Meta Advertiser Field Notes
Weekly observations from inside Meta ads
ChatGPT ads are opening up to self-serve advertisers. This week’s notes also cover Meta’s AI connector rollout, longer purchase audience retention, “higher-quality clicks,” and partner request scams.
- ChatGPT ads expand to self-serve
- Meta AI Connector for Claude approval process
- 730-day retention maximum for purchase events
- What does Meta mean by “higher-quality clicks”?
- Partner request scams
Let’s get to it…
1. ChatGPT Ads Expand to Self-Serve
Earlier this year, OpenAI announced a test of ads on ChatGPT. It would be a limited test of select partners, of course, with a minimum spend of $200,000.
And now OpenAI is making ChatGPT ads available self-serve. Go here to get started.
The setup process is generally pretty simple.
First, provide basic information about your business (legal business name, business website, favicon, and industry). Note that the favicon needs to be at least 128×128 pixels.
Next, provide country, currency, time zone, advertiser type (business or personal), and whether you’re an agency. It appears there are some additional steps required if you indicate that you’re an agency.
That creates your account. But then you’ll need to verify your business.
OpenAI says it’s “quick and easy,” and it mostly is easy. But not necessarily quick.
You’ll need to dig up your Business ID and then provide a physical address (no PO boxes).
And then verification will enter review.
That was mostly quick and easy. But how long will that review take?
Not surprisingly, demand is high right now, so I’m assuming waits will be longer than normal. I’ve been waiting several hours so far.
All indications are that the initial Ads Manager is rather basic for now, which shouldn’t be surprising. But it’s certainly worth testing. If we learned anything from those initial years of Facebook advertising, early adopters benefit before the rush.
2. Meta AI Connector for Claude Approval Process
Even though I was able to complete the process of setting up my AI Connector to Claude without issues, I’m not yet able to use it. Claude says it’s getting the following message from Meta:
Ads MCP is gradually being rolled out. Please check back at a later date to use Ads MCP with this Ad Account.
So once you get this set up, Meta still needs to enable it. I apparently have access for a couple of the ad accounts in my business portfolio, but not the one I want to use.
Based on a little Googling, it appears this is a common problem. If you’re running into it, you’re not alone.
3. 730-Day Maximum Retention for Purchase Events
This is weird.
At the top of the Audiences page, you may see this message…
It reads…
Maximum audience retention has increased for purchase events
Starting May 18, 2026, you’ll be able to set audience retention to a maximum of 730 days when you select purchase events in your website and app activity custom audiences. Your existing custom audiences with purchase events and 180 days audience retention will automatically update to 730 days.
If you would prefer to keep your current audience retention settings, you can opt out before May 18, 2026.
When you create a custom audience based on the purchase event (or any website custom audience, for that matter), the maximum retention has always been 180 days.
For whatever reason, Meta is extending this maximum to 730 days, or two years. It’s mostly odd due to the timing. Why now?
Like many advertisers, I contend that remarketing is rarely necessary now — especially general remarketing for the broadest audiences. Meta should already prioritize these people by default.
But where this could be most useful is for exclusions. One issue with excluding custom audiences is that they’re incomplete. The 6-month maximum retention was a big part of that weakness. Combined with a customer list audience, this could help make such exclusions more effective.
Presumably, Meta already has the data to complete these 730-day audiences, and they’ll fill on May 18th (assuming the event was firing that long). This provides further evidence that Meta has more data than simply that which we can define with custom audiences. We just don’t always see it.
If you’ve created website or app activity custom audiences based on the purchase event using a 180-day retention window in the past, know that they will automatically switch to 730 days on May 18th. If you don’t want that, you can opt out.
4. What Does Meta Mean by “Higher-Quality Clicks”?
I recently stumbled on an interesting note in Meta’s documentation about performance goals that I haven’t seen before. When discussing performance goals to maximize the number of link clicks or landing page views, it says this…
Note: To improve performance, we may prioritize higher-quality clicks.
This is news to me since the optimizations for link clicks and landing page views are notorious for driving low-quality traffic, often from Audience Network.
I decided to make use of the Meta AI Business Assistant to get more information, so I highlighted that note and prompted it for details:
Provide the specific ways that Meta prioritizes higher-quality clicks when using performance goals to maximize number of link clicks or landing page views, given that these are notorious for driving low-quality traffic.
The answer wasn’t particularly convincing. It said that Meta’s delivery system uses the following methods to ensure the traffic you receive is of higher quality:
Intent Verification: By optimizing for landing page views, we show ads to Accounts Center accounts who have a history of waiting for pages to load, rather than those who frequently click and immediately exit.
