How to run ads on ChatGPT: A beginner’s guide

To run ads on ChatGPT, start at OpenAI Ads Manager. Eligible businesses can create an advertiser account, complete verification and billing, build a campaign, add their ads and submit them for review.

Getting the campaign live is only part of the job. You also need to work out what you can afford to pay for a visitor, describe when your product would be useful, and check that reported conversions represent the action you actually wanted.

This guide follows a fictional retailer selling compact desks through those decisions. The campaign, copy and calculations are planning examples, not results from a live SEW advertising test.

1. Check whether your business can advertise

OpenAI now lists self-service access for businesses in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India and numerous European markets. Eligibility depends on where the legal entity being advertised and billed is based. Creating an account alone does not establish access. Check the current Ads Manager country list before planning a launch.

There are three separate questions to answer:

Ads may appear on Free and Go. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu are ad-free, and OpenAI excludes accounts it identifies as belonging to people under 18. That means ChatGPT’s total audience is larger than your potential advertising audience.

Check your product category, too. OpenAI reviews the advertiser, creative and destination. Financial, health and legal services have specific restrictions and approvals; an ordinary business registration is not enough to establish eligibility.

2. Work out what a click is worth before choosing a bid

ChatGPT advertising has no single price per click. OpenAI documents auction-based CPC and CPM buying. For ordinary Clicks campaigns, its suggested starting maximum CPC bid is $3–$5. That is bidding guidance, not a promised click price or evidence that your business can afford it. OpenAI’s pricing explanation makes the buying options clear.

For our example, assume the retailer sells a desk for $200. After the product, payment processing, delivery and an allowance for returns, it has $100 left before advertising and overhead.

The retailer chooses a $60 target cost to acquire a customer. That leaves $40 toward overhead and profit. This is a business assumption, not a ChatGPT benchmark.

If 2% of ad clicks become purchases, the calculation is:

Maximum affordable CPC = target acquisition cost × click-to-purchase conversion rate

$60 × 0.02 = $1.20 per click

At $3 a click and the same conversion rate, acquiring a customer would cost $150. The retailer would spend $50 more than its $100 contribution before even covering overhead.

Here is how much the assumed conversion rate changes that decision:

Illustrative arithmetic. These are not observed ChatGPT conversion rates or prices.

Use your own margins and sales data. An existing paid-search conversion rate can be an initial hypothesis, but it still needs testing on ChatGPT traffic.

If a commercially sensible bid gets little delivery, that is useful information. Raising the bid to win more clicks only helps if the resulting customers can support the higher cost.

For a lead-generation business, include the sales team’s close rate. A $300 customer acquisition target and a 10% lead-to-customer rate imply a $30 cost-per-lead ceiling. If 5% of clicks become leads, the affordable CPC is $1.50.

3. Create the account and complete verification

Open Ads Manager and sign in or create an OpenAI account. Prepare your business name, website, logo, country, billing currency and time zone.

Review those last three fields carefully: OpenAI says the account country or region, currency and time zone cannot be changed after creation.

Complete the verification flow, which uses Persona, then watch for account approval or requests for more information. Add your billing profile and payment method. In Settings → Account info, check the advertiser name and logo that will appear with your ads.

Allow time for review. Completing the verification questions does not mean a campaign is immediately ready to serve.

4. Set up purchase or lead tracking before launch

For the desk retailer, the outcome is a completed purchase. Measuring a visit to the product page would tell us that someone arrived, but it would not answer whether the advertising pays for itself.

OpenAI provides an OpenAI Pixel for browser events and a Conversions API for events sent from your server. You can use either or both.

For a website campaign:

1. Create a data source in Ads Manager’s conversions area and obtain its Pixel ID.
2. Install the Pixel using OpenAI’s current snippet, or connect server-side measurement. Configure any required consent controls before collecting events.
3. Send the event when the action actually succeeds.
4. Create the matching conversion event setting and attach it to the campaign.
5. Trigger a test action and check that the correct source receives the correct event.

OpenAI’s conversion tracking guide explains the relationship between the source, event setting and campaign. A working Pixel alone does not complete all three steps.

