OpenAI Ads Campaign Setup

What ChatGPT Ads actually is right now

It's a new ad inventory that runs inside ChatGPT conversations. People come to ChatGPT to compare options, weigh tradeoffs, and decide what to buy. Ads show up below relevant chats with a headline, copy, image, and a link to your landing page.

A few things to know before you sell this to a client.

Ads only show to Free and Go users in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Anyone on Plus, Pro, or a Business plan sees nothing. If your client sells B2B SaaS to enterprise buyers, this matters. If they sell DTC products, local services, or anything in the consumer middle, the reachable audience is bigger than you'd think.

Targeting works on context hints, not keywords. You describe the kinds of conversations your ad should appear in. The system decides where it actually shows. Closer to how social ads work than search ads, even though the surface looks more like search.

Pricing is CPM or CPC, second-price auction, relevance-weighted. OpenAI recommends starting bids of $3 to $5 per click. CPM defaults to $60. Real numbers, not placeholders. Plan budgets accordingly.

What we run for you

Account setup, billing, and team access. Campaign and ad group structure, with context hints written around what your client actually sells. Creative for headlines, copy, and images. Landing page review with concrete recommendations, not vague feedback. Conversion tracking wired up against the measurement docs. Weekly reporting in whatever format your client already reads from you.

It's all white-label. Your client sees you, not us.

We don't pretend ChatGPT Ads is a magic channel. For some clients, it'll work. For others, it won't, at least not yet. We'll tell you which before you spend the budget.

How a typical engagement runs

You bring us the client. We assess fit based on audience, offer, and creative readiness. If it's a go, we set up the account and run a structured test. Small budget, a few ad groups, varied creative, real conversion tracking. After three to four weeks, we know whether the channel works for that client.

If it works, we scale. If it doesn't, we tell you and move on. No retainer to run dead campaigns.

The honest tradeoffs

ChatGPT Ads is beta. Reporting is thin compared to Google or Meta. There's no audience targeting in the traditional sense. Frequency capping, lookalikes, retargeting, all the stuff agencies expect from mature platforms, is either missing or limited. You're paying for early access to an audience nobody else can reach the same way.

If your client wants polished dashboards, complex audiences, and the depth of a mature ad platform, this isn't it. If they want to be in front of people actively researching their category inside the most-used AI product on the planet, it's a fair bet.

Why agencies use SmartMetrics for this

We're already running ChatGPT Ads accounts. The mistakes you'd otherwise make on your client's budget, we've already made on ours. We work white-label, so your client never knows we exist. And we plug into the same reporting you use for Google Ads, Meta, and the rest, so this doesn't sit in a separate silo.

If you've got a client asking about ChatGPT Ads, or one who should be, let's talk about whether it makes sense before you commit to anything.