Pixel Confirmation: Unlike link clicks, which only track the action on the ad, landing page views require your website to successfully load. This ensures that the “Time on Page” you track is based on actual site visits.
Statistical Modeling: In cases where data is partial, we use statistical modeling (using mathematical patterns to estimate results) to account for views that our system identifies as high-quality based on user behavior.
That’s some paper-thin support for “prioritizing higher-quality clicks.” A landing page view is, by definition, measured when a page loads. And Meta recently eliminated the pixel requirement.
I almost never run Traffic campaigns, but I figured we should always test our assumptions. I’ve begged Meta to improve this type of optimization by prioritizing high-quality traffic signals (like dwell time), or at least provide that option.
I created a Traffic campaign with the performance goal to maximize the number of landing page views. I then created several ads to promote different blog posts that were shared to my page.
Years ago, I created custom events to help measure and optimize for traffic quality signals. For this experiment, I used two of them:
- 15-second visit
- 60-second visit
These should be pretty easy bars to pass for blog posts, especially at 15 seconds. And if higher-quality traffic is prioritized, we should see that in the results.
Custom events like these are easy to inflate because they can happen multiple times. So I used the results from 1-day click and first conversion, then divided by the total number of landing page views.
Traffic Quality for Landing Page Views Performance Goal
- 15-second visit/LPV: 8.4%
- 60-second visit/LPV: 4.4%
That seems bad. But we don’t have anything to compare these results to. So I also found the average of my numbers from the past 30 days when using performance goals that were optimized for website leads and purchases.
Traffic Quality for Leads Performance Goal
- 15-second visit/LPV: 54.0%
- 60-second visit/LPV: 27.5%
While the people Meta shows ads to for this performance goal may be higher intent, I also wouldn’t expect a long dwell time. The landing pages these ads send people to are very short, so even a successful conversion would likely happen in under 60 seconds. Even under 15 seconds isn’t impossible.
Traffic Quality for Purchases Performance Goal
- 15-second visit/LPV: 54.4%
- 60-second visit/LPV: 34.4%
Pretty much the same dwell time as traffic to my lead magnets, but with more 60-second visits.
What’s surprising about the results for the landing page views optimization is that a blog post, by nature, should generate longer dwell time. That is, of course, assuming Meta is prioritizing quality traffic and sending people who are likely to actually read it.
This experiment was hardly scientific, but it verifies my assumptions. The note that Meta “may prioritize higher-quality clicks” for performance goals related to link clicks and landing page views is flimsy, at best. They’re only “higher quality” because they’re landing page views. But Meta doesn’t seem to care at all about the quality of the visit.
And that, of course, verifies what I’ve long assumed about the deep flaw in Meta ads optimization. The algorithm is literal.
5. Partner Request Scams
Be on the lookout for the latest scam targeted at advertisers. I’m one of many advertisers who have started receiving an increase in partner requests via email.
The email above came from Meta, which will immediately throw some advertisers off. One of the most common flags is the email address a scam comes from.
This isn’t a situation of someone creating an email that attempts to look like it came from Meta. It actually came from Meta, and that’s part of what makes it a more effective scam.
What’s happening here is that the scammers are making (likely thousands or more) requests to random Business IDs to be added as a partner. Once they’re added as a partner, you can then grant them access to specific assets.
My hunch is that the true impact of the spam doesn’t only come from advertisers approving the partner request. Even if you go to your business portfolio and grant the request, it would require them to then convince you to provide the access necessary to do some damage.
There’s something else here. The email indicates the partner request comes from “Agency Pro Network.” The part I’ve fuzzed out is a link. This scammer has apparently included a URL in their business portfolio name, which is then hot linked when included in Meta’s emails.
What happens when you click that link? I don’t want to find out. But I’m sure nothing good.
Meta clearly knows about these scams since a large percentage of this email is warning you about them. It aims to clarify that the request is not coming from anyone affiliated with Meta, and then goes on to warn about fraud.
The first thing Meta could do is deactivate links that appear in business portfolio names. Maybe I’m wrong about how that’s working, but it’s otherwise a very critical security flaw.
This has become a commonly reported scam recently, so be on the lookout. As always, never click these links in emails that appear to come from Meta. Go directly to your account instead. And always be suspicious of anyone wanting access to your assets.
Your Turn
What do you think about these updates?
Let me know in the comments below!
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