Weekly Hacks #2: Meta vs TikTok, what's new in Google and ChatGPT

The second issue of our "Weekly Hacks" column: a short summary of what changed in advertising last week and what to do about it. The first issue covered the Advertising Week announcements.

Meta: TikTok ad ban in 7 countries

Since October 8 Meta has blocked ads from ByteDance and any ads that lead to TikTok or other ByteDance services. Countries: the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam. The ban covers promoting a TikTok account, TikTok Shop products, creator cross-promotion and app installs. According to a Meta spokesperson, the company is not obliged to run ads from a competitor that pulls people away from its apps. Meta has not yet published a separate policy page.

What it means. The ban does not yet apply to Ukraine or Europe. But if you advertise in the US or Canada with a "follow us on TikTok" call to action, replace those ads: send people to your own website, Telegram or mailing list. Don't work around the ban with link-in-bio pages or redirects; it risks getting your account blocked.

Meta: Product browsing turns on by itself from October 28

Product browsing is an Advantage+ creative option. After clicking an ad, a person first sees a catalog of your products inside Facebook or Instagram and only then lands on your website. From October 28 Meta will turn it on in ads that are already running unless you opt out.

• For online stores this may work: people browse products without leaving Instagram.
• For schools, courses and services it's a risk: the lead should be captured by a landing page, not a catalog. If you have a catalog connected, check the setting.
• How to turn it off: in the ad, open Advantage+ creative enhancements, go to the personalized destinations section and turn off Product browsing. If you need the click to land exactly on your URL, also turn off destination optimization.
• After October 28 check again, especially duplicated ads: the setting can come back when an ad is copied.

Meta: no more manual placements

In campaigns with the Sales, Leads, Engagement and App promotion objectives you can no longer choose placements manually at the ad set level. Manual selection remains only in Awareness and Traffic campaigns. If you need your ads not to show, for example, on Audience Network, use placement exclusions in the ad account settings.

Meta: new brand formats

On October 16 at the Brand Building Summit Meta presented formats for brand awareness:

• Ads Super Burst: you book a 3 to 24-hour window and get guaranteed reach. In tests the median was 34 million people per campaign and a 2.9-point lift in ad recall. Rolling out gradually in October.
• First Impression Ads: the first ad in the feed when someone opens Facebook. A US test, one brand per day.
• Reels Trending Ads: ads right after popular Reels. According to Meta, action intent rises by more than 5 points.
• Aggregated View Time: a new metric for how much time a person spent with a brand over a week. According to Meta's research, 5 seconds of attention accumulated over a week drove 32% more offline sales than one continuous 5-second view.

A hack for every niche. The Aggregated View Time metric confirms what we see in practice: what matters is not one long ad but frequent short touches. Run a series of 3–5 short 10–15-second Reels to your warm audience instead of one long video.

Google: channel priorities and ads in AI Mode

• Channel priorities. Since October 15, Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen let you give each channel high or low priority instead of "on or off". A low-priority channel can be capped at a share of the budget: in Google's example, 5% of $1,000 a day. By default all channels are high priority.
• More links in AI answers. On October 15 Google said AI Mode and AI Overviews now show more links to websites and place them higher. Google did not share click data.
• Personalized ads in AI Mode. On October 17 Google started testing ads for users who connected Gmail and Google Photos to AI Mode. Google promises the ads are not based directly on the content of their email or photos. For now this is US only.

What to do. If you run Performance Max or Demand Gen and see YouTube or partner sites spending budget without leads, give them low priority and cap their share instead of turning them off completely.

ChatGPT: image ads

In October OpenAI starts showing visual ads next to the images people generate in ChatGPT. For now only in the US and for an initial group of advertisers. The ads are labeled and, according to OpenAI, do not influence the answers. OpenAI also added measurement partners, including AppsFlyer, Adjust and Triple Whale, and is piloting brand safety checks with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users.

Check your analytics. According to an Adobe specialist, OpenAI confirmed a bug that stripped UTM tags from links in ChatGPT. A fix rolled out on October 15. This is second-hand, but if ChatGPT traffic in GA4 looked like "direct" in the first half of October, this may be why. We covered how to launch ChatGPT ads in a separate guide.

What is live and what is still in testing

Five things to do this week

1. Before October 28, check Product browsing and turn it off wherever the lead should be captured by a landing page.
2. Remove "follow us on TikTok" calls to action from Meta ads targeting the US, Canada and the other countries on the list.
3. Move placement exclusions to the ad account settings if you used to exclude them in ad sets.
4. In Google Ads, set channel priorities in Performance Max and Demand Gen based on actual cost per lead.
5. Reminder: Meta's new ad terms take effect on October 30, details in the previous issue.

Sources

1. AdsUploader — Meta ads updates, October 2026
2. Campaign — Meta bans TikTok ads across seven markets
3. Social Samosa — Meta's new brand-building ad products
4. LoopLoop — search and AI news, October 15–18, 2026
5. TechCrunch — OpenAI launches visual ads next to image generation results