OpenAI opened up its self-serve ad platform to US advertisers back in early May. We wanted to get in and look around before everybody else does, so we ran $500 through one campaign.
This wasn’t a test to see if the ads make money. We weren’t chasing a cost per lead or trying to prove anything out. We just wanted to see the platform up close. How the ad manager is built, what the ad format lets you do, how the pricing behaves, and what kind of traffic comes through the door. We didn’t set up conversion tracking because that wasn’t the point this time around.
Here’s what we saw.
The numbers
- Spend: $500.00
- Impressions: 6,983
- Clicks: 76
- Cost per click: $6.58
- Click-through rate: 1.09%
- Cost per thousand impressions: $71.60
Keep in mind this is one campaign over a short window. Seventy-six clicks isn’t much to go on, and OpenAI is changing this platform constantly. So treat these as a look at the landscape, not a scorecard.
People actually clicked
Ads in ChatGPT show up underneath the response, labeled as sponsored and set apart from the answer itself. That’s a tougher spot than a search ad sitting up top. Somebody has to read the whole answer and then keep scrolling.
We figured that would show up in the click rate. It didn’t, really. A 1.09% click-through rate is better than we expected for an ad that’s designed to stay out of the way.
We paid a little more than average
Most of the early numbers people shared put the cost per thousand impressions around $60. We came in at $71.60.
We wouldn’t read much into that. The inventory is new and there aren’t many advertisers bidding yet, so prices bounce around. It’s worth watching over a few campaigns instead of reacting to one.
The cost per click is the number to watch
Impressions are reasonably cheap and people click. But $6.58 a click is real money.
Whether this works for your business comes down to what a click is worth to you. If you sell a $40 product that people buy once, that math gets hard fast. If you’re selling something with a long tail and a bigger contract value, $6.58 is nothing unusual.
The ad itself is tiny
There’s one format right now. A square image at 256 by 256 pixels, a headline of 30 characters, and body copy of 60 characters.
Sixty characters is about one short sentence. You can’t fit what you do, why you’re good at it, and what you want people to do next. You get to pick one.
We think that’s where the real work is in this channel. Figuring out which one of those three matters most, and that probably changes depending on how much somebody already knows about your industry when the ad shows up.
Targeting works differently than you’re used to
ChatGPT ads are contextual. Your ad shows up because of what somebody is asking about right now, not because of anything they did last week.
Advertisers don’t get chats, chat history, memories, or personal details. Just aggregated numbers on how the ads did. If you’re used to building audiences and retargeting, that’s an adjustment.
It’s also probably why the ads work at all. People are in the middle of figuring something out when they see you.
Getting in is cheap
Campaigns start at a $25 daily minimum. So a real look at the platform runs a few hundred dollars, not a few thousand. That daily number is about to work a little differently, which we’ll get to in a minute.
Not many businesses have gotten around to this yet. That won’t be true for long.
This thing is moving fast
Right as we were writing this up, OpenAI pushed out another round of updates. It’s worth listing them, because a few of them change what’s possible compared to when we ran our test.
- You can now pick Conversions as your campaign objective. The system optimizes toward clicks more likely to convert, and you still get billed on valid clicks.
- Daily budgets are changing from a hard daily cap to an average over seven days. Nothing you need to do, and your total doesn’t change. Some days will just run higher or lower than others.
- Budgets now pace through the day instead of burning off early.
- You can exclude specific geographic areas from targeting.
- There are integrations with AppsFlyer and Adjust for tracking app installs and in-app events.
- Automatic advanced matching will tie more of your website conversions back to ads using hashed customer info. You turn it on under Tools, then Conversions, then Data Source.
- There’s a bulk API now for building and updating campaigns, ad groups, and ads at scale.
- Product feed campaigns are getting a new card format with price and star ratings.
That’s a lot for one week. The pattern is pretty clear though. Everything on that list points toward conversions and measurement, which tells you where OpenAI thinks this is headed. It’s moving from a place to get seen toward a place to get results.
Practically, it means anything you read about this platform has a short shelf life. Including this post.
Would we tell you to try it?
Yes, with a small budget and clear eyes about what you’re getting.
Right now the thing worth buying is information. Does your industry come up in the kinds of questions people bring to ChatGPT? What does the traffic look like? How does the tool handle? That’s worth a few hundred dollars on its own, separate from any business it brings in.
If you do want to know what happens after the click, the pieces are there and there are more of them than there were a month ago. There’s a conversion pixel that reports by campaign, ad group, and ad. You can add UTMs and watch it in your own analytics. And now there’s automatic advanced matching to catch conversions the pixel misses on its own. We skipped all of it this round, but none of it takes long to set up.
What’s next
Same budget, longer window, a few different ads, and tracking in place from the start. We’ll run it on the Conversions objective this time and turn on advanced matching, which should tell us what those clicks are actually worth instead of just what they cost.
If you’ve run your own test, we’d love to hear what your cost per click came out to. There isn’t much out there yet, and the numbers people are sitting on quietly would help everybody.
Links:
- OpenAI Ads: https://ads.openai.com/
- Ads in ChatGPT, OpenAI Help Center: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt