Meta Advertiser Field Notes
Weekly observations from inside Meta ads
I spent a week with ChatGPT ads, and my initial reaction is mostly underwhelmed. Meanwhile, Meta rolled out or tested several updates that caught my attention.
- A week with ChatGPT ads
- AI-powered instant form creation
- 730-day purchase retention goes live
- Media translation
- Image generation update
- Business AI prompts and responses
Let’s get to it…
1. A Week with ChatGPT Ads
Now that I’ve been working with ChatGPT ads for about a week, I have some thoughts. And I’m mostly underwhelmed.
The simplicity is mostly refreshing when compared to Meta ads, but there’s a point where it’s just way too basic. Each ad has a single headline that truncates after 24 characters, a description that truncates after 48 characters, and a small square image.
That’s not a lot to work with. If you’re getting bad results with Meta ads, the options are endless for improving them with your ads. Different formats, aspect ratios, text lengths, text angles, visuals, you name it. But these tiny ads are barely visible in the first place, and you have so few characters and pixels that your options are limited.
I know that a conversion objective is coming soon, but that’s an absolute must at the cost of these ads. Otherwise, we’re paying an average CPC of $3 to $5 and CPM around $50 to optimize for clicks or impressions. If the underlying delivery system doesn’t care whether people convert, that’s a lot to pay.
It seems unlikely that ChatGPT ads will be a good fit for the basic lead magnet or low-ticket offer for that reason. The potential is there for these ads to be very effective due to the intent of a conversation, but there are too many limitations in the current version of these ads to get particularly excited.
The biggest issue for tech companies is that our most likely ideal customer (those who subscribed to a paid tier of ChatGPT) is unreachable with ads, even though they didn’t sign up for that subscription with that benefit in mind.
The conversion tracking is also a mess, though it’s always possible I’ve set something up incorrectly, but it doesn’t help that there’s a generic “Conversions” column and there is no explanation of what goes into that. No idea what the attribution setting is or whether it includes more than the conversion event that I selected in the campaign.
Anyway, I keep reminding myself that this is the beta version. It’s going to look completely different eventually, but OpenAI has a long way to go. The biggest limitation is likely to be inventory and effective placements, and I’m not sure how they’re going to get around that.
2. AI-Powered Instant Form Creation
Some ad accounts have access to a new feature that uses AI to generate an instant form from a landing page form. If you have it, you’ll see this when you click to create a form…
You need to provide the URL to a landing page where you embed a form. Meta will use AI to learn from that page and generate an instant form.
It can take up to a minute…
When I did this, Meta didn’t try to generate an image from the page. That’s not necessarily bad, since it will just use the image from your ad if you don’t upload one specifically for the form.
Otherwise, it pulled some very basic text for a headline and description.
It seemed to mimic my landing page form and ask for only first name and email address.
And then it generated a VERY generic ending screen with text that I wouldn’t use (referring to “our” website instead of “my”). And for some ridiculous reason, it uses the URL I provided for the landing page as the destination URL.
Why would I send people to my landing page to complete a form after subscribing to that same thing with an instant form? It’s nonsense.
Overall, this feels like an excuse to use AI that doesn’t necessarily do anything that’s particularly helpful. It may be a starting point, but that’s it.
3. 730-Day Purchase Retention Goes Live
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Meta is expanding the maximum retention for purchase event custom audiences from 180 to 730 days (or from six months to two years). At the time, Meta said that any website or app custom audience based on a purchase event with a 180-day retention would automatically expand to 730 days on May 18th. That is, unless you opted out of that change.
Well, I didn’t opt out, and it doesn’t appear this change was forced after all. I have a 180-day website custom audience based on the purchase event that remains at that length.
There’s been some discussion in my Power Hitters Club – Elite community about how much this matters. Even if the retention for your custom audience was expanded to 730 days, I’m not sure what the risk or harm would be. It all depends on how you were using that custom audience.
But if you determined that this is something you don’t want, you could easily edit that audience or create a new custom audience at the original 180 days. It will update and generate immediately.
4. Media Translation Example
Last week, I covered the new AI translations feature. This feature will translate all of your text (primary text and text on media) into one of 11 languages.
At the time, I couldn’t get a preview of the translation of text on media to work. But now I have one.
I still can’t get it to work all the time. It seems that simpler images with bold text like this one are more likely to be translated than others.
5. Image Generation Update
I noticed that image generation has been further refined in my creative workflow. And the images are starting to look more usable.
When you get to the image generation step, Meta will use AI to generate several images, inspired by the original image and text. I’ve found most of these AI-generated images to be slop, and there hasn’t tended to be much of a common theme.
But that’s changing. Now I’m seeing three categories of AI-generated images:
- Refined Original Style
- Popular in Professional Services
- High Return on Ad Spend
While I’m not ready to pick all of these, they’re way better than what Meta was generating before. There are several that are passable and could be good alternatives to the primary creative options.
It would be nice if there were a way to control the creative direction of these generated images. But we’re seeing progress.
6. Business AI Prompts and Responses
Meta is really pushing the Business AI feature now. Originally, it was showing up as one of the many enhancements you could turn on and off, but now there’s a separate section for it in the ad creation flow.
If you turn this on, simple prompts may appear below your ad. Meta will use AI to develop them based on your product. There’s no way to control them, unfortunately.
Meta provided two sample prompts for this ad. If you hover over one, you can get a sense of what people will see if the prompt is clicked.
Your Turn
What do you think about these updates?
Let me know in the comments below!
