In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🤖 Follow an AI agent through your store before it shops for someone

🔎 Study of 193,000 AI answers reveals what gets websites cited

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

Together with AirOps

Your Next Content Priority Starts With This Research

Your next article costs time and budget. If AI answers the question before buyers reach your site, it’s harder to justify the investment.

AirOps brings together Kevin Indig, Ross Simmonds, and Eli Schwartz’s webinar takeaways to help you choose content worth funding next.

• Kevin Indig reports informational clicks fell 35–60% over the past year. Give buyers a reason to visit with original research.

• Ross Simmonds’ research covered 380,000 B2B answers. Comparison pages dominated citations, making separate “alternatives” and “versus” pages worth prioritizing.

• Eli Schwartz recommends purchase-focused content with clear conversion paths.

Together, their findings give you a practical basis for deciding which pages deserve your team’s time as AI changes how buyers research.

See which Content to Prioritize

🤖 Follow an AI agent through your store before it shops for someone

This month, Shopify launched shop.md, a skill that lets AI agents act as personal shoppers through a buyer’s Shop account.

According to coverage of the launch, agents can search more than a billion products in Shopify Catalog, use past orders to learn sizes and tastes, and check out with Shop Pay. The buyer approves each purchase, and orders land in the merchant’s admin.

A shopper can also set rules, such as a budget cap or fast shipping only.

Here’s your store from the agent’s side, step by step.

Step 1: The search

The agent reads your catalog data. Your homepage design never enters the picture. Thin descriptions, missing materials, or vague sizing make your product harder to match to a request like “waterproof hiking boots under $150 in wide fit.”

Fix: make sure every product lists materials, fit, care, and dimensions, with accurate sizes for every variant.

Step 2: The comparison

The agent compares you with similar products on price, specs, and availability. Sale pricing needs to be set up properly for the agent to see it. One guide published after the launch advises setting compare-at prices at the variant level before Black Friday.

Fix: check that sale prices sit on each variant, with the original price filled in.

Step 3: The rules

If the shopper said “fast shipping only,” products without fast delivery may drop out. If they set a budget, shipping costs count.

Fix: make sure delivery times and shipping costs in your settings reflect reality, especially for your bestsellers.

Step 4: The checkout

Purchases go through Shop Pay. The same guide warns that stores without Shop Pay enabled can appear in results but can’t be bought from through the agent.

Fix: Confirm Shop Pay is enabled in your payment settings.

Step 5: The order

The order arrives in your admin like any other. Watch for patterns: order sources, sizes ordered, and return rates for agent-placed orders, once you can identify them.

Test it yourself

Connect a Shop account, ask an agent to find a product in your category and see whether yours appears. Check that prices, stock, and descriptions match your site.

In my judgment, this matters less for its volume today and more for what it rewards: clean, complete product data. That pays off across every AI shopping surface.

Pick your five bestsellers and check each one against the four fixes above, starting with Shop Pay.

🔎 Study of 193,000 AI answers reveals what gets websites cited

A new analysis of 193,507 AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews reveals which content characteristics are associated with higher citation rates, offering insights for brands looking to improve AI search visibility.

The Breakdown:

• Pages that answered questions immediately were cited more frequently, with 23% of cited pages providing upfront answers compared with 14% of retrieved but uncited pages.

• Fresh content showed a strong association with AI citations, with pages published or updated within the past year recording 88% higher odds of being cited.

• Pages featuring tables had 69% higher citation odds, while content demonstrating firsthand experience saw a 45% increase and pages displaying prices recorded 28% higher odds.

• Including a year in the page title more than doubled citation odds, while schema markup showed a smaller 13% advantage. Researchers emphasized that these findings do not establish causation.

A small Google AI opt-out study found that disabling AI search visibility eliminated AI impressions but also coincided with a decline in traditional organic clicks. SEO consultant Cyrus Shepherd estimated an AI click-through rate of 0.9%, suggesting that appearing in AI answers may also encourage users to click regular search listings.

Together with Omnisend

One Plain-Text Email Outearned a Month of Campaigns

Before you send everyone the same BFCM discount, check who keeps coming back. Your repeat buyers could justify an offer of their own.

For one skincare brand, 36% of customers had ordered more than six times. Enflow Digital used Omnisend to turn that loyalty into nearly $18,000 from one plain-text email.

Omnisend helped the team:

• Find purchase patterns in minutes, cutting out hours of manual analysis.

• Build a VIP audience of customers with four or more orders, ready for a separate promotion.

• Keep the VIP offer focused on engaged buyers by filtering out contacts inactive for 180 days.

The offer was available only through email: a higher discount plus a gift above a higher spend threshold. It increased order value while helping clear slower-selling stock.

Co-founder Karolina shares how it came together so you can apply the approach to your own repeat buyers before your BFCM offers are locked in.

Try Omnisend for free

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At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🪤 Three popup offers compared: what each Q4 signup is actually worth

📱 Instagram tests 90-Minute videos as Pinterest expands ads and Meta updates campaign guidelines

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🪤 Three popup offers compared: what each Q4 signup is actually worth

From late October through Cyber Monday, sign-up forms collect more email addresses than at any other point in the year. Most stores keep their usual offer, often a percentage off the first order.

In Q4, that offer competes with your own Black Friday sale. A shopper who joins for 10% off on November 20 may simply wait a week for 30%.The incentive also shapes who you can segment later, and precise segments are where Q4 email pays.

Enflow Digital used Omnisend’s segmentation and AI connection to find a skincare client’s most loyal buyers in minutes, then sent one plain-text email to 1,676 of them. It generated nearly $18,000, more than the previous month’s broad campaigns combined. You can check out how they did it here.

Price each offer per signup

Value per signup = 60-day purchase rate × (margin per order − incentive cost)

Here are three popup offers on an illustrative store with a $70 average order and $35 margin before the incentive:

10% off the first order. Purchase rate 14%, incentive cost $7. Value: 0.14 × $28 = $3.92 per signup.

Free shipping. Purchase rate 11%, incentive cost $6. Value: 0.11 × $29 = $3.19.

Gift finder quiz, no discount. Purchase rate 9%, no incentive cost. Value: 0.09 × $35 = $3.15. The quiz also tells you who the gift is for and the budget, which makes every later email more relevant.

The purchase rates are illustrative. Measure your own by signup source.

What the math hides

A discount signup in Q4 may never buy at full price. Track the 6-month value of each signup source alongside the first order.

In my judgment, the quiz often wins over six months because those subscribers joined for help, not a code.

Build the quiz in an afternoon

1. Ask who it’s for: partner, parent, friend, or yourself.

2. Ask for a budget range.

3. Ask one preference question tied to your catalog.

4. Show three products, then ask for an email to save the results.

Segment from day one

Tag every Q4 signup by source and quiz answer. Someone shopping for a partner under $50 should get a different BFCM email from someone buying for themselves.

Clean up in January

Q4 signups who haven’t opened or clicked by mid-January can move to a lower-frequency track, protecting your sender reputation for next year.

Omnisend is used by 150,000+ ecommerce brands, which report an average $79 for every $1 spent. You can check out Omnisend here.

Add a source tag to every form and launch one quiz variant alongside your current popup.

Together with Omnisend

Imagine beating a month’s email revenue with one send

You’d probably double-check the numbers.

Enflow Digital did exactly that for a skincare client ahead of BFCM. One plain-text email sent through Omnisend to 1,676 recipients generated nearly $18,000, beating the previous month’s broad-audience campaigns combined.

Omnisend helped the team find the right customers to send it to. Its segmentation and MCP capabilities let them uncover purchase patterns in minutes.

Co-founder Karolina shares how they pulled it off with Omnisend, from choosing the audience to making the offer worth opening. Worth a read (or a watch) before you hit send on your own BFCM campaigns.

New to Omnisend? It’s an email and SMS marketing platform for ecommerce used by more than 150,000 brands, generating an average of $79 for every $1 spent. Migration is free and takes up to five business days.

Check Omnisend now

📱 Instagram tests 90-Minute videos as Pinterest expands ads

Instagram and Pinterest have announced updates to long-form content, programmatic advertising, and campaign optimization, giving creators more publishing options and advertisers new ways to reach audiences and improve performance.

The Breakdown:

Instagram Tests 90-Minute Videos for Creators - Instagram is testing Features, a format supporting videos up to 90 minutes, enabling creators to publish podcasts, interviews and vlogs. Select US creators are receiving access following initial testing in Brazil.

Instagram Introduces Connected Reels and Series - The platform is also testing Clips as Reels, allowing creators to link up to eight Reels to longer videos, alongside Series for organizing episodic content and encouraging repeat viewing.

Pinterest Opens Ads to Programmatic Buyers - Advertisers can now purchase Pinterest display and video inventory through Amazon Ads, Google DV360, Yahoo DSP and DeepIntent across the Americas and Asia Pacific, accessing its 640 million monthly users.

Instagram’s longer video formats could create new opportunities for sponsored content, although limited view-based monetization remains a challenge. Pinterest’s programmatic expansion simplifies access to high-intent shoppers, while Meta’s guidance emphasizes consolidating budgets and allowing campaigns enough data to optimize effectively.

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💃Events

🔥 What Changes When AI Already Knows the Customer Context

November 5 | 11 AM ET | Virtual Event

Instead of gathering background before every prompt and cleaning up the CRM afterward, see what happens when the context is already there. HubSpot will demo the workflow live and show how teams can move from question to decision to action with far fewer manual handoffs.

✅ Register for Free

Can’t attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

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At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🔁 Three questions about your Q4 corporate gifting pipeline, asked two ways

📊 Meta introduces creative performance breakdowns and new ad optimization guidelines

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🔁 Three questions about your Q4 corporate gifting pipeline, asked two ways

Corporate gifting is the B2B side of an e-commerce brand’s holiday season: companies ordering 200 gift boxes for clients or staff. These deals move through quotes, approvals, and delivery dates, usually tracked in a CRM.

Here’s what happens when you ask an AI assistant about them two ways.

Question 1: “Which corporate gifting quotes are at risk?”

Version A, pasted context: You paste a deal export. The assistant ranks quotes by size and flags the oldest. It can’t tell that the largest one had a call yesterday, because the call note wasn’t in the export.

Version B, connected to the CRM: The assistant reads deals, notes and activity together. It flags quotes with no activity in 10 days and a delivery date before December 15, and skips the one with yesterday’s call.

That gap is the subject of HubSpot’s live webinar on November 5. Its product team will show how HubSpot connects with Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants so answers come from your actual business data, and how you can ask, act and update the CRM in one conversation.

You’ll also hear about HubSpot’s headless product strategy and the governance controls built in, followed by an AMA. Can’t make it live? Register anyway for the recordings within 24 hours. You can reserve your free spot here.

Question 2: “Draft follow-ups for the stalled ones.”

Version A: Generic follow-ups, because the assistant doesn’t know what each buyer asked for.

Version B: Each draft references the buyer’s last question, such as custom card printing or a split shipment to three offices, pulled from the notes.

Question 3: “Update the deal stage for the ones that replied.”

Version A: You copy the answer back into the CRM by hand, deal by deal.

Version B: The assistant updates the stages in the CRM, within whatever permissions you’ve allowed.

What the comparison shows

The model was the same both times. What changed was the context it could see and the actions it could take.

Set up your own test

1. Pick three questions your team asks every week about open deals.

2. Ask each one with a pasted export and note the answer.

3. Ask again with the assistant connected to your CRM.

4. Compare which answers you could act on without checking.

For gifting deals this season

Add two fields if you don’t have them: required delivery date and number of shipping addresses. In my judgment, those two fields decide which Q4 gifting deals succeed, and an assistant can only flag risk on fields that exist.

Write down the three deal questions your team asked most last week. They’re your test set.

Together with Insense

Running creators from spreadsheets and DMs? Get 40+ hours back.

Most creator programs run on one person: a spreadsheet, a full inbox and dozens of DMs that never get a reply.