Use the event that describes the outcome:

These names come from OpenAI’s supported events reference. For purchase values, USD amounts use cents: a $200 order is 20000 with currency USD.

For our retailer, fire the purchase event after a confirmed order. Test what happens if the confirmation page is refreshed so one order does not become several events.

Preserve oppref, OpenAI’s ad-click reference, through redirects. If the browser and server both report the same purchase, use a shared event ID for deduplication. OpenAI’s measurement guidance explains both requirements.

Keep paid visits identifiable in your analytics using a consistent campaign-tagging convention. A broad ChatGPT referral bucket is not enough to distinguish an ad click from an unpaid visit.

5. Choose the campaign objective and spending limit

Create a campaign and choose the outcome you want the system to pursue. Keep the optimization goal separate from what you are billed for.

For a small initial test of traffic quality, I would consider Clicks with purchase tracking attached. That lets the retailer examine click costs and resulting orders. It does not make the campaign optimize for purchases. A conversion-optimized campaign is another option when the intended standard event is set up and produces useful signals.

Check the unit beside the bid field. In an ordinary CPC campaign, the maximum bid refers to a click. In a conversion-optimized campaign, OpenAI describes Bid Cap as conversion-oriented. It is neither a guaranteed acquisition cost nor payment only when somebody buys. The objective, billing model and selected conversion event cannot simply be switched later; a different setup requires a new campaign.

How much budget do you need?

OpenAI’s published minimum daily budgets include:

These are currency-specific platform minimums, not equivalent exchange-rate amounts or recommended test sizes.

A daily budget is an average across the applicable seven-day period. OpenAI permits spending up to twice the daily amount on an individual day, with a seven-day limit of seven times the budget when it stays unchanged. Budget changes can alter the calculation through proration.

So $25 a day can mean $50 on one day. At an unchanged budget, the applicable seven-day limit is $175. If you need a fixed total media-spend allowance, use the campaign-total budget option and check the limit shown before submitting.

For the worked example, the planning allowance is $350 in media over 14 days, subject to the selected setup’s budget requirements. Creative production, website work and applicable taxes sit outside that allowance.

6. Describe the problem your product solves

The account structure is campaign → ad group → ad. An ad group brings together ads around a related customer need.

OpenAI calls the descriptions you add at ad-group level context hints. They help explain where an offer may be useful. They are not exact-match keywords, guaranteed audience rules or a way to reserve a particular conversation. OpenAI’s ad-group guidance recommends clear, relevant needs and use cases.

For the fictional retailer, assume the product is an 80 cm-wide desk with a cable tray, sold for $200.

This gives us two possible themes:

These describe plausible uses for the product. They are not claims that OpenAI will show the ads only to those people.

With a small budget, I would launch the small-room theme first and keep the cable-storage theme as a later test. Splitting a few hundred dollars across numerous themes makes it harder to learn much about any one of them.

What can you actually target?

Use campaign location controls for the places you serve. OpenAI documents country targeting and supported US state, DMA and ZIP-code options; check the live location picker for your market. New product-feed campaigns have a country-level targeting restriction.

Custom audiences provide a separate control using your own customer or prospect lists. Inclusion targeting and audience bid adjustments require at least 25,000 matched users. Smaller matched lists can be used for exclusions. Uploaded rows are not the same as matched users.

For a small retailer with a few thousand customers, that limits the usefulness of list-based targeting. An eligible exclusion list may still help keep an acquisition campaign from reaching existing buyers.

7. Write ads the landing page can support

Prepare the advertiser identity, headline, description, image and destination. For the small-room theme, here are two possible drafts:

Fictional creative drafts. Both fit the standard chat-card API’s documented 50-character title maximum and 100-character body maximum. Confirm every product claim and check the chosen format in the live editor. OpenAI’s creative specifications provide the API limits.

The second ad gives the reader a concrete reason to click: checking whether the desk fits. That is a useful hypothesis to test; it is not evidence that the ad will outperform the first version.

OpenAI recommends specific, useful copy and relevant destinations, including product or collection pages.

