Meta has already changed how your sales get counted. The switch is on, the date is 12 November, and nobody asked you first. It lands 15 days before Black Friday, which is exactly when you are most likely to mistake a measurement change for a good campaign.
SEO and search
Meta will count more of your sales from 12 November
From 12 November Meta starts measuring some website purchases on your customer’s device instead of only on its own servers. The setting is called Measure conversions on customer devices, and it is already switched on for every dataset that sends events. That means your live pixel and any Conversions API connection you run. Meta matches the sale using details the shopper gave you, such as an email address, plus temporary device data. PPC Land reported the change on 27 October and noted the notice reached advertisers roughly 25 days before it takes effect. You can turn it off in Events Manager under Data sources, then your pixel, then Settings.
Why this matters for your business: Your Meta reporting will look better on 12 November without your advertising getting better. If you judge spend on platform numbers alone, you will scale into a counting change and call it growth. Write down your current cost per purchase and your Meta attributed revenue this week, while you still have a clean before picture.
Google writes the review summaries in your ads, and only the flattering ones
Google has documented review summaries written by its AI that appear inside Search ads. They draw on reviews from across the web and you cannot edit the text. Google’s own help page says the summaries are only positive and highlight benefits from customer reviews. They run in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and India, in English, on Search campaigns only, in every vertical except sensitive categories. Google says a summary shows when it predicts the ad will perform better, without naming the metric or publishing any test data, and the page never explains how to switch the format off.
Why this matters for your business: Somebody else now writes copy that sits inside your advert. Your reviews are the raw material, so clean up the sources you can control and answer the critical ones properly. If you sell into those four markets, watch for summary wording that promises more than your service actually delivers.
Social
Instagram opened horizontal video to 90 minutes
Instagram has started testing a long form horizontal format called Features with selected creators in the United States, after an earlier test in Brazil. Videos run up to 90 minutes, they can surface on Explore, and a short Reel can link straight through to the full episode. Instagram’s VP of Product Tessa Lyons said established creators can bring existing brand relationships and branded placements to the format. No revenue share terms have been published yet.
Why this matters for your business: Instagram now wants the long watch as well as the short one. If you already record webinars, training sessions or customer interviews, you are sitting on the footage this format needs. Cut one sharp Reel as the hook and point it at the full recording.
Content and commerce
Only a third of connected South Africans buy anything online
The Online Retail in South Africa 2026 report, produced by World Wide Worx with Mastercard, Peach Payments and Ask Afrika, puts the local online retail market at R159bn this year. It also found that 79.1 percent of South African adults use the internet while only 34.2 percent buy anything online. Browsers beat apps for purchases in 42 of the 48 product categories measured. Writing in Bizcommunity on 26 October, Specno chief executive Joshua Harvey pointed at delivery costs, minimum order values, payment uncertainty and data costs as the barriers holding the rest back.
Why this matters for your business: Your growth sits in the gap between those two numbers, and it is a checkout problem rather than a traffic problem. Test your Black Friday journey on a cheap handset over mobile data, not on office fibre. Then put delivery cost and delivery time in front of the cart instead of behind it.
OpenAI halved the price of its fast model
OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra on 26 October at 1 dollar per million input tokens and 5 dollars per million output, half the price of the model it replaces. OpenAI reports roughly three times the speed on agent tasks and an internal factual error rate down from 53.6 percent to 16.7 percent at its lower effort setting. Those benchmarks are the vendor’s own and nobody has verified them independently.
Why this matters for your business: Work you priced as too expensive to automate six months ago is now cheap enough to test. Product descriptions, review replies and first draft advert copy are the obvious places to start, with a human reading everything before it ships.
Automotive
AI shopping tools are starting to grade dealers on price transparency
Speaking to CBT News on 27 October, CarEdge chief executive Zach Shefska said ChatGPT has cited his company’s Dealer Transparency Index when recommending dealerships to shoppers. That index has now assessed more than 24,000 dealers, with roughly 60 percent scoring an A and about 10 percent scoring an F. CarEdge says its own AI shopping agent has contacted dealerships 160,000 times since July 2025, and that shoppers who use it convert at three times the rate of those who do not. Shefska argued transparent pricing is a competitive advantage rather than a compliance exercise, and he told dealers to check that advertised online prices match the quotes their staff actually give.
Why this matters for your dealership: A third party is grading your pricing and an AI assistant is repeating that grade to buyers who never visit your site. Pull ten vehicle detail pages at random and compare the advertised price with the figure your sales team would quote on the phone today. Close every gap you find, because that gap now feeds a recommendation you do not control.
What to do this week
- Record your Meta cost per purchase and attributed revenue before 12 November, so you have a clean baseline.
- Decide whether to leave the new pixel setting on. If you leave it on, hold one region back so you can check the lift is real.
- Audit the reviews feeding your Google ads if you advertise in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia or India.
- Noindex the shareable pages your site generates that were never meant for search.
- Test your checkout on an entry level phone over mobile data before Black Friday.
- Compare ten advertised vehicle prices against the quotes your team gives on the phone.
If you want a hand with any of this, from measurement and paid media through to the website it all runs on, talk to us.
Sources
- PPC Land on Meta’s 12 November conversion measurement change
- PPC Land on Google’s review summaries in Search ads
- Search Engine Roundtable on Google’s user generated spam guidance
- 9to5Mac on Instagram’s 90 minute horizontal video test
- Bizcommunity on the customers South African online retailers are missing
- DataCamp on GPT-6.1 Terra pricing and benchmarks
- CBT News on CarEdge, AI shopping tools and dealer pricing transparency