Insense takes the manual work out:

• Post one brief and vetted creators apply to you, usually within 48 hours

• Automated agreements, approvals, and payments in one place

• Updates from your campaigns in Slack, Claude, or ChatGPT; check all collab statuses in one message and review content deliverables directly in your chat or Slack channel

Save 40+ hours on creator ops and spend that time on strategy and testing.

Book a free strategy call by October 30th and get $200 toward your first campaign.

📊 Meta introduces creative performance breakdowns and new ad optimization guidelines

Meta has introduced individual creative performance reporting in Ads Manager, alongside new campaign optimization recommendations encouraging advertisers to establish clear goals and allow sufficient data collection before making changes.

The Breakdown:

Meta Adds Individual Creative Performance Insights - Advertisers can now view performance breakdowns for individual images, videos, and text variations in Ads Manager, helping them identify which creative elements drive campaign results.

Creative Reporting Comes With Limitations - The new breakdowns exclude certain multi-post formats, including collection and carousel displays, and do not support some custom conversion actions, such as Donate and Subscribe.

Meta Recommends 50 Conversions Per Week - Meta advises advertisers to generate approximately 50 conversions per ad set weekly to support optimization. Its analysis found that ad sets below this threshold had roughly 28% higher costs per purchase.

Meta Warns Against Frequent Campaign Changes - Advertisers are encouraged to define clear optimization events, budgets, bid strategies, and attribution settings, then allow campaigns sufficient learning time before evaluating results through A/B tests or Conversion Lift studies.

Meta’s updates give advertisers more visibility into creative performance while reinforcing the importance of sufficient conversion data for automated optimization. Marketers can use insights on individual creatives to refine future campaigns, but frequent adjustments and fragmented ad sets can increase costs and make performance harder to evaluate reliably.

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At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🎥 Your best creator videos are stuck in Ads Manager

🛍️ Shopify expands catalog testing, international shipping and AI shopping capabilities

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🎥 Your best creator videos are stuck in Ads Manager

You paid for a creator video, ran it as an ad, and found a winner. It now lives in one place: your ad account.

Meanwhile, the product page it advertises still shows studio photos, and your BFCM emails use the same hero images as last year.

Repurposing is easier when you settle the rights question up front. Content made through Insense comes with lifetime usage rights, and each creator delivers 20+ raw clips, enough to cut a fast ad version and a slower product-page version from the same shoot. You can then rehire the creators whose videos performed and keep a monthly flow of fresh footage. You can book a free strategy call by November 6th and get $200 toward your first campaign.

Map where the video could work

• Product page: a short clip near the price, where shoppers decide.

• Email: a thumbnail with a play button linking to the video, since most inboxes don’t play video.

• Post-purchase: a how-to clip after the order ships, which can reduce support questions.

• Abandoned cart: a 10-second clip of the product in use, for shoppers who hesitated.

Check the rights first

Most creator agreements cover ad usage on specific platforms. Using the same video on your website or in email may need separate permission. Before you repurpose anything:

1. Read the usage clause for each winning video.

2. Ask for owned-channel rights in writing if they’re missing.

3. Agree on a duration, such as 12 months.

For future bookings, include owned-channel rights in the original agreement. In my judgment, adding them up front usually costs less than negotiating later.

Test it on one product

Add your best creator clip to one high-traffic product page and leave a similar product page unchanged. Compare conversion rate over two weeks. If the clip helps, roll it out to your top ten products before Black Friday.

Pick the right clip for each place

Ad cuts are built to stop the scroll. Product pages need proof: the product in use, close-ups, and the result. Ask creators to deliver a second, slower cut showing the product in detail, which works better on a product page.

Credit the creator

Show the creator’s name or handle next to the clip. It reads as real customer proof, and creators tend to appreciate the extra exposure.

What to track

• Conversion rate on pages with creator video

• Click rate on emails with a video thumbnail

• Support tickets for products with a how-to clip

Today

List your three best-performing creator ads and check whether their agreements allow website and email use.

Together with AirOps

Getting cited by AI is not the finish line. Getting chosen is.

Most teams now track citations like a rankings report. But a citation is a mention, and a mention does not build a pipeline.

Buyers use AI to research, shortlist, and decide, so the brands that win give them a reason to pick them.

Three recent AirOps Growth Leader webinars point to the same shift.

• Kevin Indig’s data shows that ranking #1 for your key fan-out queries earns 58% of citations, four times more than rank #10.

• Ross Simmonds found that Google’s AI surfaces lean on Reddit and YouTube, while the assistants favor off-site product and comparison pages.

• Eli Schwartz argues that every asset still needs a conversion path.

You’ll leave with practical tips on which pages to prioritize and how to give AI-referred buyers a clear next step.

Read the full takeaways to see where your content and off-site effort should go next

🛍️ Shopify expands catalog testing, international shipping and AI shopping capabilities

Shopify has introduced new updates across product catalogs, international shipping, checkout, and AI-powered shopping, giving merchants more control over store operations while simplifying product discovery and customer purchases.

The Breakdown:

Shopify Adds Catalog Scheduling and A/B Testing - Merchants can now schedule market-specific prices, product availability, and catalog changes through Rollouts, test different catalog offers, and coordinate updates across themes, catalogs, and checkout.

International Shipping Gets Simplified Pricing - Shopify Managed Markets now sets Standard and Express shipping rates automatically, incorporating part of the shipping cost into product prices. Eligible prepaid FedEx and DHL Express labels are protected from later carrier adjustments.

Checkout Gets a New Payment Layout - Stores offering four or fewer payment methods now display them as compact tiles instead of a list. Shopify also blocks malicious links and warns customers before opening suspicious destinations.

AI Shopping Agents Can Find Physical Stores - Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) now supports physical store discovery, allowing AI agents to search by city or distance and identify locations carrying specific products.

Shopify’s updates give merchants more flexibility to manage promotions, international sales, and customer experiences across online and physical stores. The addition of physical store discovery for AI agents could also create new opportunities for local inventory visibility as AI-assisted shopping becomes more common.

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🥳 Events

🔥 How to Make TV Earn Its Place in Your Growth Mix

October 29 | The Glasshouse, NYC | Free In-Person Event

Forward shows how leading brands connect TV reach to measurable business outcomes, decide when to move beyond paid social, and evaluate new discovery channels. Hear directly from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Cody Plofker, and operators building growth strategies at scale.

✅ Secure Your Spot

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Checkout our Partner Kit here🤝

At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📒 Demand gen costs can now shift for 60 days. keep your own ledger

📢 Google Ads expands customer targeting controls while automatically adding creative assets to PMax

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

Together with Omnisend

Imagine beating a month’s email revenue with one send

You’d probably double-check the numbers.

Enflow Digital did exactly that for a skincare client ahead of BFCM. One plain-text email sent through Omnisend to 1,676 recipients generated nearly $18,000, beating the previous month’s broad-audience campaigns combined.

Omnisend helped the team find the right customers to send it to. Its segmentation and MCP capabilities let them uncover purchase patterns in minutes.

Co-founder Karolina shares how they pulled it off with Omnisend, from choosing the audience to making the offer worth opening. Worth a read (or a watch) before you hit send on your own BFCM campaigns.

New to Omnisend? It’s an email and SMS marketing platform for ecommerce used by more than 150,000 brands, generating an average of $79 for every $1 spent. Migration is free and takes up to five business days.

Check out Omnisend today

📒 Demand gen costs can now shift for 60 days. Keep your own ledger

In mid-October, reports noted that Google Ads Help now says Demand Gen cost adjustments can apply for “up to 60 days,” up from the three weeks previously reported.

Here’s how they work, according to that coverage. For qualifying new Demand Gen campaigns using target CPA or target ROAS, Google may lower the final cost if conversions fall short of what the system predicted. Adjustments can start within five days of launch.

There’s no separate credit, notification or line item. The adjusted cost simply appears in reporting, sometimes days later.

Why that matters in Q4

If you launch a Demand Gen campaign in early November, the cost you see on day three may not be the cost you see on day ten. Decisions made on early numbers can be wrong in either direction.

Who qualifies

Eligibility depends on factors such as account age, activity history, tracking setup and bidding and budget practices. It isn’t guaranteed, there’s no published minimum and the window can end early if a campaign hits a duration or cost limit.

So assume it might apply, and plan as if it might not.

Build a daily ledger

From launch day, record these numbers every day in your own sheet:

• Spend as shown that day

• Conversions and conversion value

• Bid strategy and target

• Budget

Then re-pull the same days a week later. Any difference in spend is an adjustment.

Judge on settled numbers

Wait until costs for a given week stop changing before you call a campaign’s performance. In my judgment, give each week of data about seven days to settle.

Keep settings steady early

Frequent target or budget changes in the first weeks make it harder to tell what moved results. Eligibility also depends partly on bidding and budget practices, so steady settings are the safer choice.

Time your launch

If you want a Demand Gen campaign stable by Black Friday, launch it by early November. That leaves a few weeks of settled data before the peak.

Report clearly

When you share results, note which figures came before and after adjustment. Finance will notice if last week’s cost per acquisition quietly changes.

What to track

• Daily spend, first pull against re-pull

• Settled cost per acquisition by week

• Whether adjustments appeared at all

Set up the ledger before the campaign goes live. The first five days are the ones you’ll most want to compare later.

📢 Google Ads expands customer targeting controls while automatically adding creative assets to PMax

Google Ads is introducing new customer lifecycle bidding options across Performance Max, Search, and Shopping campaigns, while making automated video and landing page image sourcing the default for eligible PMax campaigns.

The Breakdown:

Google Introduces High-Value Customer Bidding - Shopping campaigns are gaining New Customer High Value Mode, allowing advertisers to bid more aggressively for first-time customers predicted to generate higher spending.

New Retention Modes Target Existing Customers - PMax, Search and Shopping campaigns are getting Re-engagement, Loyalty and Retention Only modes, enabling advertisers to adjust bidding for lapsed customers, loyalty members and selected customer segments.

Percentage-Based Bid Boosts Expand - Advertisers can now apply percentage-based bid boosts across Search, Shopping, PMax and Demand Gen, allowing adjustments to scale with purchase value rather than relying on fixed amounts.

PMax Automatically Sources Videos and Images - Google is making sourced videos opt-out, while landing page image sourcing becomes enabled by default for all new PMax campaigns starting December 4, even when account-level dynamic images are disabled.

Google’s updates give advertisers more control over customer acquisition and retention bidding while increasing automation in creative selection. Advertisers will need accurate customer segmentation data and should review PMax asset optimization settings to prevent unauthorized or unsuitable images and videos from appearing in campaigns.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

Advertise with Us

Wanna put out your message in front of over 50,000 best marketers and decision makers?

Checkout our Partner Kit here🤝

At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🚚 Google now says how fast “fast shipping” is, country by country

📢 Meta expands AI-powered ads, updates commercial terms and adds new Reels tools

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🚚 Google now says how fast “fast shipping” is, country by country

On October 21, Search Engine Roundtable reported that Google’s Merchant Center documentation now states how many days a listing needs to qualify for fast shipping in each market:

• Japan and New Zealand: 1 day

• India: 2 days

• United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia: 3 days

• Brazil: 4 days

That gives every store selling through Google a clear target. Whether you hit it depends on two numbers in your shipping settings: handling time and transit time.

Step 1: Add up your real delivery days

For each country you ship to, write down:

• Handling time: days from order to dispatch

• Transit time: days from dispatch to the customer’s door

A US store that ships next day with two-day ground transit totals three days, right at the line. One that needs two days to pack and ships ground in three totals five.

Step 2: Close the gap where it’s cheapest

Cut handling time first. Moving dispatch from two days to one often costs less than paying for faster carriers. Look at pick-and-pack staffing and order cutoff times.

Set an order cutoff time. Orders placed late in the day usually ship the next day. Stating a realistic cutoff keeps delivery estimates honest.

Use regional transit times. If most of your customers sit near your warehouse, setting transit by region can show faster delivery to the shoppers who’ll actually get it.

Step 3: Stay honest in November

Carriers slow down around Black Friday. If your real delivery time stretches, update handling or transit settings to match. In my judgment, a delivery promise you miss in peak week does more harm than a slower promise you keep.

