In this week’s digital news, the latest ChatGPT Ads updates give advertisers more control over campaign pacing, location targeting, and ad engagement. The campaigns introducing customers to your brand may be getting the least credit for revenue.
Organic traffic remains a useful SEO metric, but only when filtered by intent and business impact. This new SEO guide talks about the differences, if any, between SEO, AEO, GEO and so on and touches on commodity content, AI agents and much more.
OpenAI expands Ads Manager Beta with new budgeting and geo targeting controls
OpenAI is rolling out a fresh set of updates to its Ads Manager Beta, giving advertisers more control over campaign pacing, targeting, and reporting, while also quietly testing new ad experiences inside ChatGPT. The latest updates signal continued investment in building out the platform’s advertising capabilities as OpenAI looks to make ChatGPT a more viable performance and brand advertising channel.
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How signal decay hurts your top-of-funnel performance
Ad blockers, aggressive privacy laws, cookie deprecation, and a host of other converging factors have combined to mask significant conversion data, costing businesses up to $203 million in revenue annually, according to one Deloitte study.
For most brands, the path from discovery to purchase is no longer clear. This signal decay is more than an annoying data quirk. Left unchecked, it can make it harder for new customers to discover your brand. Most marketers don’t realise they’re making decisions based on incomplete data. Instead, they see top-of-funnel campaigns that aren’t pulling their weight and reallocate those budgets elsewhere.
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Organic traffic is still worth tracking, just not all of it
Organic traffic remains a useful SEO metric, but only when filtered by intent and business impact. With around 60% of searches now ending without a click to the open web, and buyers increasingly using AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to research before ever visiting a website, top-of-funnel informational traffic is rapidly losing its value. Rather than scrapping traffic reporting altogether, DiNardi recommends narrowing the focus to four high-intent page types: homepages, pricing pages, product/solutions pages, and bottom-of-funnel conversion pages.
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Google publishes a guide on optimising for generative AI features
Google has published a new guide on how to optimise for Google’s generative AI features, like AI Mode, AI Overviews and more. A lot of this content is put together from previous communication from Google, but all in a neat new help document named Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. This document sums up a lot of the advice Google has posted on its blogs, videos, spoken about at in-person events and more. It is a good document to see how Google thinks site owners should optimize their sites for AI-generative engines.
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Google pushes AI-generated ads further into search results
Google has started testing several new ad formats in both standard search and in AI Mode. AI-generated ads for brands and products will now appear below the responses to some prompts in AI Mode. Ads with direct offers for discounted products will be displayed in standard search results. The ads will not appear in Gemini for now. Google will protect the ads against AI hallucinations with strong guardrails.
Read more here.
Disguised AI ads outperform human ones
AI-generated ads match human performance overall, but those that look human-made drive the highest click-through rates. When ads are recognised as AI, performance drops, and human ads that look artificial perform the worst. This shows perception matters more than origin. Most people misidentify AI images, often associating polished visuals and prominent faces with human work.
Read more here.
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