For this standard ad, prepare a 1200 × 1200 PNG or JPG. That satisfies the API guide’s minimum 640 × 640 dimensions and the Help Center’s square-image maximum of 1200 × 1200. An image URL must open the actual image, not a sign-in or preview page.

Before submitting, open the destination on a phone. Can a visitor immediately find the product, price, dimensions, delivery coverage and purchase button? If the ad has made a promise, the page should make it easy to verify.

Also check crawler access. OpenAI’s dedicated crawler guide requires OAI-AdsBot and recommends OAI-SearchBot. Review robots.txt, firewall restrictions and bot challenges. A page that opens for you may still be inaccessible to the system reviewing the ad.

If you have a product catalogue

Retailers can use Tools → Feeds to create and import a product feed, then build a Product feed campaign, filter products at ad-group level and preview the template. OpenAI says feed items expire after two weeks, making ongoing updates part of the job. It also says products supplied through this advertising workflow are ads-eligible rather than automatically added to organic conversations.

SEW has also covered ChatGPT’s product carousel ads for readers who want to see the format’s development.

8. Launch, then read the results in the right order

The first test now has a defined setup:

This uses fixed bidding because OpenAI’s bidding documentation pairs campaign-total budgets with fixed bids; Maximize Results requires a daily budget. The plan does not guarantee approval, delivery or results.

Submit the campaign for review. Once approved, check its serving status. If an ad is marked Not serving, hover over the status for the reason, as described in OpenAI’s launch quickstart.

First establish that delivery, spend and tracking work. Then look at commercial performance.

For our $350 planning allowance, an average CPC of $1.20 would buy roughly 292 clicks if the full amount delivered. At the assumed 2% purchase rate, that corresponds to roughly six orders. At $3 a click, the same allowance buys roughly 117 clicks, corresponding to two or three orders under that assumption.

Those calculations show how limited the first test could be. Six purchases would still be a small sample, and actual results can differ substantially. The test may reveal an obvious problem or justify a further test; it cannot establish a dependable long-term acquisition cost on its own.

Ask three questions when reviewing it:

1. Did usable traffic arrive? Compare ad clicks with website activity and inspect the destination experience.
2. Did the intended action happen? Review completed purchases or qualified leads, not just a combined conversion count.
3. Did those customers make economic sense? Reconcile orders, cancellations, refunds and contribution after media cost.

OpenAI says attributed conversions can take 24–48 hours to appear. Its current reporting guide separates the main click-through Conversions total from supplemental view-through conversions. Add individual event columns through Edit columns → Conversions & events so you know which actions the total contains.

A view-through conversion means somebody converted after seeing an eligible ad, without a qualifying click receiving credit. Treat that as attribution information, not proof that the ad caused the sale. The same caution applies to click attribution: a customer may already have been going to buy.

Avoid adopting a universal CTR target or a rule to stop every campaign after a fixed number of hours.

For this retailer, the decision is whether purchases recorded after allowing for the sales cycle and reporting delay approach the $60 acquisition target. Pause immediately for a broken checkout or incorrect event. Otherwise, review after the purchase cycle and reporting delay, and decide whether the evidence warrants another defined amount of spend.

When the campaign is not working

Can you buy ChatGPT ads through Amazon or an agency?

Direct Ads Manager access is one route. OpenAI also works with agency and technology partners, as described in its August expansion announcement.

Amazon announced its integration on September 10, but described it as a pilot for selected US advertisers. Existing Amazon Ads access does not establish that the ChatGPT placement is available to you. Amazon’s announcement gives the current scope; SEW’s coverage of the Amazon partnership explains the context.

If you use an agency or partner, ask for the buying route, eligible markets, media budget, separate fees, measurement setup and account ownership in writing. You need to know which decisions the partner controls and what reporting you will receive.

Does paying for ads make ChatGPT recommend your business?

OpenAI says advertising does not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Sponsored placements are separate, and advertisers do not receive users’ private conversations. An ad purchase therefore buys advertising inventory; it does not buy an organic recommendation or citation.

For a first campaign, define one customer need, make one relevant offer, measure the action that earns money, and decide in advance how much evidence you can afford to collect. The useful result is knowing whether this channel can bring your business customers at a cost it can sustain.

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