Step 4: Prioritize your fastest products

If only some products ship fast, such as in-stock items from your main warehouse, give them more prominence in Shopping campaigns during the holiday weeks. Products with long lead times or made-to-order items are better left out of the fast-shipping push.

Step 5: Check by country

If you sell abroad, run the same math for each market. A store that qualifies at home may miss Canada’s 3-day line because of cross-border transit.

What to track

• Share of products that meet each country’s threshold

• Actual delivery days against the stated estimate

• Shopping conversion rate before and after any change

Your first check

Open your Merchant Center shipping settings and add handling time to transit time for your main market. If the total is above the line, start with handling time.

Together with Insense

Your BFCM Creator Calendar is Already Mapped

Still sourcing creators when your Black Friday ads should be running? Every delay leaves less time to test what actually sells before your biggest spending weeks.

Insense’s free BFCM + Q5 Creator Marketing Playbook gives marketers a week-by-week plan from September through January, so every creator campaign starts with a clear deadline and purpose.

Inside, you’ll find:

• A week-by-week August-to-January calendar showing when to secure permissions, test content, scale winning creators, and move into Q5.

• A practical creator scorecard using conversions, engagement quality, and reliability, so November budgets back proven performers over follower counts.

• Q5 action plan covering licence extensions, January creative, and the recommended 10–15% budget reserve for the lower-cost post-holiday window.

You’ll also get benchmarks for creator-handle ads, modular UGC testing, live shopping, hook rates, and creative volume, helping your team set measurable targets before spending rises.

Download the playbook

📢 Meta expands AI-powered ads, updates commercial terms and adds new reels tools

Meta is introducing new product browsing and AI-generated landing page experiences across Facebook and Instagram, while updating its commercial terms and expanding video creation tools for creators.

The Breakdown:

Instagram Adds Reels Creation Tools - Meta’s Edits app now supports clickable audio links, audience trend insights, and reusable style kits. Instagram also introduced reference Reels for iOS creators while removing linked Reels series starting October 28.

Meta Makes In-App Product Browsing Default - Starting October 28, Meta will automatically enable personalized product browsing pages for eligible ads unless advertisers opt out. A test involving 117,000 advertisers showed an average 3% increase in conversions.

AI-Generated Landing Pages Raise Tracking Concerns - Meta is testing AI-generated landing pages on fewer than 5% of ad impressions. Because these pages operate outside advertisers’ websites, standard GA4 and Meta Pixel tracking may miss user activity and create attribution gaps.

Meta’s New Terms Raise AI Training Questions - From October 30, Meta’s updated terms could allow AI training on business-linked website content. Meta says its crawling practices and existing protections remain unchanged.

Meta’s updates are bringing more product discovery and creative activity inside its platforms, potentially giving advertisers new conversion opportunities while complicating independent measurement. Businesses should review browsing settings, verify conversion tracking, and understand the updated commercial terms before the changes take effect.

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🕸️ Meta’s new terms start October 30. List every domain tied to your business account

📢 ChatGPT tests new shopping ads, CTA buttons and AI-powered creative enhancements

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🕸️ Meta’s new terms start October 30. List every domain tied to your business account

On October 19, Net Influencer reported that Meta’s updated commercial terms take effect on October 30 for organizations with a Meta business account, which covers anyone running ads, managing a Page or using Ads Manager.

Under the terms, Meta can access, crawl and periodically pull updates from domains “associated with” business accounts, and may create test credentials to access them. The content can be used to provide, develop, improve and train Meta’s products, including AI at Meta. There’s no opt-out short of stopping commercial use of Meta’s products.

Meta told the outlet the update consolidates existing language, won’t change how it crawls and that site owners can still manage access through robots.txt.

For a store, the practical question is which of your sites are exposed, and what you want crawled.

Inventory your associated domains

List every domain and subdomain connected to your Meta business account: your main store, regional stores, a blog, landing page domains and anything verified in Business Manager.

Then add the sites people forget: wholesale portals, member pricing areas and staging sites.

Decide what each one should allow

Main store: product pages are already public and feed your ads. Blocking Meta’s crawlers here may affect how your products appear in ads, so think carefully.

Gated areas: wholesale portals and member-only pricing deserve a closer look, given the reference to test credentials. Make sure access requires manual approval.

Staging sites: these shouldn’t be publicly reachable at all.

Write robots.txt rules carefully

In a video published October 21, Google’s Gary Illyes noted that robots.txt controls access and has no say over what happens to data afterward. To block a specific crawler, you target its user-agent token, and other crawlers may not support every feature Google does.

So check the user-agent tokens each Meta crawler uses before writing rules, and test them.

Watch your sign-ups

If test accounts appear, they’ll likely show up as new registrations. Keep an eye on account creation in gated areas after October 30, and require manual approval for wholesale access.

Ask your legal team

Terms like these raise questions only counsel can answer for your business. Share the inventory from Step 1 with them before October 30.

List every domain tied to your Meta business account. Many stores find at least one they’d forgotten.

Together with Omnisend

What Happened to Everyone Who Bought Last Black Friday?

Before you spend more bringing new shoppers in, what happened to the people who bought last Black Friday? Some haven’t returned. Your next campaign could give them a reason to.

Omnisend’s BFCM AI playbook shows you how to turn customer and campaign data into work you can use this season:

• Find past BFCM buyers who haven’t purchased again and build a dedicated audience.

• Identify the offers behind your strongest campaigns to inform this year’s calendar.

• Check welcome and abandoned-cart emails for weak spots before holiday traffic arrives.

With Omnisend connected to Claude or ChatGPT, you can create segments and editable email templates from the conversation. Review them in Omnisend before sending.

The email and SMS platform serves 150,000+ brands, and you can start free without a credit card.

Use the prompts now, while there’s time to address what you find before your busiest selling weekend.

Try the BFCM prompts

📢 ChatGPT tests new shopping ads, CTA buttons and AI-powered creative enhancements

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT’s advertising capabilities with single-brand shopping ads, clickable CTA buttons and automated creative enhancements, while fixing a tracking bug that caused marketers to underestimate referral traffic.

The Breakdown:

ChatGPT Tests Single-Brand Shopping Ads - New ad units appear at the bottom of ChatGPT responses, displaying products from one advertiser with its website name, favicon, product images, and prices.

CTA Buttons Appear Inside ChatGPT Ads - OpenAI is testing clickable calls to action with dotted underlines and arrow icons, giving advertisers a more prominent way to direct users toward their websites or offers.

AI Will Automatically Modify Ad Creatives - Starting October 29, OpenAI’s creative enhancements will be enabled by default, allowing AI to rewrite headlines, translate copy, resize images, and change landing page destinations without approving every variation.

ChatGPT Fixes Referral Tracking Bug - Missing UTM parameters caused approximately 31,000 daily ChatGPT visits to disappear from referral reports in one analysis, with many classified as direct traffic. OpenAI began rolling out a fix on October 15.

ChatGPT is expanding its advertising formats while introducing more automation into campaign delivery. Advertisers gain new opportunities for product visibility and engagement, but should review creative enhancement settings and monitor attribution accuracy to maintain control over their campaigns and measure performance reliably.

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🥳 Events

🔥 Where to Put Your Next Growth Dollar Beyond Meta

October 29 | The Glasshouse, NYC | Free In-Person Event

Hear how Reddit CEO Steve Huffman thinks about discovery, how Cody Plofker helped scale Jones Road Beauty to nine figures, and how brands like Liquid I.V. and MANSCAPED use TV to drive measurable revenue. Bring your hardest acquisition question and leave with a sharper channel plan.

✅ Reserve Your Spot

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At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

✂️ Your black friday email is too heavy for Gmail, and your open rate is lying about it

🔍 ChatGPT expands web indexing as DeepSeek opens its search engine to developers

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

✂️ Your black friday email is too heavy for Gmail, and your open rate is lying about it

A brand sends its Black Friday gift guide: 36 product tiles, a countdown timer and three hero banners. The open rate comes in 30% below last year’s. The team blames the subject line.

The subject line was fine. Gmail clipped the email.

Gmail cuts off messages at roughly 102KB of HTML and shows a “[Message clipped] View entire message” link. Everything below the cut disappears unless the reader clicks through. That usually includes the footer, unsubscribe link, physical address and open-tracking pixel. When the pixel never loads, the open never counts.

Weigh the code instead of the images

Image files don’t count toward the limit. The HTML does, including every image URL, style block, hidden mobile variant and tracked link.

Tracked links add up fastest. Take 36 tiles with three tracked links each (image, title and button) at around 250 characters per link. That’s roughly 27KB of URLs before a single word of copy, using illustrative figures.

Find where the cut lands

Send every holiday template to a Gmail inbox on desktop and mobile. If you see “[Message clipped],” scroll to the cut and note what sits below it.

Strip the weight

• Give each product tile one link instead of three.

• Cap grids at 12 products with a “see all deals” link to a landing page.

• Remove hidden mobile duplicates, HTML comments and leftover code.

• Keep finished HTML under about 90KB for a safety margin.

Protect your tests

Clipping quietly breaks A/B tests. A longer variant gets clipped more, loses more open pixels and looks worse on opens even when it sells better. Judge holiday tests on clicks and revenue per recipient.

Watch complaints on heavy sends

A reader who can’t find the unsubscribe link has one easy alternative: the spam button. Compare complaint rates on heavy and light campaigns from the same weeks.

Sometimes the lightest email wins outright. Before BFCM, agency Enflow Digital used Omnisend’s segmentation and its Claude and ChatGPT connection to find a skincare client’s most loyal buyers in minutes, then sent them a plain-text, email-only offer.

It went to 1,676 contacts with at least four orders, excluding wholesale accounts, bounced addresses, and anyone unengaged for 180 days. That one send brought in $17,980 across 110 orders, or $10.73 per message, more than the previous month’s broad campaigns combined. You can read the full story here.

The email that looked weakest on Black Friday may have been the one Gmail never let anyone finish.

Together with Insense

Save 40+ hrs/month in Q4 on UGC creator & influencer operations

Your team already runs on Slack and AI agents. Your creator marketing should too.

Insense now plugs into the stack you already use, so you brief, approve, and track creator work without living in yet another dashboard.

Route campaigns and updates through Slack, put your AI agents (ChatGPT, Claude) to work on briefs and shortlists, and keep everything connected to your Ads Manager and analytics.

Underneath, the creator layer runs itself:

• Vetted creators apply to you within 48 hours - from a vetted marketplace of 115K+ creators across 57+ countries

• Run diverse campaign types - from UGC to seeding, influencer posting, and Meta Partnership Ads and TikTok Spark Ads

• Get creator performance insights - connect your Ads Manager and view which creators perform best - not only which ads

Over 3,500 brands and agencies use Insense, with first creator applications arriving within 48 hours and teams saving 40+ hours monthly.

Book a free strategy call and get $200 towards your first campaign.

🔍 ChatGPT expands web indexing as DeepSeek opens its search engine to developers

OpenAI and Cloudflare are expanding how ChatGPT discovers web content, while DeepSeek has opened its search engine to developers with page-level authority scores and filters targeting search manipulation.

The Breakdown:

ChatGPT Discovers Hundreds of Millions of Pages - A Cloudflare pilot covering approximately 1% of its network helped OpenAI discover and index hundreds of millions of additional pages, including useful content that receives few external links.

Cloudflare Improves Crawling Efficiency - Cloudflare’s signals help OpenAI identify recently updated pages, duplicate content, and potentially harmful URLs. Website owners retain crawler access controls, and improved discovery does not guarantee ChatGPT citations or traffic.

DeepSeek Opens Its Search Engine to Developers - DeepSeek’s new Search API provides access to an index it says contains hundreds of billions of pages, with results including authority tiers, relevance scores, and filters for language, publication date, and specific domains.

DeepSeek Targets AI Search Manipulation - DeepSeek says its engine filters SEO spam, GEO manipulation and low-quality AI content. Search and Fetch APIs cost $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, although its ranking and filtering methods remain undisclosed.

