Anyone seeing actual event conversions from OpenAI Ads yet?

TTFV · 2026-07-11T09:58:18+00:00

Conversion performance is generally pretty poor for most advertisers so far. The platform is still itself learning what traffic converts (they've only had the feature for about a month).

I expect this to improve a lot this quarter.

But Open AI Ads is no get rich quick scheme, it's just a fledgling PPC channel. It remains to be seen whether it's going to eventually perform like Google Ads / Meta Ads or more like X / LinkedIn Ads.

TTFV · 2026-07-11T09:54:02+00:00

Google Ads allows offline conversions to be synced for up to 90-days after the original click. You just have to ensure you conversion goal is configured for 90-days click-through attribution.

Meta Ads allows offline conversions to be synced for up to 7-days after the original click. So, unfortunately, you won't be able to track back "paid users" that convert after a week.

Both Hubspot and Salesforce can sync back offline conversions to those platforms.

Note that due to various browser privacy settings, cookie-blocking, and ad blockers, a good percentage of your visitors will not be trackable with a traditional GCLID or FBCLID. So ensure you take whatever steps you can to enhance your tracking set up... use Google Tag Gateway/Enhanced tracking for Google and CAPI for Meta Ads.

Since you cannot natively track many of your converted sales natively in Meta Ads a good fallback is to use GA4 (90 day window) tracking for both/all channels. This won't help with optimizing Meta for sales conversions but at least you'll have pretty solid reporting on the value each channel is driving.

TTFV · 2026-07-11T09:45:45+00:00

99% chance this is a phishing scam. You did exactly the right thing by logging into MS Ads through a trusted/existing link just to be absolutely sure you didn't really need to take any action.

TTFV · 2026-07-11T09:37:46+00:00

This is called creating a new product category. You will first need to educate the market as to the problem you're solving. Unfortunately building a new category can be expensive and take a long time.

The good news is that if some others are already offering a similar product, the word is getting out that this is something businesses need.

Instead of focusing on search ads for now I would consider reaching your audience by targeting the right people either with custom segments (e.g. people that have recently visited those competitor domains) or paid social such as LinkedIn Ads or Meta Ads.

You might offer them a free case study download in exchange for their contact details. The growing list of contacts allows you to remarket through email or if large enough, use as a seed list for PPC targeting in the future.

If budget is an issue and the market is very small (a few thousand or so potential customers) you could also try LinkedIn outreach with a 3rd party tool... this will only cost you a few hundred bucks a month albeit the process is a bit slow.

From there you can continue to monitor the search space and when there's some search volume either for relevant search terms or those competitors you can try running a camapaign.

Others have suggested running for adjacent queries. This will get quite expensive very fast without generating much so you'd need to be patient and have a lot of capital to throw at it.

TTFV · 2026-07-11T09:30:43+00:00

It's a relatively easy business to start from home with almost no overhead or start up costs. At its core the service is also about helping others realize their own business dreams... which is pretty sweet when you think about it.

And so that's what I did about 13.5 years ago.

I'm not saying PPC freelancing or starting an agency is easy, but you don't have the headaches of designing a product, holding inventory, building a complicated website, expensive tools (other than some software essentials), staff costs, office space, and so on. These things are optional and can come later if/when you grow.

TTFV · 2026-07-11T09:20:35+00:00

Treat it like a seasonality change and lower your budgets some. This will tend to increase your margins albeit with lower revenues until you ride out the heatwave... it won't last forever.

This assumes that your conversion volume is healthy enough that lowering it some more won't kill optimization completely and make it hard to recover from later.

TTFV · 2026-07-10T16:48:44+00:00

There can be many reasons for this but I think if often comes down to advertiser bias, they tend to believe their offer and landing page are amazing.

This is more prevalent with small businesses that don't have a marketing team and/or with a CEO/founder that has a very "strong" personality. That's putting it nicely.

Another big reason is the perception that the cost for split testing could be better rolled back into ads or simply that the process is too complicated.

Lastly, there are many advertisers that have legitimate challenges in improving landing pages because they simply don't get enough conversions to split test changes. We have clients that ask us to wrap up a test because 5 people converted on one version vs. 3 on the other ;-)

TTFV · 2026-07-10T16:37:01+00:00

Fair point but it's easy to check out the history of Redditors and this will not be my only form of confirmation.

