You Can FINALLY Run ChatGPT Ads
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
As you know, we’ve been tracking this story for months. OpenAI kept forever teasing a self-serve ad dashboard for ChatGPT, we’ve seen the limited partner tests, and no actual launch date ever appeared.
Yesterday it shipped.
The beta of Ads Manager is now officially open to U.S. advertisers: register, add payment, set budgets, upload ads, run campaigns, watch performance. CPC bidding is in alongside the existing CPM. Finally, there’s a Conversions API and a pixel for measuring whatever counts as a conversion in your business: purchases, sign-ups, lead forms. The previous $50K test-spend floor is gone too.
Registrations are manually approved for now, so we can’t walk you through the actual UI yet. That’ll come in a day or two, once our account clears.
Before you get excited, the obvious caveat: ChatGPT’s CTR is rough.
Independent estimates put it at around 1.3% versus Google Search’s 29.2%. Which makes sense if you think about it: people in a conversation aren’t trying to leave it. But Criteo, which has been running ads through ChatGPT since March, says LLM-referred traffic converts at roughly 1.5x the rate of other channels. So fewer clicks, yes, but higher intent.
If you’ve got a small budget that you don’t mind treating as a tuition fee, then go ahead, register, wait for approval, and run a campaign. That’s exactly what we will do this week. If you can, pick a high-consideration category where the research phase is long: finance, travel, B2B software. Buy on CPC, add the pixel, and watch CPA like a hawk. Impressions and click counts won’t tell you much yet — the only number worth watching is what landed on the other side of the click.
Benchmarks barely exist yet, so whatever you measure is more useful as your own baseline than as a comparison to anyone else’s. And the platform’s moving — CPC has reportedly settled at $3-$5, and the agency and tech partner list keeps growing.
Either way, it’s a real channel now, and it is exciting. It doesn’t happen often that a whole new category opens up for advertisers. Today is that day.
— Torsten and Peter
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