Both developments could change how websites are discovered and evaluated by AI search engines. Cloudflare’s signals may help previously overlooked pages enter ChatGPT’s index, while DeepSeek’s scoring system gives developers more visibility into search results.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

🥳 Events

🔥 What Makes a Creator Program Worth More Budget

Today | Online | Free Festival

See how experienced teams prove creator impact before asking for more spend. Leaders from Adobe, ŌURA, Edelman, Ogilvy, and more will break down the metrics, campaign decisions, and operating systems that help creator programs earn trust, budget, and room to scale.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can’t attend every session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

🔥 How to Build a Growth Plan That Goes Beyond Meta

October 29 | The Glasshouse, NYC | Free In-Person Event

See how teams are using Reddit, TV, and broader channel mixes to reduce dependence on crowded digital acquisition. Forward puts you in the room with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Cody Plofker, and leaders from Liquid I.V., MANSCAPED, Thorne, and Avocado Green Brands.

✅ Secure Your Spot

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At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🗓️ Shoot creator ads in modules, so they outlive black friday

🔍 Google expands AI shopping and search links but keeps click data hidden

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🗓️ Shoot creator ads in modules, so they outlive black friday

Your strongest creator ad ends with “30% off, this weekend only.” On December 1, you either kill your best performer or keep it running with a promise that’s no longer true.

You can’t edit a spoken line out of someone’s voice. You can plan for it at the shoot.

Briefing that plan is the part teams skip under Q4 pressure. With Insense, you can brief and approve creators from Slack and have ChatGPT or Claude draft the closing lines, and teams report saving 40+ hours a month on creator operations. You can book a free strategy call here.

The modular structure

Ask every creator for two parts in the same session:

1. A core video, 20 to 40 seconds of hook, demo, and proof, with no prices, dates, or offers.

2. Four closing lines, 5 to 8 seconds each, filmed in the same framing and outfit:

   • Sale: “Black Friday pricing runs through Monday.”

   • Gifting: “Order by [date] and it arrives before the holidays.”

   • Last minute: “Grab a gift card if you’re cutting it close.”

   • January: “Start the year with the one I actually use.”

Keep offers out of burned-in captions too. Add them as text in the ad platform, where you can change them in seconds.

Why it pays

Extra closers in the same session typically add a small share of the fee. A new shoot in December costs a full fee and one to two weeks. My rule of thumb: if a creator ad is in your top five by spend, the closers pay for themselves the first time you swap.

The swap calendar

• November 20: sale closers go live.

• December 1, 11:59 p.m.: swap to gifting closers.

• Your last shipping date: swap to last-minute closers.

• January 1: swap to January closers.

The naming rule

Name every file Creator_Core#_Closer_Version, such as Maya_Core02_GIFT_v1. Whoever does the swap at midnight shouldn’t have to watch videos to find the right one.

Watch the pooled creative

On October 5, TikTok announced Smart+ Creative Selection, which brings advertiser assets, AI-generated creatives and creator content into one approval workflow and recommends creative groupings.

That’s convenient until a sale-ending cut sits in the pool after the sale. Tag each version with its offer window, and pull every sale closer from the pool on December 1.

Brief wording you can paste

“After the main take, please record four closing lines from the list below, same framing and lighting. Read each one twice.”

Update every creator brief going out this week. It’s the cheapest insurance your Q4 creative will get.

Together with Omnisend

Get Your BFCM Emails Built Before the Rush

Every BFCM email built at the last minute leaves less time to catch a broken link or test whether the offer is clear on mobile.

Omnisend’s free BFCM AI playbook includes 12 detailed prompts for core BFCM tasks: last year’s performance, deliverability, segmentation, campaign planning, and more.

Connect Omnisend with Claude or ChatGPT, then follow the playbook to:

• Give valuable customers first access. Identify a VIP audience from purchase history, then approve the criteria before creating your segment.

• Know what each email should achieve. Build a send calendar and campaign briefs informed by last year’s results.

• Have emails ready to refine. Generate templates using your brand assets directly in Omnisend, then edit them in the Email Builder.

Omnisend’s email and SMS platform serves 150,000+ ecommerce brands. Migration is free and takes up to five business days.

Bring your store data into the conversation now, and use the playbook to get campaigns ready while there’s still time to test.

Try Omnisend now!

🔍 Google expands AI shopping and search links but keeps click data hidden

Google is introducing new shopping features, expanding links in AI-generated answers and testing deeper AI Mode integration, while publishers and marketers continue waiting for clearer traffic reporting.

The Breakdown:

Google Introduces Universal Cart - Rolling out across Search and Gemini in the US, Universal Cart lets shoppers save products from multiple retailers, track price drops, receive restock alerts, and access promotions. Participating retailers remain sellers of record.

AI Search Gets More Links - Google is adding more prominent inline links to AI Mode and AI Overviews. It is also testing dedicated sections highlighting one or two official websites for certain searches, potentially increasing visibility for authoritative sources.

Google Still Withholds AI Click Data - Despite expanding links, Google has not introduced separate click reporting for AI search experiences. Meanwhile, its News AI pilot now pays 400+ publications, including CNN, Axios and Forbes, for content used in AI summaries and audio briefings.

AI Mode Moves Into Regular Search - Google is testing an AI Mode chat sidebar within traditional search results, allowing users to move directly into conversational search. The experiment could increase searches completed without visiting external websites.

Google’s updates are keeping more of the shopping and search experience within its own ecosystem. While additional links may improve publisher visibility, limited click reporting makes their impact difficult to measure, leaving marketers increasingly dependent on their own referral and conversion data.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

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At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

⏱️ You fixed your pages for AI search. Here’s when to judge the result

📢 Meta launches high-impact ads as Google and OpenAI expand advertiser controls

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

⏱️ You fixed your pages for AI search. Here’s when to judge the result

You rewrote 40 product guides on Monday.

By Friday, AI answers haven’t changed, and someone wants to call the project a failure.

They’re judging too early. On October 5, at Google’s Search Central Live Deep Dive event in Europe, Gary Illyes shared typical timelines for Google’s pipeline:

• Recrawling a known URL: about 30 days, and “weeks to never” at the slow end

• Indexing once crawled: about 1.5 hours

• Title and snippet updates: one to two days, and up to months at the slow end

The bottleneck is getting Google to come back to the page. Your measurement plan should start there.

Patience is a hard sell in Q4, when every week of budget is questioned.

Citations alone won’t settle that argument either. A mention isn’t the same as a pipeline, and three recent AirOps Growth Leader sessions make the point from different angles: Kevin Indig’s data shows ranking #1 for your key fan-out queries earns 58% of citations, four times more than rank #10.

Ross Simmonds found Google’s AI surfaces lean on Reddit and YouTube while assistants favor off-site product and comparison pages.

Eli Schwartz’s point is simpler: every asset still needs a conversion path, or the citation is just visibility with nowhere to go. Read the full takeaways to see where your content and off-site effort should go next. You can read the full takeaways to see where your content and off-site effort should go next.

Step 1: Pull the recrawl forward

Update the sitemap lastmod date only on pages you genuinely changed, so the signal stays trustworthy.

Link to changed pages from your most-crawled pages, such as the homepage and top category pages.

Use URL Inspection’s “Request indexing” on your ten most important pages. It has a daily limit, so save it for those.

Step 2: Start the clock at the recrawl

Check each page’s last crawl date in URL Inspection, or look for Googlebot hits in your server logs. Day zero is the recrawl, not the publish date.

Step 3: Split pages instead of comparing weeks

Q4 traffic swings make before-and-after comparisons unreliable. Take 40 similar pages, change 20 and leave 20 untouched. Compare the two groups over the same weeks, so seasonality hits both equally.

Step 4: Read early, decide late

Day 14 after recrawl: check that titles and snippets updated, and that nothing broke.

Day 42: compare organic clicks, conversions and how often each group appears in AI answers for a fixed prompt set.

The day 42 decision point is my judgment, based on Google’s typical timelines plus time for answers to settle.

Step 5: Agree the call in advance

If the changed group isn’t ahead on clicks or AI answer appearances by day 42, revise the change before rolling it out further. If it’s ahead, extend it to the next 40 pages.

Open URL Inspection for the five pages you changed most recently. If any haven’t been recrawled, your results haven’t started yet.

Together with Insense

Your BFCM Creator Calendar is Already Mapped

Still sourcing creators when your Black Friday ads should be running? Every delay leaves less time to test what actually sells before your biggest spending weeks.

Insense’s free BFCM + Q5 Creator Marketing Playbook gives marketers a week-by-week plan from September through January, so every creator campaign starts with a clear deadline and purpose.

Inside, you’ll find:

• A week-by-week August-to-January calendar showing when to secure permissions, test content, scale winning creators, and move into Q5.

• A practical creator scorecard using conversions, engagement quality, and reliability, so November budgets back proven performers over follower counts.

• Q5 action plan covering licence extensions, January creative, and the recommended 10–15% budget reserve for the lower-cost post-holiday window.

You’ll also get benchmarks for creator-handle ads, modular UGC testing, live shopping, hook rates, and creative volume, helping your team set measurable targets before spending rises.

Download the playbook

📢 Meta launches high-impact ads as Google and OpenAI expand advertiser controls

Meta, Google and OpenAI are introducing new advertising formats and campaign management tools, while streaming platforms increase ad loads and researchers uncover a new security threat involving online advertisements.

The Breakdown:

Google Gives Advertisers More Budget Control - Google Ads is rolling out channel prioritization, allowing campaigns to fund high-priority channels first. Advertisers can cap the daily budget share allocated to lower-priority placements, including Search partners.

Meta Introduces Ads Super Burst - Advertisers can book 3–24-hour windows with guaranteed delivery and optional category exclusivity. Early tests reached a median 34 million people. Meta also introduced First Impression Ads and Reels Trending Ads.

ChatGPT Ads Adds Human Support - OpenAI is reportedly assigning account managers to advertisers for strategy calls and biweekly reviews. Meanwhile, premium streaming platforms averaged 18% more ad minutes in August than January.

Hackers Exploit Online Ads to Deliver Spyware - Citizen Lab documented the first known case of government-backed hackers delivering zero-click spyware through online advertisements. Researchers are advising potential targets to block ads or disable ad tracking.

Advertising platforms are offering more control over reach, budgets, and campaign support, while growing streaming ad loads increase competition for attention. The spyware discovery also raises security concerns around ad delivery infrastructure, adding another consideration for the broader digital advertising ecosystem.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

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At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📦 Build a shipping cutoff cascade before December gets away from you

🛒 Shopify lets AI agents complete purchases as Google and ChatGPT expand AI shopping

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

📦 Build a shipping cutoff cascade before December gets away from you

USPS recommends mailing by December 17 for Ground Advantage, December 18 for Priority Mail and December 19 for Priority Mail Express to reach the lower 48 states by December 25. Alaska and Hawaii Ground Advantage closes a day earlier.

Those are carrier dates. Yours are earlier, because orders still need picking and packing.

Calculate your real cutoffs

Your cutoff = carrier mail-by date − your fulfillment time in business days

If you ship within two business days, your Ground Advantage cutoff is about December 15. Run the same math for each method and region you ship to.

Turning those dates into a send schedule is where Omnisend’s BFCM AI playbook helps. Its prompts turn last year’s results into a campaign calendar your team can work from, so each cutoff gets its own send. You can try the BFCM prompts.

Send four emails, one per cutoff

1. Standard shipping cutoff: “Last day for free shipping to arrive by the 25th.”

2. Upgrade window: “Still time with express. Here’s what the upgrade costs.”

3. Final guaranteed day: your express cutoff, framed as the last chance for a physical gift.

4. After the cutoff: e-gift cards, which deliver instantly.

Segment by region. Customers far from your warehouse need earlier sends, and Alaska and Hawaii customers need the earliest.

Price the late-gift problem

Say 600 orders are placed on December 16 with standard shipping and 20% land after Christmas. That’s 120 disappointed gift buyers. If half ask for a refund on a $70 order, that’s $4,200, before support time. These figures are illustrative.

Fix: after each cutoff, hide or relabel slower shipping methods at checkout, and show an estimated arrival date beside every option.

