15 Updates - Meta Catalogs, BFCM Spend & AI Ads
Happy Monday.
Meta is moving more of the click journey onto its own pages, holiday numbers are already shaping budgets, and measurement is still the gap between data and decisions.
Here is what caught my eye today:
- Meta is moving ad clicks, landing pages, and training data onto its own terms.
- Holiday spending looks strong, but clicks will cost more to win.
- Everyone wants unified measurement, yet few use insights to set budgets.
META
Meta keeps the click, tests the landing page, and rewrites the crawling rules
Meta had three announcements for advertisers this month. Two come with an off switch. The third does not.
That split is the whole story. Read each change, decide what you accept, and act before the default dates arrive.
Product browsing sends Meta ad clicks to a Meta-hosted catalog. Product browsing is a new Meta ads setting. When it is on, a click on your ad opens a Meta-hosted catalog of your products instead of sending the shopper to your site. Meta switches it on by default for existing ads after October 28.
Meta says an August test with 117,000 advertisers lifted conversions 3% on average. A hosted catalog can load fast and keep shoppers browsing, so a small lift is believable. Still, a catalog page is not your store, so check whether the extra conversions are worth the loss of on-site control.
You can switch it off any time in Advantage+ Creative and Destination settings. My recommendation is to decide before October 28 instead of discovering the change in your results.
Meta tests AI-generated landing pages. Meta is also testing AI-generated landing pages. Its AI builds a page from your ad and site content and shows it instead of your website.
The test started October 14 and covers under 5% of impressions, according to Common Thread Collective. Your pixel and GA4 do not fire on those pages, so those visits vanish from your analytics. That makes the test hard to judge from your own reports.
To opt out, switch off "test new AI generation features" in Ad Account Settings. If you rely on pixel data for optimization, opting out is the safer move until tracking works.
Meta's new Commercial Terms let it crawl your site to train products. From October 30, Meta's updated Commercial Terms, the rules every business account accepts, let Meta crawl your linked website. Meta can use that content to train its products, as reported by Ars Technica.
The old ad terms only allowed crawling for your ads. The new terms go further, and the only opt-out is leaving Meta. Meta says nothing changes for its crawlers, and robots.txt still works, so check your robots.txt file if you want to limit crawling.
Instagram adds a reference mode and new Edits tools. Instagram's new "Use as reference" mode plays a Reel under 90 seconds in your camera view, so you can sync a response to it. It is iOS only for now.
Edits, Meta's Reels editing app, also added creator tools: tappable links to the songs and sounds you use, kits that save style combinations for reuse, and trending topics among your audience for accounts with over 10,000 followers.
These are small tools, but they speed up the exact work that eats creator time: matching a trend and reusing a look that already worked.
My take on this whole section: Meta is pulling more of the journey inside its own walls, from the click to the landing page to the training data. Use the off switches where they exist, and read the terms where they do not. The advertisers who stay in control will be the ones who check settings before October 28 and October 30, not after.
E-COMMERCE
A $1 trillion holiday is coming, and clicks will cost more
Black Friday is next month. The first forecasts and benchmarks are out, and they point the same way: shoppers will spend, and advertisers will pay more to reach them.
Plan for the expensive version of the season, not the cheap one.
NRF expects holiday sales to grow 4.2%. NRF's annual holiday forecast predicts US retail sales in November and December will grow 4.2% to $1.013 trillion, faster than last year at 3.1%.
Shoppers will still mind their budgets. NRF expects inflation and rising gas prices to hit income groups differently, so plan offers at every price point instead of betting everything on one discount tier.
Google Search CPCs jumped from 1% to 4% growth. Google Search CPC growth jumped from 1% in Q2 to 4% in Q3, per Tinuiti's Digital Ads Benchmark Report.
Amazon's retreat from US Google Shopping auctions in July 2025 kept CPCs flat for a year. Then other ecommerce giants moved in, and everyone else bids higher to hold impression share.
Budget for pricier clicks this BFCM, and lock in your top search terms early instead of chasing them at peak prices.
TikTok Shop passed $500 million in BFCM sales. TikTok's new holiday shopping data shows TikTok Shop, its in-app store, passed $500 million in sales over BFCM 2025.
LIVE Shopping, TikTok's livestream selling format, more than doubled its US sales year over year in the first half of 2026. TikTok expects it to play an even bigger role this season.
If you sell there, plan your BFCM livestreams now. Live selling rewards sellers who show up with a schedule, not sellers who go live once and hope.
Shopify lets AI agents fill carts and check out. Shopify's Checkout MCP and Cart MCP let AI agents fill carts and check out on Shopify stores.
Now shoppers buying through an agent can opt in to your email or SMS marketing, and make the same privacy choices as in your own checkout. You get those choices with the order, so AI agent sales can grow your lists too.
