The person seeing your ChatGPT ad is halfway through working something out.
"They're on the platform and they've got no reason to leave it," says Brayden Zuin, our Senior Performance Media Specialist.
The temptation for advertisers is to grade ChatGPT Ads on the click to the landing page and the sale that follows it.
"We put that expectation on it straight away because we want to track results and purchases at the bottom of the funnel," Brayden says, "and then you compare it up against another platform like Google Shopping and Meta, and ChatGPT is going to be the worst one obviously."
The targeting tells you what ChatGPT Ads is
Ads in ChatGPT opened to Australian advertisers in March 2026. To target an audience with ChatGPT Ads, you don't choose keywords like in other platforms: you write Context Hints, plain-sentence descriptions of a person and the conversations they're likely to be having. OpenAI then matches your ad to the audiences matching that description.
For now, people mostly use ChatGPT to research. Ads and product listings are new to most users, and nobody has been trained yet to expect to buy straight from a ChatGPT answer. That could change as people get used to seeing ads and products in their responses, but today whoever sees your ad is still asking questions, whatever your context hint says about how ready they are.
Google Ads matches your ad to a search, and someone searching "caravan dealers Perth" is probably ready to buy a caravan. ChatGPT Ads matches your ad to a conversation with someone mid-research, and reaching people mid-research is discovery, however ChatGPT Ads is priced.
What $1,536 returned
To test ChatGPT Ads, we ran a campaign for Bonfire with a budget of about $1,500. We wanted enquiries from businesses looking for an agency, so we bought ChatGPT Ads the way OpenAI sells it, as performance media: conversion tracking on, context hints built around agency selection and campaign performance, and four ad groups pointed at our paid media, creative, SEO and agency service pages.
| Ad group | Spend | Clicks | CPC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paid Ad Services | $506 | 86 | $5.89 |
| Creative Services | $483 | 121 | $3.99 |
| Digital Agencies | $451 | 88 | $5.12 |
| SEO Services | $96 | 19 | $5.06 |
| Total | $1,536 | 314 | $4.89 |
Those four ad groups bought 40,000 impressions at a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of $38.40 and a click-through rate of 0.79%.
ChatGPT also reported eight conversions. Brodie McMaster, our Performance Strategy Lead, checked all eight against Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and our call and form tracking software, and couldn't find any of them. Either the platform is counting something our tracking can't see, or it's counting something that didn't happen, and nothing in the reporting lets us tell which.
Reaching people mid-research is discovery, however ChatGPT Ads is priced.
We'd take $38.40 per thousand impressions and $4.89 a click in most Australian paid media accounts. On conversions, though, the campaign returned nothing we could verify.
So measure it as what it is
"I can't see if they're relevant or not," Brayden says of the conversations his ads sat beside. Not seeing those conversations reads as fatal while you're grading ChatGPT Ads on conversions. But people move in and out of market over weeks, and ChatGPT Ads sits in the messy middle of that journey. "That middle funnel process," Brayden says, "it's almost impossible to track what happens."
ChatGPT Ads reaches people mid-research, so measure it on clicks and cost per click.
So Brayden picks the metric from the phase he's assigned the campaign. "If it's impression-based, then I'm measuring it off CPM," Brayden says. "If it's middle funnel then I'm basing it off the volume of clicks and the cost per click. If it's a conversion base then I'm measuring it off that."
Judged on clicks and cost per click, a run that produces no conversions and a lot of new traffic is a result rather than a write-off, because the job of discovery is to hand you an audience you didn't have.
Whether that traffic is worth paying for again shows up outside the platform: brand search uplift, visibility tracking inside the AI platforms themselves, trend growth in Search Console, and whether AI shows up as a growing source of traffic in your analytics. Each of those measures picks up before a conversion does, and together they show whether ChatGPT Ads is pulling people towards you.
Buy it as discovery, or don't buy it
ChatGPT Ads is priced and sold as performance media, but for businesses outside retail, ChatGPT Ads behaves like discovery. In retail the product feeds are live, the placements work like shopping ads, and the journey is short enough that you can still see which click produced the sale.
Everywhere else, if you can only justify the spend on conversions, don't buy ChatGPT Ads. If you can judge it as discovery, give ChatGPT Ads around 10% of budget as a test-and-learn line, decide what you're measuring before the campaign goes live, and hold the campaign to that measure.
"ChatGPT Ads are a nice add-on on the side," Brayden says. The chips, or the sauce. "It's not the main meal, but it's nice to have it there."