Update the site the same day

Add a banner with the next cutoff date, and swap it when each one passes. Product pages should show “arrives by December 24” only while that’s true.

Sell the gap

After the last physical cutoff, lead every email and SMS with gift cards. Add a printable “your gift is on its way” card for buyers who still order a physical item.

Plan for the gift card balances

Add a short “how to spend it” note and a signup invitation to the e-gift card delivery email itself. January is quiet, and those balances are ready-made demand.

Calculate your four cutoffs and add them to your campaign calendar. Every email after December 15 depends on them.

Together with SurveyMonkey

Make the Next Decision With Real Feedback

You need to know why customers aren’t buying. But commissioning research takes budget, and running it yourself adds work to a team already chasing targets.

SurveyMonkey does the research work for you. You choose what to test and who to reach. It recruits respondents through its paid panel and analyzes their answers, giving you findings to guide your next decision.

Here’s what that looks like:

• Tweezerman validated 10 product ideas with SurveyMonkey Audience, gathering consumer feedback in days to guide product launches.

• Greyhound reduced weekly customer-feedback analysis from 3 hours to 3 minutes, freeing station managers to act on the findings.

• Helix Sleep cut product-development time by 50% using survey insights. Its resulting pillow sold out in the first month.

Put your next product idea or pricing decision through customer research. You’ll have evidence to decide what needs changing before committing to the rollout.

Get started for free

🛒 Shopify lets AI agents complete purchases as Google and ChatGPT expand AI shopping

Shopify, American Express, OpenAI and Google are introducing new AI shopping capabilities, allowing agents to complete purchases, verify customer instructions and help shoppers find products through AI-powered search.

The Breakdown:

ChatGPT and Google Refine AI Shopping - ChatGPT is testing a shopping box where users select product types and budgets before searching. Meanwhile, Google AI Mode Shopping ads are displaying promotional offers with clickable discount details.

Shopify Lets AI Agents Complete Purchases - Shopify’s new Shop MCP allows compatible AI agents to search over 1 billion products, build carts, and complete Shop Pay checkout after customer confirmation. Orders appear directly in merchants’ Shopify dashboards.

Amex Adds Protection Against Unauthorized Purchases - American Express introduced an Intent Intelligence Framework that records customer-approved budgets, merchants, and product preferences. Its Proof of Intent Token helps prevent agents from purchasing items outside those instructions.

Google Tests Prescription Ads in AI Search - Google is testing branded prescription drug advertisements within AI Mode and AI Overviews in the United States, extending AI-powered advertising into a heavily regulated product category.

AI shopping is moving closer to complete transactions, with agents handling product discovery, checkout and payment verification. For retailers, accurate product data, inventory information and promotional offers could become increasingly important as AI systems influence which products shoppers discover and purchase.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

🥳 Events

🔥 What Changes When Creator Programs Scale From 5 to 5,000

October 21 | Online | Free Festival

Return on Influence Festival ’26 opens up the systems behind large creator programs, including how teams track ROI, improve partnerships, and avoid operational chaos as volume grows. Hear directly from leaders at Adobe, ŌURA, Edelman, Ogilvy, and more.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can’t attend every session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

🥳 Events

🔥 How to Make TV Earn Its Place in Your Growth Mix

October 29 | The Glasshouse, NYC | Free In-Person Event

Forward shows how leading brands connect TV reach to measurable business outcomes, decide when to move beyond paid social, and evaluate new discovery channels. Hear directly from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Cody Plofker, and operators building growth strategies at scale.

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🧢 Microsoft Ads dropped max cpc on new campaigns. find your scenario

🤖 Google Ads tests AI campaign creation and expands automated targeting

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🧢 Microsoft Ads dropped max cpc on new campaigns. find your scenario

Since October 1, new standalone Microsoft Advertising campaigns can’t set a Max CPC when they use Maximize Clicks, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value, Target CPA or Target ROAS.

Existing campaigns keep their caps. Remove one after October 1, though, and you can’t add it back. Portfolio bid strategies still accept a Max CPC, and Enhanced CPC and Target Impression Share are unaffected. API, tool and Google Import users face a January 12, 2027 deadline covering new and existing campaigns.

Peak days are when caps matter most. Your situation decides the move.

Scenario 1: Your capped campaigns already work

Leave them alone through the holidays. Rebuilding, duplicating or restructuring creates new campaigns, and new campaigns can’t carry the cap.

Before touching any capped campaign, write down its current Max CPC. If someone removes it by accident, that note is all you’ll have left.

Scenario 2: You’re launching a holiday campaign

Put it inside a portfolio bid strategy, which still accepts a Max CPC. Set the cap from last year’s peak-week average CPC plus a margin you can afford. That margin is a judgment call. Mine would be 20% to 30%.

If you don’t use portfolios today, set one up this week, while there’s still time to watch it before November.

Scenario 3: You import campaigns from Google Ads

The January 12 deadline is yours. Import settings that rely on caps will stop working on new and existing imported campaigns.

Before January:

• List every imported campaign that uses a cap.

• Decide which ones move into portfolios and which switch to target-based controls.

• Turn off automatic import for those campaigns, so a sync doesn’t undo your changes.

Scenario 4: You used caps as a safety net

Microsoft points advertisers toward budgets, acquisition-cost targets, return-on-ad-spend targets and conversion value rules instead.

Replace the safety net with a monitoring rule. Check average CPC daily during peak weeks. If it runs above 1.5 times its trailing 14-day average for two days, lower the target or the budget. The 1.5 multiplier is my judgment.

Conversion value rules can help too. If certain audiences or devices bring higher-value orders, tell the bidder, so it spends more there and less elsewhere.

Before you change anything

Microsoft recommends search optimization experiments for testing bidding changes before full rollout. Use one for any campaign above your median spend.

Start with the export

Export every campaign’s bid strategy and Max CPC setting. That list tells you which scenario applies to each campaign.

Together with Insense

Save 40+ hrs/month in Q4 on UGC creator & influencer operations

Your team already runs on Slack and AI agents. Your creator marketing should too.

Insens now plugs into the stack you already use, so you brief, approve, and track creator work without living in yet another dashboard.

Route campaigns and updates through Slack, put your AI agents (ChatGPT, Claude) to work on briefs and shortlists, and keep everything connected to your Ads Manager and analytics.

Underneath, the creator layer runs itself:

• Vetted creators apply to you within 48 hours - from a vetted marketplace of 115K+ creators across 57+ countries

• Run diverse campaign types - from UGC to seeding, influencer posting, and Meta Partnership Ads and TikTok Spark Ads

• Get creator performance insights - connect your Ads Manager and view which creators perform best - not only which ads

Over 3,500 brands and agencies use Insense, with first creator applications arriving within 48 hours and teams saving 40+ hours monthly.

Book a free strategy call by Oct 9th and get $200 towards your first campaign.

🤖 Google Ads tests AI campaign creation and expands automated targeting

Google Ads is testing a conversational campaign builder, changing how Demand Gen audiences work and introducing new AI Max reporting tools, giving advertisers more automation alongside greater visibility into campaign decisions.

The Breakdown:

Google Builds Campaigns From Prompts - A new experimental campaign builder asks advertisers to describe their campaign goals in plain language. Google’s AI then suggests objectives and assets, while manual campaign creation remains available.

Demand Gen Lookalikes Become Suggestions - Google is moving Lookalike segments to suggestion mode by default, allowing ads to reach audiences beyond the selected segments. Advertisers wanting strict targeting must submit an opt-out form.

AI Max Reveals Search and Ad Matches - A new report shows which search terms triggered specific headlines, descriptions, and landing pages. Advertisers can also identify AI-generated matches and assets to catch irrelevant combinations.

Google Ads API Gets Faster Updates - Starting with version 26, Google Ads API will receive two releases monthly, alongside four major annual versions. Additional minor updates won’t introduce breaking changes or shorten existing migration timelines.

Google is giving AI more responsibility for campaign creation, audience expansion and ad matching. The new reporting tools help advertisers inspect those decisions, but broader targeting and automated creative selection make regular reviews increasingly important for controlling relevance and wasted spend.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

🥳 Events

🔥 What Bain’s Marketing Leaders Reality Index Reveals About AI ROI

Today | Virtual Event

Bain’s research shows why traditional attribution is struggling to explain how buyers actually choose. Matt Hammel and Zak Prauer break down what AI search influences before the click, which signals matter beyond citations, and how to make a stronger investment case when last-click reporting comes up short.

✅ Secure Your Free Spot

Can’t attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

🔥 What Makes a Creator Program Worth More Budget

October 21 | Online | Free Festival

See how experienced teams prove creator impact before asking for more spend. Leaders from Adobe, ŌURA, Edelman, Ogilvy, and more will break down the metrics, campaign decisions, and operating systems that help creator programs earn trust, budget, and room to scale.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can’t attend every session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

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At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

🛫 Pre-Flight checklist for any AI-built landing page

📊 Google ads changes how video engagements are counted and expands local advertising

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🛫 Pre-Flight checklist for any AI-built landing page

Earlier this month Shopify launched Canvas, which builds store pages by chatting with its AI agent, Sidekick. One Shopify product director said merchants can now build a custom store “in twenty minutes.”

Speed is the appeal and the risk. Canvas launched without support for third-party themes, app blocks and extensions, markets, translations, Rollouts or editing on mobile.

Missing app blocks matter most. Reviews, upsells and other app features you rely on may simply not render on those pages.

Run this checklist on any AI-built page before it gets a cent of paid traffic.

1. Tracking

Check: place a test order through the page from an ad click.

Pass if: every ad platform and your analytics record the visit and the purchase.

If it fails: send traffic to a standard template page until the tags fire.

2. Social proof

Check: look for your star ratings and review widgets.

Pass if: reviews appear where shoppers expect them.

If it fails: add three short customer quotes as plain text, with first names and the product bought, so the page isn’t silent on proof.

3. Basket builders

Check: add to cart and look for your upsell, bundle and free-shipping progress features.

Pass if: the basket looks the same as on your normal pages.

If it fails: expect lower order values from this page, and compare it against a standard page before scaling.

4. Mobile

Check: editing is desktop only, so open the live page on two real phones.

Pass if: the headline, price and add-to-cart button sit on the first screen.

If it fails: shorten the hero section until they do.

5. Markets and language

Check: view the page from each country you sell to.

Pass if: prices, currency and language match the market.

If it fails: target ads for this page at your home market only.

6. Testing

Check: Rollouts aren’t supported yet, so you can’t split-test inside the page.

Pass if: you’ve set up the comparison elsewhere.

If it fails: run two ads with identical creative, one pointing to the AI page and one to your current page, and compare cost per purchase.

Scoring

Six passes means launch. One or two fails on items 2, 3 or 5 means launch to a small budget and fix as you go. A fail on item 1 means stop, because a page you can’t measure can’t be judged.

Use the twenty minutes Canvas saves to run this list. It takes about an hour, and it protects every dollar of spend that follows.

Together with Omnisend

Your BFCM Plan Is Still Waiting on Better Prompts

How much time goes into pulling last year’s reports and explaining them to AI? If every useful answer takes another round of clarification, your BFCM prep barely moves forward.

Omnisend’s BFCM AI playbook gives you detailed prompts for the work you need to get done, so you can spend less time figuring out what to ask.

Use last year’s results to decide which campaigns deserve another run and check deliverability before increasing send volume.

Then turn those findings into a campaign calendar your team can work from.

Better yet, Omnisend connects with Claude or ChatGPT, so you can analyze performance and create editable email templates without leaving the chat.

New to Omnisend? Its email and SMS platform serves 150,000+ ecommerce brands, reporting an average $79 for every $1 spent. Migration is free and takes up to five business days.

Start now, with time to put the answers to work.

Try the BFCM prompts

📊 Google Ads changes how video engagements are counted and expands local advertising

Google is rolling out updates across YouTube, Demand Gen, Performance Max and DV360, changing how video engagement is measured while introducing more automated bidding and new ways to drive in-store sales.