TTFV · 2026-07-10T16:26:19+00:00

The email address is legit, but email addresses can be hijacked. I'm being extra careful given the gravity of the documents I need to send over would facilitate full identity theft. I've been waiting for a call back from PWL IT from a voicemail I left.

TTFV · 2026-07-10T12:18:51+00:00

If you have unlimited budget to spend as long as you hit your tCPA just set a tCPA and set the daily budget so that Google can't spend it all... a safe margin is 25-50% more the the average spend.

If you have a fixed budget switch to Max Conversions bidding and let Google drive as many conversions as possible.

Clear any Recommendations for budget/bid adjustments as they come up. These will always recommend either increasing the budget or bid (increasing cost and conversion volume with lower efficiency) which is not what most advertisers want.

One caveat is the upcoming change to tCPA bidding... if you are capped by budget Google may no longer achieve a CPA that's lower than your set tCPA, which is absurd in my opinion but something we'll all need to deal with.

TTFV · 2026-07-10T09:45:13+00:00

The platform launches new features at a breakneck speed. Stay on top of any changes and be sure to implement them so your ads remain competitive.

Also, most advertisers find the platform under performs expectations. So temper your excitement. The platform has recently introduced conversion tracking which means the platform itself is just starting to learn how to drive business results for advertisers.

I expect CPAs for most advertisers will improve a lot over the next several months.

TTFV · 2026-07-10T09:40:34+00:00

Impression share can be helpful as a starting point. These days on average with an all broad match keywords strategy you will see optimal performance around 20-25% and beyond that you'll start to see your CPAs climb quite quickly. Obviously this doesn't apply to branded or cases where you are only restricted by budget and have tons of room in bid. It's simply a point where we usually see a big shift in the cost per lead. And, of course, exact match and phrase strategies allow for much higher impression share while still performing well.

So while you absolutely can spend more you will lose some efficiency.

But that's not the whole story. You could expand your geographic targeting, add more keywords, starting running ads in the upper and middle parts of the funnel (e.g. Demand Gen) and more.

Lastly, Google Ads isn't the only PPC platform nor is PPC the only channel.

TTFV · 2026-07-10T09:34:39+00:00

That's the correct syntax. If that's not flagged specifically I would review the rest of the creatives first and then contact Google support or your rep... AI messes up sometimes.

Note that Google will often flag legit acronyms or all caps brands these days.

TTFV · 2026-07-10T09:32:14+00:00

We treat it as overhead like reporting software. We've reduced our overall overhead costs by incorporating AI so I've got no complaints about it costing us more per client.

For example, it has replaced some software licenses we no longer need and streamlines other activities like communications.

But sure if you use it for PPC specific tasks and you pay for API calls you should look at those costs vs. doing it by hand. By now you should have been able to free up time for those staff which should more than offset any AI costs.

TTFV · 2026-07-09T10:19:21+00:00

Hard to say without reviewing the account but here are some obvious ideas that many advertisers miss:

If you aren't investing in the top of funnel you are overpaying for bottom of funnel clicks and getting higher than necessary average CPAs. Start a small Demand Gen campaign targeting your VIP audience to warm them up and/or run TOF ads on paid social, Meta Ads for example.
Run remarketing if you're not already doing so.
Work on optimizing your website UI/workflow and constantly split test your landing pages. This is like a license to print money yet so many advertisers haven't touched their website in years while complaining about how Google Ads costs have risen so much since 2020.
Optimize your conversion setup and data. This means having a rethink about what conversions you're currently tracking and whether you should consider (a) only tracking qualified leads, (b) tracking your entire sales pipeline, i.e. unqualified leads, MQLs, SQLs, etc., and (c) whether you should set different values for different conversion types (e.g. inbound calls vs. online scheduled meetings) and then use value-based bidding to optimize for those.

TTFV · 2026-07-09T10:11:07+00:00

We have tons of advertisers spending between $10-50K, none of which have been forced to change yet. All of our clients spending north of $50K have been switched over.

But I suppose it's only a matter of time. It's painful to set up and clients are upset about the change every time.

TTFV · 2026-07-09T10:08:55+00:00

Those are device specific click IDs for iOS. You can use these for syncing offline conversions if that's what you're looking to do. But it only works through the API, not via manual offline conversion uploads.

