We just set a client up to advertise inside ChatGPT

A year ago, if you’d told us we’d be setting up ad campaigns inside ChatGPT, we’d have laughed. Then this month we did exactly that, for one of our clients.

Wait, ChatGPT has ads now?

It does. OpenAI started with a small pilot, working directly with a handful of big advertisers. In May this year they opened it up further, through agency partners and a new self-serve Ads Manager that’s still in beta. The ads show up as a small “Sponsored” card underneath ChatGPT’s answer, clearly separate from the answer itself.

At first you could only pay per thousand views. Now you can also pay per click, which makes a lot more sense to us. Someone asking ChatGPT to compare options is usually pretty close to making a decision, and a click in that moment means something.

One thing worth knowing upfront: it isn’t available everywhere yet. It’s rolling out country by country, so check it’s live where your customers are before you plan a campaign.

What we actually did

Getting an ad live is the easy bit. Ads Manager walks you through budgets, bids and uploading your creative. The work that makes it worthwhile happens on the website.

We got the client’s site ready for the traffic, so the pages people land on actually match what the ad promises. We connected the site to OpenAI’s ads platform through their API, including their Conversions API, so that when someone clicks an ad and then signs up or buys, that result gets reported back. Without that, you’re basically spending money and hoping.

The setup and the tracking matter more than the ad.

Privacy, because people always ask

This was the first thing we wanted to understand ourselves. Advertisers don’t see anyone’s conversations. What comes back is grouped, anonymous performance data: how many people clicked, how many went on to do something useful. OpenAI’s line is that the answers stay independent of the ads, and the chats stay private. We’re glad, honestly. We wouldn’t want to build anything on the alternative.

What we’d tell another business

It’s early. The tools are still in beta and still changing, so expect a bit of trial and error. But being early is also the opportunity. There’s far less competition in there than on Google or Meta, and the people seeing your ad are actively asking about the thing you sell.

The bit people skip is the website. An ad in ChatGPT sends someone who’s already been doing their research. If they land on a slow, vague page, you’ve paid for that click and lost them. That’s exactly why the setup and the tracking matter more than the ad.