The Breakdown:

YouTube Engagements Now Require 10 Seconds - In-stream ads now need 10 seconds of watch time to count as an engagement, up from five. Clicks and completed shorter ads still qualify, making historical engagement and CPE comparisons less reliable.

Demand Gen Adds Overlays and Automated Bidding - Demand Gen can now display text assets over videos, with the setting appearing enabled by default. Separately, Video Reach campaigns are testing bid-free optimization that automatically adjusts bids to spend the campaign budget.

Local Targeting Gets More Flexible - DV360’s SDF v11 supports bulk targeting near business chain locations. Meanwhile, Performance Max can send traffic directly to a Google Business Profile, allowing businesses to advertise without a traditional website.

Google Connects Search Ads to Store Sales - A new Local Coupons pilot lets shoppers save Search offers to their mobile wallets and redeem them in-store. Retailers pay only when coupons are redeemed, connecting advertising costs to actual redemptions.

These changes give advertisers more automation and stronger connections between online ads and offline purchases. However, the new engagement definition makes historical comparisons harder, while automated bidding and video overlays require closer monitoring to avoid unexpected costs or creative changes.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

🥳 Events

🔥 What to Measure When AI Search Doesn’t Get the Last Click

Tomorrow | Virtual Event

Matt Hammel, COO of AirOps, joins Zak Prauer, Expert Partner at Bain & Company, to show what citations alone miss, why recommendations matter more when buyers compare options, and how to judge AI search investment without waiting for perfect attribution.

✅ Register for Free

Can’t attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

🔥 How Top Brands Measure, Fund, and Scale Creator Marketing

October 21 | Online | Free Festival

Return on Influence Festival ’26 brings together teams from Adobe, Edelman, ŌURA, Ogilvy, and more to unpack how creator programs actually run. Learn how they measure ROI, justify budget, structure partnerships, and scale from 5 to 5,000 creators without adding chaos.

✅ Secure Your Spot

Can’t attend every session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

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Checkout our Partner Kit here🤝

At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🧾 Stop paying creator commission on sales they didn’t drive

📊 Google Ads is changing how campaigns are measured and optimized

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🧾 Stop paying creator commission on sales they didn’t drive

A shopper sees a creator’s Partnership Ad, clicks, leaves, gets your email two days later and checks out with the creator’s code they found on a coupon site.

The ad platform and your email platform both claim the order, and the code pays the creator a commission on top. Cyber Week multiplies it by thousands.

Price the leak

Say 1,000 Cyber Week orders use creator codes, with an average order of $90 and a 15% commission. That’s $13,500 in commission.

If 30% of those codes came from coupon sites and browser extensions, you paid $4,050 for sales the creators didn’t drive, plus the code discount itself. The 30% is illustrative, so check your own referrer data.

Spotting which creators drive real orders is easier when your creator platform reads your ad data. Insense connects to your Ads Manager and shows which creators perform best, and new customers can get $200 toward their first campaign. Book a free strategy call by DATE and get $200 towards your first campaign

Find the leaked codes

Pull every code order and check the session’s landing source. Orders arriving from coupon or extension domains, or with no creator link in the session, are leaks.

Rule 1: Pay on links during the sale

From November 20 to December 1, pay commission on orders placed through each creator’s tracking link. Deactivate any code found on a coupon site and issue a new one.

Rule 2: Stop codes from stacking

Set creator codes so they can’t combine with sitewide sale pricing. A 15% code on top of 30% off cuts margin twice.

Rule 3: Switch to a target bonus

During the sale, replace percentage commission with a flat bonus for hitting a link-order target, such as $300 for 50 orders. Your cost is capped and the creator still has a clear goal. The figures are illustrative.

Rule 4: One claim per order

When two creators touch an order, the most recent creator link within seven days gets the credit. That window is my judgment.

Contract wording you can send

“From November 20 to December 1, commission applies to orders placed through your tracking link. Codes found on coupon sites will be replaced, and codes won’t combine with sitewide offers.”

Count commission in creator ROI

On October 5, TikTok said GMV Max will factor in affiliate commissions, coupons and referral fees to optimize for true return. Apply the same logic to every creator:

Creator ROI = (revenue − commission − coupon cost) ÷ ad spend

Search each creator code on the top coupon sites. Every hit is commission you’ll pay in November unless you replace it now.

Together with AirOps

Are You Judging AI Search by the Wrong Numbers?

You wouldn’t judge a brand campaign only by last-click sales. Yet AI search is being asked to prove itself against paid-channel attribution standards.

You risk cutting the budget that helped win a customer because another channel got credit for the sale.

On October 15, join Matt Hammel, COO of AirOps, and Zak Prauer, Expert Partner at Bain & Company, to rethink how you evaluate AI search:

• Use findings from Bain’s Marketing Leaders Reality Index to understand why paid-channel measurement sets the wrong expectations.

• Look beyond citations to whether AI recommends your brand when buyers are weighing their options.

• Discover what AI search conversations reveal about customer needs that survey responses can miss.

You’ll leave with a clearer view of what your reporting overlooks, so the next investment decision accounts for how buyers actually choose.

Secure your free spot

Can’t attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

📊 Google Ads is changing how campaigns are measured and optimized

Google is rolling out updates across Demand Gen, Conversion Lift, AI Max and commerce advertising, giving advertisers new reporting tools, more automation and additional ways to reach customers.

The Breakdown:

Display Views Get Easier to Count - Demand Gen Display will count any rendered impression as a view for attribution, even if just one pixel appears briefly. View-through conversions may rise without any actual performance improvement.

Conversion Reporting Gets More Detailed - Google Ads is adding video impressions to eligible web conversion paths and grouping metrics by funnel stage. Conversion Lift is also becoming self-serve, requiring at least 1,000 observed conversions and a $5,000 campaign budget.

AI Max Gets More Transparent - New reporting columns show location-of-interest, optimized targeting and brand inclusion settings. AI Max can also generate and refresh search ad copy using landing pages, keywords and existing assets.

Retailers Can Share Audiences With Brands - Google’s commerce audience sharing lets eligible retailers provide first-party audience segments to advertising partners. Brands can combine these with their own data, but campaigns must direct traffic to the retailer’s approved domain.

These updates give advertisers more ways to understand campaign performance while Google automates more of the execution. The biggest distinction is between reported conversions and incremental results: easier attribution can increase credited conversions, but Conversion Lift helps determine whether advertising actually generated additional business.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

Advertise with Us

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Checkout our Partner Kit here🤝

At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🖼️ AI made your product shots. Google wants that on the record

🎯 Meta, X, Reddit and Pinterest are making ads easier to launch

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

Together with Omnisend

Still Hand-Holding AI Through Your BFCM Prep?

If you’re still copying reports into AI and explaining what they mean, the time savings disappear before you’ve made a single campaign decision.

Omnisend’s free BFCM AI playbook gives you twelve detailed prompts to get answers from your store’s data without starting every question from scratch.

Find last year’s offers worth repeating and buyers who haven’t returned. Check for deliverability warning signs before you increase sending volume, while there’s still time to address them.

Omnisend connects with Claude or ChatGPT, so you can analyze performance and create campaigns in the same conversation. Put those findings into a campaign calendar you can actually work from.

New to Omnisend? Its email and SMS platform serves 150,000+ ecommerce brands, and free migration takes up to five business days.

Start while there’s time to use what you learn. You’ll have more room to test your campaigns before the BFCM rush.

Try Omnisend now.

🖼️ AI made your product shots. google wants that on the record

Plenty of catalogs now carry AI-generated lifestyle scenes, models and descriptions. Google’s AI content guidance, refreshed on October 1, is specific about ecommerce.

AI-generated images should carry IPTC metadata marking them as made by an algorithm, and AI-generated product data should be specified separately and labeled. Better to sort that out before Q4 traffic peaks.

Inventory what AI touched

Open a sheet with one row per product and four columns:

1. Main image: photographed, AI-edited or fully generated

2. Lifestyle images: same three options

3. Description: human-written, AI-drafted and edited, or AI-generated

4. Specs: confirmed against supplier data or not

In my view, those specs matter beyond compliance, because they’re the raw material AI shopping answers work from. That gap between being recommended and merely cited is the focus on October 15, when AirOps COO Matt Hammel and Bain & Company’s Zak Prauer cover how to invest in AI search before attribution catches up. It’s free, with recordings within 24 hours. You can secure your free spot.

When in doubt, treat a fully generated scene or model as AI-generated. Background cleanup on a real photo is a gray area, so flag it for review rather than guessing.

A home decor brand might find its product shots are real but every room scene behind them was generated. That’s the column to fix first.

Write the metadata into the files

For every image marked AI-generated, set the IPTC Digital Source Type to “trainedAlgorithmicMedia” before upload.

With the free ExifTool utility, one command handles a whole folder:

exiftool -XMP-iptcExt:DigitalSourceType=”http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/digitalsourcetype/trainedAlgorithmicMedia” ./ai-scenes/

Then add a check to your upload process: no AI-scene file goes live without that field set.

Once a week, spot-check five live images with exiftool -DigitalSourceType in case your image pipeline strips metadata on upload. If the field is gone, fix the pipeline before re-uploading.

Keep verified specs apart from AI copy

Split each product page into two layers:

• Spec block: dimensions, materials, weight and care. Every value is sourced from supplier or lab data, with no AI drafting.

• Description: AI-assisted is fine here, but a human edits it and it never states a spec that isn’t in the block above.

If an AI scene shows the product doing something it can’t, such as a jacket in a downpour when it isn’t waterproof, swap the image. Misleading visuals tend to come back as returns.

If a supplier can’t confirm a spec, pull it from both layers until they do. Fill in the inventory for your top 50 products before Friday.

🎯 Meta, X, Reddit and Pinterest are making ads easier to launch

Four major advertising platforms are rolling out updates that simplify campaign creation, improve targeting and open new ways to promote content, with AI handling more of the manual work.

The Breakdown:

Meta Brings AI Into Ads Manager - Meta is testing an AI assistant that builds campaigns through chat, adjusts targeting and budgets, and remembers past tests and seasonal trends.

Meta Connects Creative to Checkout - Advantage+ can now turn static images into videos, while upcoming Messenger and Meta AI checkout tests will let shoppers purchase directly within conversations.

X Builds Ads From a URL - X Lift generates ad creative and targeting from a website link, leaving advertisers to choose creatives and budgets. X reports 50% annual growth in active self-serve advertisers.

Reddit Targets Buyers More Precisely - Reddit is testing B2B in-market audiences across enterprise, business AI and cybersecurity. Early testers saw nearly 7% lower CPA, while Max campaigns now support lead generation.

Pinterest Opens Creator Promotions - Brands can now boost existing creator Pins without commissioning the content. Creators receive an email and can decline or opt out of promotions entirely.

Ad platforms are removing more manual steps between planning and launching campaigns. AI can increasingly build ads, adjust targeting and simplify buying, but advertisers still need to decide which audiences, creatives and outcomes are worth spending money on.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

🥳 Events

🔥 Why Google May Be Getting Credit for Customers AI Helped Win

October 15 | Virtual Event

A buyer can discover your brand in AI, convert through Google, and leave your attribution report telling the wrong story. Matt Hammel and Bain’s Zak Prauer show how to evaluate recommendation influence, spot what paid-channel metrics miss, and make a stronger case for AI search investment.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can’t attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

Advertise with Us

Wanna put out your message in front of over 50,000 best marketers and decision makers?

Checkout our Partner Kit here🤝

At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🐾 How a $699 litter box sells on tiktok shop at full price

🛍️ ChatGPT is testing new ways to highlight products and ads

🥳 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

Together with SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey Will Do the Research for Your Next Campaign

Before you approve the next campaign, find out whether buyers respond to its message. That feedback is far more useful while you can still change the creative.

SurveyMonkey does the research work for you. Set up your study and select your audience. It handles paid-panel recruitment and automatically analyzes the responses.

• Compare up to 10 messages with your target audience to decide which deserves your campaign budget.

• Get your creative evaluated against industry benchmarks, with findings that show what needs improving before launch.

• Discover which product benefits buyers prioritize, so your ads and landing pages emphasize what matters to them.