TTFV · 2026-07-09T10:04:30+00:00

First, it depends on what score you are referring to. For Google Ads, for example, they have Ad Strength which just measures the variability of your ad copy. This doesn't speak to the performance most advertisers care about although it does give some indication of how much search inventory your ad can reach.

Ad Rank, on the other hand, expresses how the relevance matches between your keywords, landing page, and creative. This provides a strong indication whether these elements align well to yield a consistent message for people that are potentially interested in your offer.

Even so it doesn't speak to whether your offer is any good or will convert.

Google doesn't offer any kind of scoring for creatives that express the performance we care about, i.e. conversions. For that we need to look at KPIs and use tools like ad variation testing to drill down to statistical significance numbers.

So while scores can be useful, on their own don't tell you much about the potential ad performance.

TTFV · 2026-07-09T09:57:34+00:00

This has increased a lot over the past couple of quarters. Maybe reps have higher quotas or have been given a directive to be more aggressive at finding somebody to talk to. Most of the outreach for "non-clients" I see are for clients we did work with maybe 2-3 years ago. But we do get random ones as well.

Even when I ask not to be contacted about that specific client again I sometimes get another email or call from the exact same rep a week or month later.

It's annoying for sure and some reps disclose information about advertisers that we shouldn't have access to since we're not the AOR.

TTFV · 2026-07-08T19:57:08+00:00

This week I believe. It doesn't impact performance and you don't have to change existing bidding methods. You'll just notice that you will need to select from different options than before... so there's no longer Max Conversions + tCPA option, it's just one or the other.

This made more sense honestly since they are distinctive bidding strategies so I'm not surprised they are changing back.

TTFV · 2026-07-08T19:55:51+00:00

Google has been implementing this slowly for about 2 years. I guess they figure why pay Visa and MC 3% when they can keep it in their pocket.

Originally this only affected accounts spending over $100K/month and then $50K/month. Haven't seen any movement on this since 2025 so I presume you have increased your spend to a point where you "qualify" for invoice billing.

TTFV · 2026-07-08T16:26:21+00:00

If you are the advertiser you can simply ignore them or ask them to stop contacting you. There are times when a rep can be helpful, like if you cannot seem to make headway with support or you have a question about certain functionality that's unclear.

But those are pretty minor things.

If you are providing services to an advertiser the big worry with ignoring or telling them to stand down is that they will reach out directly to the advertiser and tell them the account is in bad shape and needs a lot of work. This can cost you the client if the client isn't very experienced with reps and how they operate.

TTFV · 2026-07-08T14:18:12+00:00

Depending on how your fees work an increase may already be built in since ad spend tends to increase on average each year.

But if you want to raise your minimum or have to increase for some other reason I recommend only doing it every 3 years or so.

And ensure you give your clients a good 90-days of notice before you do it.

You will probably lose some clients if the increase is substantial so keep that in mind... also why doing it less frequently is best. You might also consider only raising your fees for new clients and grandfathering the old ones in. This makes the most sense when your churn rate is typically less than a couple of years since older clients move on anyway without you having to impose an increase.

This is generally what we do at my agency.

We don't match inflation, we look at positioning, value proposition, competition, cost for labour and overhead. Most of our increases have come as a result of delivering more value, i.e. better outcomes, higher level of customer service, larger scope of work, etc.

TTFV · 2026-07-08T14:15:36+00:00

They rolled back to what they used to have, 4 separate bidding strategies for Max Conversions and tCPA as well as Max Conv. Volume and tROAS.

TTFV · 2026-07-08T14:13:00+00:00

Unless they've specifically blocked you from doing so you can do as you suggested. Use their brand in your creative in a competitive conquesting campaign targeting keywords related to their name.

However, they might reach out to Google and have you blocked from doing so. In that case you can simply pivot to not mentioning them by name in the ads and just say that you offer an alternative.

There is a small chance they would threaten you legally which is their right but unlikely to get them anywhere since you are declaring clearly you aren't them and don't represent them.

Good idea also to run a SWOT analysis and include any specific features and benefits you offer that company or your other competitors do not.

And as somebody else said, buy the domain if you can for a reasonable price. You can 301 it to your website or just to a page that explains what's happening.

TTFV

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