The catch: only agents that adopt the update pass those choices along. If an agent has not adopted it, the order still comes through, but the marketing opt-in does not.
My take on this whole section: the holiday story is simple. Demand looks solid, competition will be fierce, and the channels that convert will charge more for the privilege. Set budgets for the expensive version of BFCM, not the cheap one.
META ADS
Your custom conversion belongs in a reporting column
Selling one blue shirt, then telling Meta to find only blue shirt buyers, sounds like the obvious move. Jon Loomer makes the case that it usually costs more than it gets you.
The fix is not complicated. Keep the broad signal for optimization, and do the narrow counting in a column.
Three options, two with the same first name. A standard event, like Purchase or Lead, is Meta's default. A custom event covers an action the standard list does not cover, like PodcastPlay. A custom conversion uses rules, with no code needed, to carve a slice out of an existing event, such as purchases of one blue shirt.
Narrower target, thinner data. Sales campaigns already fight for conversion volume, and a custom conversion that counts one product shrinks the pool further. When Meta sees very few conversions, it assumes your ads are failing.
It also narrows your reporting. If someone clicked your ad and bought something else, you and your client both want to know.
Inflated results are smaller than they look. Default reporting mixes click, view-through, and engage-through conversions, first versus all conversions, and sometimes sales of products you were not promoting. Never take it at face value.
If you send traffic to one product page, most reported conversions will be for that product anyway. The attribution breakdowns show what sits behind the total.
Main point: optimize for the standard event. Optimize for the standard event. Then add the custom conversion as a column in Ads Manager to see exactly how many of that product you sold. Meta gets its volume, and you still get your product-level number.
When the custom conversion earns the slot. First, it needs enough volume on its own to exit learning. Second, you need a real problem beyond inflated numbers, like Meta leaning hard into a product that does not make you money.
That rarely happens unless the page makes it easy to buy something else. As a rough bar, Meta's target for exiting learning is about 50 optimization events per ad set in a week. Check your custom conversion column against it before you switch.
My take on this whole section: let Meta chase the broad signal and do the narrow counting yourself. A custom conversion is a measuring tool first, and an optimization target only when the volume proves it.
DATA STORIES
Everyone wants one source of truth, but few use it to set budgets
Marketing measurement works like a group project where every channel claims credit for the top grade. A recent report shows what leaders want most, and the gap is not tools. It is decisions.
The wish list is clear. The follow-through is the problem.
Unified measurement tops the wish list at 40%. Unified cross-channel measurement leads at 40%, followed by higher-quality data at 33%, and better incrementality testing at 31%.
A quarter would prioritize AI for faster insights, tied with building in-house expertise at 25% each.
The surprise sits at the bottom. Only 16% picked using insights to plan future spending, which is the whole point of measuring.
Before you buy a unified tool, run one holdout test on your biggest channel. Then tie every report to one budget decision. A report that does not change a budget is a decoration.
My take on this whole section: every platform grades its own homework, so teams end up with five reports and no single answer. Leaders want one source of truth, but they need better data first. Start with one holdout test, not one more dashboard.
QUICK UPDATES
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is testing pre-roll ads on topically relevant creator and publisher videos, and creators who sign up get a cut of the ad revenue. A new feature, Advice Sessions, also lets verified Premium members in the US sell 1:1 consultations from their profile. My take: if you create B2B content, this is a new way to earn from your videos and your expertise in one place.
Google Ads AI Max: On the fence about AI Max, Google's AI matching and ad copy add-on for Search? Check your Recommendations page. Eligible accounts may find a 1-click, 50/50 split test of a Search campaign against an AI Max version. Building one manually? You can pick which AI Max features each ad group gets. My take: a 50/50 test beats a debate. Run it on one campaign before you roll AI Max everywhere.
Google AI Mode ads: Your AI Mode ads could get more personal. Google is now testing ads for Personal Intelligence users, who let AI Mode use info from their connected Google apps, and insights from those apps may shape which ads they see. Ads will not draw directly on Gmail or Photos content, and you cannot access that data. My take: watch this one for targeting shifts, but do not expect new data in your reports.
ChatGPT: Need proof your ChatGPT ads work? OpenAI added new measurement partners, redesigned its Conversions page to flag tracking problems, and now sends weekly performance emails. It is also testing wider ad cards and bigger images using your existing creative, so there is nothing to set up. No rollout date yet. My take: fix the tracking flags first, then judge the bigger cards.
Google Ads Campaign Type Attribution: Social platforms claim full credit for every conversion they touch, while Google Ads splits credit across campaigns. Campaign Type Attribution, a beta you request through your Google rep, lets Demand Gen claim full credit too, so you can compare it with Meta and TikTok like for like. The catch: account-level conversion totals go blank. My take: useful for a fair comparison, but keep a second view of totals before you switch.