With a multimillion-dollar Super Bowl campaign at stake, ClickUp used SurveyMonkey to test its ad with 5,000+ people in less than a week before choosing which version to air.

Give your next creative brief customer evidence your team can act on before production and media costs are committed.

Get started for free

🐾 How a $699 litter box sells on tiktok shop at full price

The usual advice says TikTok Shop is a discount channel. Slash the price, flood it with affiliates and hope for volume.

Whisker, the company behind Litter-Robot, ignored most of that. It joined TikTok Shop within the past year with a $699 product, and on October 3 its CMO explained how it sells there without deep discounts.

The timing lines up with TikTok’s own numbers. A TikTok-commissioned study released October 1 says live-driven sales in the US grew 92% year over year, across nearly 595,000 TikTok Shop LIVE sessions a month.

The thumb-stopper

Whisker’s product does something you can see. It cleans itself, and that motion stops people mid-scroll, which the company calls a “thumb stopper.”

Nobody needs a discount to watch a machine do something surprising. They need three seconds of it happening.

Steal this: find the moment your product visibly does its job. A stain lifting, a jacket shedding water or a blender crushing ice. Open every video and every live session on that moment, before a word is spoken.

Fewer, better creators

Whisker scales its affiliate program carefully. It works with niche creators instead of chasing volume.

Steal this: build a bench of 10 to 20 creators who already talk to your exact buyer, such as cat owners or trail runners. Brief them on the demo, with no discount script. Pay a few to go live, since live is where TikTok says the growth is.

Protect the price

Holding $699 means the rest of the funnel has to work harder.

Steal this: when TikTok needs an incentive, add value instead of cutting price. A free accessory, extended warranty or bundle keeps your list price intact across channels. That avoids training buyers to wait for TikTok-only deals and keeps your own site and marketplace listings consistent.

Get the customer’s name

Whisker brings TikTok Shop buyers into its own Litter-Robot app. The company also expects its TikTok presence to lift sales on its own site and on Amazon.

Steal this: give every TikTok buyer a reason to register with you directly, such as setup help, warranty activation or refill reminders.

The ending you can write

If your product has a visible moment, you have a full-price TikTok story waiting. Film the moment this week, then recruit five creators who already speak to your buyer.

🛍️ ChatGPT is testing new ways to highlight products and ads

OpenAI is experimenting with product recommendation labels and new ad headings inside ChatGPT, potentially changing how shoppers discover products and interact with sponsored results.

The Breakdown:

Product recommendations get labels

ChatGPT is testing labels like “best all-rounder,” “best for beginners,” and “best cushioning” to explain why particular products are recommended.

The experiment uses green highlights for the best all-rounder and gray labels for other categories, making product recommendations easier to scan and compare.

ChatGPT tests a new ad heading

A new “This might also interest you” heading has appeared above sponsored results, introducing ads as additional suggestions related to a user’s search.

The heading adds to ChatGPT’s growing collection of experimental ad formats, although its effect on engagement and click-through rates remains unconfirmed.

Both tests focus on how recommendations are presented. Clearer product labels could help shoppers compare options faster, while softer ad introductions may encourage users to explore sponsored results. For advertisers, even small presentation changes could influence which products get noticed and clicked.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

Advertise with Us

Wanna put out your message in front of over 50,000 best marketers and decision makers?

Checkout our Partner Kit here🤝

At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🧪 An experiment brief for your black friday offer

🛍️ TikTok wants to turn discovery into a full shopping journey

🥳 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🧪 An experiment brief for your black friday offer

On October 2, Shopify added discounts to Rollouts, its tool for scheduling and testing store changes. Merchants can now “test discounts with a share of buyers” before committing a whole store to one offer.

There’s a catch buried in the documentation. Partial-traffic tests apply only to the Online Store. At 100%, a discount reaches every sales channel.

Here’s a brief you can copy.

Question

Which Black Friday structure earns more profit per visitor: 20% off sitewide, or $25 off orders over $100?

Hypothesis

The threshold offer lifts average order value enough to beat 20% off on profit, while conversion drops no more than 10%. That tolerance is my judgment, so set your own before launch.

Setup

• Control: 20% off sitewide, shown to 80% of Online Store visitors.

• Variant: $25 off $100, shown to 20%.

• Run for 10 to 14 days in October, so the winner is known before November.

• Change nothing else in the store during the test, including theme, prices and shipping thresholds.

Guardrails

1. Channel leaks. POS, marketplaces and any other channel won’t see the split. Analyze Online Store orders only.

2. Code leaks. Use automatic discounts instead of codes. Codes get shared on coupon sites and picked up by browser extensions, which pulls control shoppers into the variant.

3. Traffic mix. Email and SMS clicks often arrive carrying codes from past campaigns. Tag them and report them separately, or the result reflects your list instead of your offer.

Primary metric

Gross profit per visitor: revenue, minus product cost, discount and shipping, divided by visitors in each group.

Secondary metrics

• Conversion rate

• Average order value

• Share of orders landing just over $100, which shows whether the threshold is pulling baskets up

If the variant wins on profit per visitor and conversion stays within tolerance, roll it out at 100% for Black Friday.

If it wins on order value but loses on profit, raise the threshold to $120 and test again.

If it loses on both, keep the sitewide offer and test the percentage instead, such as 15% against 20%.

Agree in advance that if the variant’s conversion falls more than 25% below control after 48 hours, you end it early.

Two weeks of clean data in October beats guessing in November. Set up the Rollout, write the decision rule in the ticket and press start.

Together with Insense

Your BFCM Creator Calendar is Already Mapped

Still sourcing creators when your Black Friday ads should be running? Every delay leaves less time to test what actually sells before your biggest spending weeks.

Insense’s free BFCM + Q5 Creator Marketing Playbook gives marketers a week-by-week plan from September through January, so every creator campaign starts with a clear deadline and purpose.

Inside, you’ll find:

• A week-by-week August-to-January calendar showing when to secure permissions, test content, scale winning creators, and move into Q5.

• A practical creator scorecard using conversions, engagement quality, and reliability, so November budgets back proven performers over follower counts.

• Q5 action plan covering licence extensions, January creative, and the recommended 10–15% budget reserve for the lower-cost post-holiday window.

You’ll also get benchmarks for creator-handle ads, modular UGC testing, live shopping, hook rates, and creative volume, helping your team set measurable targets before spending rises.

Download the playbook

🛍️ TikTok wants to turn discovery into a full shopping journey

TikTok unveiled a wave of advertising updates spanning AI shopping agents, lead generation, search ads, off-platform reach, and campaign automation, pushing advertisers from discovery through purchase in fewer steps.

The Breakdown:

Shopping Happens Inside TikTok - Buy Direct lets users purchase from brands without leaving the For You feed, while Shopping Assistant answers questions about sizing, shipping, availability, and products conversationally.

AI Starts Qualifying Leads - Agentic Leads talks with potential customers, captures information, and qualifies high-intent prospects through TikTok DMs or lead forms on advertisers’ websites.

Ads Move Beyond TikTok - The new TikTok Ad Network lets U.S. advertisers extend campaigns to nearly 400,000 apps, directly through TikTok Ads Manager with placement and brand-safety controls.

Campaigns Get More Automated - Smart+ automates search keywords and creative selection, while GMV Max will account for costs like affiliate commissions, coupons and referral fees when optimizing for ROI.

TikTok is building beyond an advertising feed. Shopping agents, one-click checkout, automated campaigns, and off-platform distribution could give marketers a more connected path from someone discovering a product to actually buying it.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

🥳 Events

🔥 Why Google May Be Getting Credit for Customers AI Helped Win

October 15 | Virtual Event

A buyer can discover your brand in AI, convert through Google, and leave your attribution report telling the wrong story. Matt Hammel and Bain’s Zak Prauer show how to evaluate recommendation influence, spot what paid-channel metrics miss, and make a stronger case for AI search investment.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can’t attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

🔥 What Changes When Creator Programs Scale From 5 to 5,000

October 21 | Online | Free Festival

Return on Influence Festival ’26 opens up the systems behind large creator programs, including how teams track ROI, improve partnerships, and avoid operational chaos as volume grows. Hear directly from leaders at Adobe, ŌURA, Edelman, Ogilvy, and more.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can’t attend every session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

Advertise with Us

Wanna put out your message in front of over 50,000 best marketers and decision makers?

Checkout our Partner Kit here🤝

At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

💸 The numbers to know before you announce a price increase

💡 AI is changing both how we understand information and how brands reach us

🥳 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

💸 The numbers to know before you announce a price increase

Teams testing price increase emails usually ask which version keeps the most people. A better first question is how many people you can lose and still come out ahead.

Number 1: Your break-even churn

Going from $30 to $34, on revenue alone, you break even if you lose 11.8% of subscribers (4 ÷ 34).

Now use contribution margin. If each box costs $18 to make and ship, margin rises from $12 to $16. You break even at a 25% loss (1 − 12 ÷ 16).

A 10% cancellation spike feels like a crisis. On these numbers, it’s a profitable outcome.

Number 2: The sample you need

Survey results only help when differences are real. To reliably separate a 50% “would stay” score from 40%, you need about 390 people per version, at 95% confidence and 80% power.

At 100 per version, a 10-point gap can easily be noise.

Recruiting 390 people per version is the hard part, and SurveyMonkey takes it off your plate: you choose the audience, it recruits a paid panel matched to your buyers and analyzes up to 10 messages for you. You can get started for free.

Number 3: Your top-box stay rate

Set up the test so each person sees one email only. People who read every version start comparing framings, which a real subscriber reading one email never does.

Ask “How likely are you to keep your subscription?” on a five-point scale, and compare versions on the top box alone: “definitely would keep.” Stated intent runs higher than real behavior, and the top box is the most trustworthy slice.

Also ask “How fair does this change feel?” If a version wins on staying but trails another by more than 15 points on fairness, expect it to cost you at renewal. That cutoff is my judgment.

What to test

• Plain notice of the new price

• Cost explanation naming what got more expensive

• Added value worth less than $4 to you

• Loyalty lock holding the old price for three months

The rollout decision

Send the winner to 10% of subscribers. After 14 days, subtract your normal cancellation rate from that group’s rate.

If the extra churn sits well under your break-even figure, send to everyone. If it gets close, switch to the runner-up for the next group.

Calculate both break-even numbers before anyone writes a word of the email. They decide how bold the message can be.

Together with Modash

You See Their Creator Campaigns. Now Hear Their Thinking.

A creator campaign can look great in your feed and still leave you wondering whether you’d pay to run it again.

Repeating that uncertainty with more creators gets expensive.

On October 21, Modash’s Return on Influence Festival ’26 opens up how established teams run their programs, including the mistakes behind better campaigns.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How teams run campaigns day-to-day, including what they changed after mistakes.

• What creators want from brand partners so that you can approach collaborations from their side.

• What it takes to scale from 5 to 5,000 creators before adding more to your own program.

You’ll hear from Maya Shaff, Head of Influencer at ŌURA, and Josh Rangel, Senior Director, Social Strategy at Ogilvy. More to be announced. It’s online and free.

Reserve your spot for Oct 21st and leave with actionable insights to build and scale a creator program that moves the needle.

Secure your spot

Can’t attend every session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

💡 AI is changing both how we understand information and how brands reach us

Two updates show AI products evolving beyond text responses: Andrej Karpathy is pushing richer ways to learn from AI, while OpenAI is adding visual ads and deeper measurement to ChatGPT.

The Breakdown:

ChatGPT Gets Visual Ads - OpenAI will begin testing image-based ads during image generation later this month with select U.S. advertisers. Ads will be clearly labeled and separate from images generated by ChatGPT.

Advertisers Get Better Measurement - OpenAI is adding attribution, conversion and incrementality partners including AppsFlyer, Triple Whale, LiveRamp and Hightouch. Early partner data found WeightWatchers’ attributed CPA was 15.3% below its paid-search benchmark.

Make AI Easier to Read - Andrej Karpathy recommends asking models to write using ASD-STE100, an aerospace standard built around simple technical English. He says even following it “80% of the way” can make explanations easier to understand.

