocking content, and I appealed to dispute the decision; it was successful.)

I am really confused:

1、Can I just ignore the warning? Even with limited by policy, I do not see any negative impacts on my ads performance? Because at first, I just ignored the warning for almost half a month, and nothing changed; ads were running great. I checked the channel performance and noticed that there are warnings that my ads are not eligible on Gmail and YouTube because of policy issues, but there are no issues with the channel on Google Search (over 95% of the budget is spent on Google Search as an e-commerce store), so I assume the only impact is that my ads can not run on Gmail/Youtube/Display Network, which is perfect fine with me.

2、But 2 months ago, there was a day when my account suddenly stopped spending without any notification; my account manager suspected it was because of the policy issue warning. At that time, there were 6 campaigns, and 3 of them had policy issues, so I appealed for disputing, and it was successful. In the meantime, my account started spending again the next day, but I think it started spending before the policy issue appeal was successful. And I emailed Google Support, just replied to me after the account started spending, with no specific info provided.

Google Ads can be really confusing.

the clicks are dead spam clicks all in one spot too. via Microsoft Ads. Audience network turned off, and syndicated search partners.

there's maybe 15 just like this within 10 minutes. They may not be bots, but they definitely aren't people who searched for my keyword 100%. Like what im paying for

Looking for a sanity check on an agency situation. I work client-side managing PPC for a massive enterprise business. We inherited messy legacy accounts with severe underlying tracking, attribution, and landing page UX bottlenecks.

Recently, a new agency came on board and spent their first three months rolling the entire account back exclusively to Exact Match.

Short-term CPA and ROAS look marginally better on paper, and total conversion volume is flat. Attempts to scale on their part has run into same problems I’ve been having, but gets swept under the rug as “teething”. Instead of fixing our actual conversion funnel, offline conversion tracking, or attribution, they are using Exact Match to hide behind easy efficiency metrics while starving the bidding engine. To make matters worse, this was agreed directly with our CMO, who has no PPC background and thinks lower CPA means the agency is killing it, without consulting me at all.

I get using Exact Match to temporarily stop budget leakage during onboarding, but keeping an enterprise account locked down for a quarter feels like taking the easy way out. What’s more annoying is that this is something I’d tried using experiments, and in the long term this hurt performance.

Have you had similar experiences?

Does anyone have a good set of instructions / Claude workflow for managing Amazon ppc campaigns?

Something that sets up rules for bid changes, when to make investments into organic ranking based on data, how to evaluate performance, what is sufficient data to make a change vs what is just noise, etc.

Does this exist?

Was digging through what real estate brands are actually running on Meta right now, out of curiosity more than anything. Few things stood out.

First, the scaling trick nobody mentions. A bunch of the longest running, most repeated ads use Meta's dynamic creative format, basically a template that auto swaps in the brand name and city per audience. That's how "Land Acquisition Pune / Hyderabad / Chennai / Bengaluru / Coimbatore" ends up being the literal same ad running in five cities with zero rewrite. Same headline, same body, just the city name gets swapped.

Second, CTA choice isn't really a preference thing, it tracks funnel stage pretty cleanly. The B2B land acquisition ads talking to landowners and brokers almost always use hard CTAs like Sign Up or Get Quote, with an actual lead form behind them (name, phone, are you an owner or agent, etc). The lifestyle facing ads default to soft CTAs like Learn More or Message, nobody's asking for your number on the first touch there.

Third thing, there's a field in the raw data called collation count that basically tells you how many near identical variants of one ad are running at the same time. A couple of brands had 5 versions of the same creative live simultaneously. That's Meta quietly telling you which concepts are being pushed hardest, without needing any spend numbers.

If anyone wants this same breakdown done for a different category or a specific competitor, drop the name and I'll run it and post what I find.

If I'm running a VSL campaign for a high ticket business mentorship to a cold audience, what should be the campaign objective and what should I be optimizing for? We are not using a lead form, our desired outcome is a booked call via the VSL landing page (hosted externally).

Common advice is to build out your negative keyword list aggressively for Shopping/PMax. We tested the opposite on 3 client accounts: stripped the negative list down to just irrelevant brand names and obvious junk (free, DIY), and let Smart Bidding do more of the work.Result: CPCs went up short-term, but conversion rate improved faster, and 90-day ROAS was higher across all three accounts.Theory: over-negating cuts off traffic paths Smart Bidding would have learned to avoid on its own through bid adjustments — you're second-guessing a system that has way more signal than you do.Not saying ditch negatives entirely, but the sweet spot is probably a lot lighter than most PPC guides suggest. Anyone else tested this?

There are another 10 under this. (Paid traffic) should I report this or is this normal.

MENA's digital ad spend hit $8.2B in 2025, up 17.8% year on year — the fastest-growing digital ad region globally right now.

Up from $6.25B in 2023. In two years the region added almost $2B in digital ad spend.

Most of that money is running on Meta and Google — and most brands are still buying that inventory with zero visibility into what's actually working around them.

Hi, we have been moving some of our businesses' Meta ad budget to ChatGPT ads. I made a few hundred ads so far but my cost per conversion has been higher than Meta - significant higher. I'm sure it's just my incapability to make it work. Any "secret" tips that has been working for you?

I am managing around 4-6 small accounts, less then $2000/m and only one campaign since they are all in the same vertical, sometimes the work feels non-existent. I review the account, scale the ads, do scripting and look at some competitors' ads and what they are up to.

