ChatGPT Ads Manager is new, and the setup has one quirk that trips up agencies on day one: you can’t create an advertiser account on behalf of a client. The platform is built for businesses advertising on their own behalf, not for an agency spinning up accounts and handing them over later.
That sounds like a limitation. In practice, it’s the platform nudging you toward the setup you actually want anyway — one where the client owns their account and you have clean, revocable access. Here’s how we approach it, and why fighting the flow is a mistake.
The flow: client creates, client owns, client invites you
The sequence that works is simple, and the order matters:
- The client creates the account at ads.openai.com, signed in with their own OpenAI login.
- The client completes business verification and billing — the legal business name, address, and payment method all sit under their identity.
- The client invites you under Settings → Users → Invite, using your email.
- You log in as yourself and build and manage campaigns from your own seat.
You never touch their password. You’re an invited user on an account they own, which is exactly the relationship you want with a client’s advertising.
Do it together, live
The single best thing we’ve found is to run the initial setup on a screen-share — we use Google Meet. There are a few decisions that can’t be undone after signup: the account owner, the legal business name, and settings like country, currency, and timezone. Walking through it together means those get set correctly the first time, the client sees exactly what’s being created in their name, and identity verification (which asks for business details and an ID) gets handled by the person it actually belongs to. Twenty minutes on a call saves a support ticket later.
Don’t try to circumvent it
The temptation is to “save the client the hassle” by setting things up under your own login and transferring later, or by sharing one set of credentials. Resist it. Working around the intended flow creates exactly the problems the flow is designed to prevent:
- Ownership gets muddy. If the account is registered under your agency’s identity and billing, untangling it when you part ways is painful — and some fields can’t be changed without contacting support.
- Shared logins are fragile and risky. One credential for multiple people is a security liability and makes individual actions impossible to attribute.
- You lose the clean handoff. When the client owns the account from the start, ending the engagement is as easy as removing your seat. Nothing breaks, and the client keeps everything.
The takeaway
The right setup isn’t a workaround — it’s the obvious one once you stop resisting it. Let the client own the account, get them set up live so the locked-in details are right, and join as an invited user. It’s cleaner for them, cleaner for you, and it’s the way the platform was built to work.