This week brings a bidding overhaul on ChatGPT Ads with a tight deadline, a new Google Ads channel-control feature, a practitioner's take on when tightening PPC accounts backfires, and Microsoft Clarity's push into tracking AI agent traffic.
Per Search Engine Roundtable's report on an OpenAI advertiser email, from Monday 9 November advertisers can choose Target CPA for conversion campaigns and Target CPC for click campaigns inside ChatGPT Ads Manager. These replace Max Bid and Max CPC for new campaigns. Existing campaigns keep running on the old bidding until advertisers switch. Max Bid and Max CPC retire fully on 1 January 2027. OpenAI is telling advertisers to check Pixel or Conversions API signal quality via Event Quality Score warnings before setting targets.
This is reported exclusively through Search Engine Roundtable's coverage of OpenAI's advertiser communication, so the detail should be read as OpenAI's own framing of the change rather than independently verified performance claims. The core mechanic mirrors Google's and Meta's shift from bid caps to target-based automated bidding, which only works well when conversion signal quality is solid. OpenAI's own recommendation to check EQS warnings before switching is the critical line here.
In this official Ads Decoded clip, Google's Tal Akabas describes two new controls: channel prioritisation, which funds high-priority channels at your CPA or ROAS target first before any remaining budget reaches lower-priority channels, and budget allocation, which lets you cap a channel such as Display Network at a daily percentage ceiling like 10 percent so it cannot overspend.
This is Google's own video, so treat it as a feature announcement rather than a performance claim. It matters because it gives advertisers more explicit control over which channels get first access to budget, something that has been a recurring complaint about automated and Performance Max delivery favouring lower-cost, lower-intent inventory like Display or YouTube over Search.
On Inside Google Ads episode 145, Jyll Saskin Gales claims that in high-CPC or low-volume niches, the instinct to tighten match types, add negatives and reset bids after seeing zero results actually starves the account of the data smart bidding needs to find buyers. She illustrates this with two coaching client case studies, Chloe and Ariana, who both struggled with high CPCs and no results before changing approach.
This is Jyll Saskin Gales's own coaching experience and framing, not independently verified data, so it should be read as practitioner advice rather than a universal rule. Where I agree is that automated bidding genuinely needs conversion volume and signal quality to work, and panicking into tight restrictions in low-volume accounts can indeed suffocate that signal before it has a chance to mature. Where I would qualify this is that loosening controls to chase volume is only safe if the conversions being fed back are revenue-quality, not just any form fill or click, otherwise you risk teaching the algorithm to find more of the wrong thing faster.
Microsoft's own blog announces three Clarity additions: Agent Activity, which shows which AI agents visit a site, what they do and where they get stuck; Conversational Analytics, which lets users ask plain-language questions about site behaviour backed by session recordings; and Brand Agents, which aims to make products discoverable in Copilot and Bing and help local businesses get found and booked.
This is Microsoft's own announcement, so the framing that non-human traffic has overtaken human traffic should be treated as context for why Microsoft is building this, not as independently audited fact. The practical value is visibility into a traffic source that is increasingly hitting forms and checkouts but has not historically been separated out in standard analytics or attribution.