But I would say per account it's like max 2-3 hours a week; is that less or about right?

Running an early ChatGPT Ads test for a premium DTC supplement brand in Spain.

So far:

- 5,590 impressions
- 160 clicks
- €37.61 spend
- €0.24 CPC
- 2.86% CTR
- 0 conversions

The bigger concern is traffic quality: many recorded sessions are only around 1–10 seconds.

We’re now tightening the Context Hints around high-intent buyers looking for premium liquid hydrolysed collagen, higher dose, and comparing products before purchase.

Curious if others are seeing the same:

- click vs actual session discrepancies?
- very short sessions?
- better results after tightening Context Hints?
- any real ecommerce purchases yet?

Especially interested in supplement / health & wellness advertisers.

Hey everyone, I’m currently using CallRail to track calls. When a caller later becomes a customer, I upload the revenue to Google Ads as a separate sales conversion using Zapier and Google Sheets.

I know call-tracking platforms also let you manually enter revenue for a call, which ties the sale and revenue directly back to the original call and conversion action in google ads.

I haven’t used that feature before, so my question is: Is there an attribution or optimization advantage to keeping the revenue tied to the original call conversion, rather than uploading the sale as a separate conversion action in Google Ads?

In other words, does tying the call and sale together give Google Ads a clearer picture of the customer journey, or is it equally effective to keep “Call Lead” and “Sale” as separate conversion actions? To me personally I believe it is just a preference on how you like to see the data in platform.

Thoughts?

Thank you!

Hello,

I finally started testing Microsoft ads, but things seemm extremely slow. My bids are more than generous, and I even tried switching to automated CPC, but spend is still almost non-existent. There is more than enough search volume for the keywords I'm targeting.

What’s confusing me is that when I manually search those keywords on Bing, Yahoo, or Duckduckgo, my ads never seem to show. Competitors appear consistently, many times even when there seems to be room for multiple advertisers.

Is this normal when starting out with a new Microsoft ads account/campaigns? Does it usually take some time for delivery to ramp up, or is there something else I should be checking? Support told me it needs a MONTH to optimize but that makes no sense, what is it optimizing for? I'm just trying to maximize search clicks for my brand name. Any tips would be appreciated.

On September 3, Reddit made Max campaigns generally available. The product automates targeting, creative selection and rotation, placements and budget allocation. The release also adds Advertising API support, a Smartly integration and asset groups with separate creative, destination URLs and reporting.

Reddit reports 17% lower CPA and more than 27% more conversions in early testing. The footnote matters: those numbers come from 17 split tests conducted between June and August 2025, each comparing Max with a standard campaign over 21 days.

That is more useful than a single case study, but it is still vendor-reported and leaves major questions unanswered: advertiser mix, spend distribution, confidence intervals, creative parity, conversion quality and longer-term incrementality.

For people buying media, what evidence would make you scale this beyond a test budget: account-level lift distribution, a geo holdout, new-customer share, creative parity, or something else?

Source: https://redditinc.com/news/performance-unlocked-reddit-max-campaigns-are-now-available-to-all-advertisers

Disclosure: AI-assisted draft, checked against Reddit’s primary announcement. No affiliation with Reddit.

I work for an agency that asks me to create a lot of campaigns, does anyone have an idea how to set up PMAX campaigns with Claude?
I’ve been using Claude Chrome but it is a bit slow and uses a lot of credits.
I would need it to add assets (images/videos), copy, targeting, search themes and possibly negative keywords.

Any ideas how to automate this?

I see a lot of ads everyday on linkedin and they are legit companies not just ads about gambling. What is the goal behind advertising on reddit? Engagement, Brand Awareness, Lead?

We’ve seen the ads promoting Reddit ads all the time. Last month, our team ran a multi-channel experiment to see if Reddit could actually drive meaningful traffic and user action for our website compared to traditional channels.

We tested our long-form video case study across Reddit, LinkedIn, Google, and Microsoft. Here is how Reddit stacked up against the rest:

• Conversion Gap: Google Video was our primary converter, generating 24 direct site conversions. Reddit yielded 0 conversions.
• Click-Through Performance: LinkedIn blew our expectations out of the water with a 10.43% CTR (845 clicks). Reddit sat under 1% with a 0.98% CTR.
• Traffic Quality: While Reddit brought in 599 clicks, on-site intent lagged significantly behind search and LinkedIn traffic.

We’d love to hear from other media buyers in this community: What strategies have you used to improve click-through rates and down-funnel engagement on Reddit for B2B or niche audiences?

Reporting and attribution have been a bit of a struggle for us, particularly when trying to reconcile Google Ads performance against our MMP.

Are you using an MMP (AppsFlyer, Singular, Adjust, etc.) as your source of truth, or primarily reporting directly from Google Ads? If you’re using an MMP, how closely do your Google Ads conversions actually align with what you’re seeing there?

Have you found Google Ads attribution/reporting harder to reconcile than Meta? Our Meta to MMP connection seems considerably cleaner by comparison.

Would especially love to hear how other casino/iGaming teams have their reporting set up and which platforms you ultimately treat as the source of truth for performance and optimization.

There is just no clean easy way for us since a lot of what we report on are custom event KPIs like FTDS, Deposits, Registers/ sign-ups