ChatGPT ads – Our first impressions

With more and more now using AI to search and compare buying options. “Can I advertise in AI results?” is something we’ve been asked by clients a lot.

Whilst it’s something we are expecting to see within Google’s AI placements later this year, we were given access to the Beta version of OpenAI’s ad manager last month. We rounded up several willing clients, and soon began testing some campaigns…

The setup

A minimum budget of £15 a day is required. Location targeting is at a country level and at the point of testing we only had a choice of impressions or clicks for our campaign bid strategy. Although we were able to create conversion events within the ad platform to report on. We also used UTM’s to see the fruits of our labour in GA4.

Unlike Google where you setup what keywords you’d like to target. With this platform you enter what they’ve dubbed ‘context hints’. These can be short concise keywords, or longer phrases that are typical of what users ask AI. Or a mixture of both. These are only a guide though and aren’t exactly what our ads will match to.

Ad’s are then shown at the bottom of the AI’s responses and are limited to a title, a description, a logo and an image.

The results…

CTR was 0.70 – 1%: Very low in comparison to Google ads but expected given people typically use AI to research or compare rather than take action or visit a website.

CPC was £1.35 – £2.60: Medium to high when compared to Google ads. But low enough to generate a reasonable volume of website traffic.

Conversions: Somewhat surprisingly (Given how users interact with AI). Every client we tested ads for did see conversion actions on their website. One client’s campaign even had a conversion rate of 11%!

What next?

We’d encourage testing some ads at the minimum budget, but if OpenAI are serious about competing with Google then their platform will have to become smarter, and we have already seen them make updates. There is now a maximise conversions objective, but currently no improvements have been made to the targeting.

Our biggest gripe though, is the lack of visibility on what prompts/queries are triggering our ads. Being able to manage these would have a big impact on CTR and Conversions.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for any further product updates and will continue to test ads throughout the rest of 2026.

Any questions? Or would like to test some campaigns? Give us a shout.