Go Beyond Text Answers - Karpathy suggests progressing from writing to diagrams, interactive HTML pages, and custom explainer videos. He expects more human work to shift toward “oversight and understanding” as models handle execution.

AI interfaces are becoming more visual on both sides. Users can increasingly ask for diagrams, webpages, or videos instead of another wall of text, while ChatGPT’s 1.2 billion weekly users are giving advertisers a new visual surface with the measurement tools needed to test whether it actually drives sales.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

🥳 Events

🔥 What Meta’s Partnership Ads Data Means for Your Next Test

Today | 11 AM ET | 60-Minute Virtual Event

Get Meta’s view on where Partnership Ads fit, why creator-handle delivery is changing performance, and how experienced advertisers are testing it in real accounts. Reyna Baker from Meta and Curtis Howland, who has managed $100M+ in spend, break down what deserves budget now.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can’t attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

🔥 What to Measure When AI Search Doesn’t Get the Last Click

October 15 | Virtual Event

Matt Hammel, COO of AirOps, joins Zak Prauer, Expert Partner at Bain & Company, to show what citations alone miss, why recommendations matter more when buyers compare options, and how to judge AI search investment without waiting for perfect attribution.

✅ Register for Free

Can’t attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

Advertise with Us

Wanna put out your message in front of over 50,000 best marketers and decision makers?

Checkout our Partner Kit here🤝

At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📈 A Week-by-Week Plan to Widen Your List Before Black Friday

🔎 Google is getting clearer about what it trusts and how long SEO changes take

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

Together with AirOps

Your Buyers Aren’t Waiting for Better AI Measurement

Your buyers are asking AI what to buy. But when leadership asks which sales it drove, your attribution report doesn’t give you a clear answer. Waiting for one could mean losing buyers before they ever reach your site.

On October 15, join Matt Hammel, COO of AirOps, and Zak Prauer, Expert Partner, Marketing at Bain & Company, for a live conversation to help you:

• Understand why waiting for perfect measurement could cost more than investing in AI search today.
  

• See how AI search shapes brand preference, and why a recommendation carries more weight than a citation.
  

• Decide how to invest now and what evidence to demand that your spending is creating additional growth.

You’ll leave knowing how to make the case for AI search when “we can’t measure it yet” is what’s holding your budget back.

Secure your free spot

Can’t attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

📈 A Week-by-Week Plan to Widen Your List Before Black Friday

On Black Friday, plenty of brands email people they haven’t contacted since spring. Mailbox providers notice the sudden spike in volume and the complaints that follow, and placement drops on your biggest day.

Gmail asks bulk senders to keep their spam rate below 0.1% and never reach 0.3%. On 200,000 sends, 0.1% is just 200 complaints.

So bring older subscribers back gradually, starting now.

Before you widen anything, it helps to know where you stand. Omnisend, which serves 150,000+ ecommerce brands, includes a deliverability check in its BFCM AI playbook with prompts that flag warning signs before you raise volume. You can try the BFCM prompts here.

Step 1: Sort the list into tiers

Use clicks, site visits and purchases. Apple’s privacy features inflate opens, so opens alone overstate engagement.

• Tier 1: engaged in the last 30 days

• Tier 2: 31 to 90 days

• Tier 3: 91 to 180 days

• Tier 4: 181 to 365 days

• Tier 5: more than a year

Step 2: Widen on a schedule

Week of October 12: Tier 1 only, at normal frequency. Note your spam rate in Google Postmaster Tools as a baseline.

Week of October 19: add Tier 2 to your best-performing campaign.

Week of October 26: add Tier 3 to one campaign.

Week of November 9: send Tier 4 a single “still want first look at our deals?” email. Anyone who clicks moves into Tier 3.

Black Friday week: send to Tiers 1 through 3 plus reactivated Tier 4. Leave Tier 5 out entirely.

Step 3: Set your stop rules

• If the spam rate crosses 0.1% two days running, drop the last tier you added.

• If bounces pass 2% on any send, clean that tier before sending again. That threshold is my judgment.

• Don’t more than double daily volume from one week to the next, also my judgment.

Step 4: Protect the inbox during the week

• Send the biggest campaigns to Tier 1 first, then to Tiers 2 and 3 a few hours later, so early positive engagement builds before the wider send.

• Keep one-click unsubscribe visible. People who can’t find it hit “report spam” instead.

• Watch Postmaster Tools daily. It reports with a lag, so act on trends across several days.

Count how many subscribers sit in each tier. If Tier 4 and Tier 5 together outnumber Tier 1, start the warm-up this week.

🔎 Google is getting clearer about what it trusts and how long SEO changes take

Two Google Search updates give site owners clearer guidance on who should be credited for content and how long common crawling, indexing, and recovery processes can realistically take.

The Breakdown:

Fake Authors Are a Red Flag - Google now explicitly warns against AI-generated headshots, invented names, and false credentials used to make content appear human-written or expert-created. Google calls this deception and a signal of a low-quality page.

Bylines Aren’t the Point - Google still says author bylines themselves don’t improve rankings. The concern is authenticity: sites shouldn’t manufacture experts or credentials simply to make content appear more trustworthy.

SEO Changes Can Take Time - Google says a new URL is typically discovered in around 20 hours; title and snippet changes can take 1–2 days, while canonical changes commonly need 1–3 weeks.

Recovery Can Take Months - Site moves typically need 1–3 months, while recovery after a core update can take 3–6 months. In slower cases, both processes can stretch to six months or more.

Google’s message is fairly simple: don’t fake trust signals, and don’t assume an SEO change failed just because results aren’t immediate. Some updates appear within days, while larger changes and recoveries can legitimately take months.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

🥳 Events

🔥 What Meta’s Partnership Ads Data Means for Your Next Test

Tomorrow | 11 AM ET | 60-Minute Virtual Event

Get Meta’s view on where Partnership Ads fit, why creator-handle delivery is changing performance, and how experienced advertisers are testing it in real accounts. Reyna Baker from Meta and Curtis Howland, who has managed $100M+ in spend, break down what deserves budget now.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can’t attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

🔥 Where to Put Your Next Growth Dollar Beyond Meta

October 29 | The Glasshouse, NYC | Free In-Person Event

Hear how Reddit CEO Steve Huffman thinks about discovery, how Cody Plofker helped scale Jones Road Beauty to nine figures, and how brands like Liquid I.V. and MANSCAPED use TV to drive measurable revenue. Bring your hardest acquisition question and leave with a sharper channel plan.

Advertise with Us

Wanna put out your message in front of over 50,000 best marketers and decision makers?

Checkout our Partner Kit here🤝

At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📊 Your MMM says tv worked. now find out which part

🎯 Google Ads is automating more of the campaign work

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

If you’re new to Buyology then a hearty welcome to you, You’ve reached the right place alongside 50k+ amazing people, Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

📊 Your MMM says tv worked. now find out which part

A TV trade column this week made a point worth repeating. Mix models can tell you whether connected TV worked, but not always why. In the writer’s words, they risk “replacing one oversimplification with another.”

The problem is the bucket. One “CTV” line in a model can hide hundreds of apps, devices and inventory paths, and a linear line hides dayparts and networks. A healthy average can cover for buys that are quietly losing money.

Some teams sidestep the problem by measuring at the buy level from the start.

Tatari, for one, plans, buys and measures streaming, linear and online video on one platform with direct supply, tying results to actual conversions instead of each vendor’s own report.

Nutrafol, Ro and Fiverr run their TV that way, self-serve or full-service at nine-figure spend. You can book a free demo here.

If your plan already runs on a mix model, here’s how to open up the bucket yourself.

Blind spot 1: The single TV line

What the model sees: one return figure for streaming and one for linear.

What it misses: the spread underneath.

Fix it with a split:

1. Export streaming and linear spend by publisher or network, device, daypart and creative.

2. Tag every line with its share of total spend this quarter and last.

3. Flag any line that grew more than 20% in share while total TV returns held flat. In my judgment, that growth is coasting on the average.

4. Pull those lines into their own holdout or test cell next flight.

A home goods brand might find its streaming line looks fine overall, while spend has drifted toward phone and desktop screens it thought were living-room TV.

Blind spot 2: Frequency

What the model sees: total impressions.

What it misses: the household that saw your spot nine times.

Fix it with exposure bands: group converting households by how often they saw an ad, using bands of 1, 2 to 3, 4 to 6 and 7 or more. Plot cost per conversion for each band. Where it climbs sharply, set your cap one band lower.

Blind spot 3: A leaky geo test

What the model sees: a clean lift between test and control markets.

What it misses: control markets that quietly got ads anyway.

Fix it with hygiene rules:

• Keep test and control markets apart, with no shared borders or commuter overlap.

• Exclude control markets from every geo-targeted streaming buy during the test.

• Before trusting the lift, check that control markets received close to zero impressions.

Run the spend split on your last flight this week, before Q4 budgets lock on an average.

Together with Billo

What Meta’s Changes Mean for Your Next Campaign

Still running the Meta setup that worked six months ago? Your next creative test could be paying for assumptions that no longer hold.

Before you put more budget behind it, understand what’s changed and where creator-led Partnership Ads fit.

On October 7 at 11:00 AM ET, join Donatas Smailys, CEO of Billo, for a free 60-minute live session to:

• See Meta’s Partnership Ads data and understand where creator-handle ads could earn a place in your account.

• Improve your creative testing with Curtis Howland, VP of Marketing at Misfit Marketing, with $100M+ in Meta spend managed.

• Hear directly from Reyna Baker, Partner Manager at Meta, about platform changes that could affect how you spend your budget.

You’ll leave knowing where your Meta setup needs to change and how to put creator-led ads to work before committing more budget.

Secure your free spot

Can’t attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

🎯 Google Ads is automating more of the campaign work

Google is rolling out three updates that automate more of the work around promotions, creative testing and international expansion, while still giving advertisers controls to review or override what the platform does.

The Breakdown:

AI Localizes Campaigns - A new beta can take an existing U.S. English Search campaign and create an independent version for another market, translating keywords, headlines, descriptions, sitelinks, callouts and even landing-page text.

Google Finds Your Promotions - Starting October 12, Google can scan advertisers’ websites for eligible offers and automatically turn them into promotion assets for certain Search and Performance Max campaigns. Advertisers are opted in automatically but can switch it off.

PMax Gets A/B Tests - Advertisers can now test different headlines, descriptions, images and videos within Performance Max asset groups, including UGC versus polished creative, without immediately replacing the existing assets.

Advertisers Keep Some Control - Localization supports instructions like “Don’t translate the brand name,” plus back-translations for review. But budgets and bids are copied unchanged, so currency, market economics and cultural nuances still need manual checks.

Google is moving automation beyond bidding and ad generation into the operational work surrounding campaigns. Promotions can be pulled directly from websites, PMax creative can be tested more systematically, and entire Search campaigns can be localized in minutes. The tradeoff is that advertisers increasingly need to review what Google automates rather than build every element themselves.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

🥳 Events

🔥 What Makes a Creator Program Worth More Budget

October 21 | Online | Free Festival

See how experienced teams prove creator impact before asking for more spend. Leaders from Adobe, ŌURA, Edelman, Ogilvy, and more will break down the metrics, campaign decisions, and operating systems that help creator programs earn trust, budget, and room to scale.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can’t attend every session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.

🔥 How to Build a Growth Plan That Goes Beyond Meta

October 29 | The Glasshouse, NYC | Free In-Person Event

See how teams are using Reddit, TV, and broader channel mixes to reduce dependence on crowded digital acquisition. Forward puts you in the room with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Cody Plofker, and leaders from Liquid I.V., MANSCAPED, Thorne, and Avocado Green Brands.

✅ Secure Your Spot

Advertise with Us

Wanna put out your message in front of over 50,000 best marketers and decision makers?

Checkout our Partner Kit here🤝

At Buyology, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. It would be amazing if you could hit us up with feedback about our content or absolutely anything, we are always up for a chat 🥰

Thanks for your support, We'll be back with more such content 🥳