How to Advertise on ChatGPT: A Setup Guide From an Account Running Since March

To advertise on ChatGPT, the business itself signs up at ads.openai.com, adds its legal entity, tax ID and billing, then builds a campaign in Ads Manager: campaign, ad group, ad. Targeting is a written context hint per ad group, not a keyword list. In the US a campaign needs at least $25 a day. You choose a Clicks or a Conversions bid, write a title of up to 50 characters and a body of up to 100, and install the OpenAI pixel before you spend anything.

That is the whole process in one paragraph. The rest of this guide is what each step looks like in practice, written by the team that has run a US lead generation account on the platform since March 2026, as one of OpenAI's pilot advertisers. We published our six-month ChatGPT Ads results separately, and the short version is that cost per approved lead started at a little over three times the client's Google Search benchmark and finished about 35% below it. This piece is the setup manual behind that number, and two of its steps, agency access and bid type, are where we have seen launches go wrong.

What changed since February

This platform has changed its rules five times in eight months, and most guides ranking for this search were written before at least one of those changes. Check the date on anything you read. Including this.

The one that still trips people up is the minimum. The guide sitting first on Google for this query on 29 October still quoted the $200,000 pilot minimum, which stopped being true on 5 May.

Step 1: the advertiser opens the account

Go to ads.openai.com and sign in with an OpenAI login tied to a business email. Third-party guides report that sign-up asks for the business the ad account belongs to, its legal name, website and industry, then the advertiser name shown on ads, a logo, a tax ID (an EIN for a US company) and a payment card, and that adding the card places a temporary authorization hold rather than a charge.

OpenAI then reviews the account before anything can run. Ours took about a week. Plan the launch date around the review, not around the day you finish the creative.

Self-serve buying depends on where the billing entity is registered. Any business can sign up, but buying opens only when that entity sits in a supported country, and some new accounts can at first only advertise in their home country. A US company advertising to US users has none of these problems.

Step 2: give your agency access, do not let it own the account

An agency cannot open a ChatGPT Ads account on behalf of a client. The client creates it under its own legal name and tax ID, then invites the agency as a user. In Ads Manager that sits under Settings, then Users, then Invite user, where you choose the role.

We learned this on our first account, in March, when we expected to open it ourselves as we would in most ad platforms. The client had to do the sign-up itself, and because the account sits under the advertiser's legal entity, somebody on its side then had to finish the tax and payment setup before anything could run. That is the step most likely to delay a launch by a week, so start it on day one and run everything else alongside it.

The arrangement has consequences worth knowing before you sign an agency contract. Billing sits with the advertiser, so there is no pass-through invoicing. The advertiser grants and revokes access. When an agency relationship ends, the account and its history stay with the business, which is how it should work everywhere.

Step 3: how ChatGPT Ads Manager is built

ChatGPT Ads Manager has three levels: campaign, ad group and ad. A campaign is either Standard or product feed, carries the objective and the budget, and sets the locations. The ad group holds the targeting and the bid. The ad holds the creative and the landing page URL.

If you come from Google Ads, two things are missing on purpose, and we think the missing keyword field is the best design decision on the platform: it forces an advertiser to describe a customer instead of bidding on a word. There is no keyword field and no demographic targeting. Your levers are geography, first-party audiences (a minimum of 25,000 users) and the context hint. Account ceilings are 5,000 campaigns, 5,000 ad groups and 5,000 ads, which no normal account will touch.

Ads show only to logged-in adults on the Free and Go plans. Users on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu see no ads, which means you cannot reach your B2B buyers while they work in a company-paid ChatGPT seat, however long and detailed their conversations there may be. The ad appears at the bottom of a ChatGPT answer as a card labelled Sponsored, which is the answer to the "what do ChatGPT ads look like" question that sits in Google's People Also Ask box for this search.

Step 4: write context hints, not keyword lists

The context hint is a free-text field at ad group level where you describe the conversation your ad belongs in. OpenAI's own help pages describe hints as broad thematic signals, not exact matches, and that is the right mental model. The system reads the conversation a person is having and decides whether your ad fits it, which means you are describing a moment rather than buying a query, and the habits that make a good search account, like tight match types and long negative lists, have nowhere to go here.

The mechanics that have held up in our account:

• One theme per ad group. If a hint describes two situations, split it into two ad groups. Mixed hints produce ads that fit neither conversation well.
• Each hint is capped at roughly 280 characters. Long enough to describe the person, the problem and the decision they are near; short enough that every phrase is doing work.
• Write the situation, not the product. Describe who the person is, what they are trying to decide and what they have already ruled out. A service name gives the system a category it already knows; a situation gives it a conversation to recognise.
• Start with a handful of ad groups. Three sharply different hints teach you more in a month than thirty overlapping ones, because each gets enough volume to read.
• Make the ad copy match the hint. If the hint describes a rollover decision and the ad talks about portfolio management, relevance drops. Practitioners on r/PPC make the same point.

Commerce Pundit's guide suggests 5 to 10 hints per ad group. We have had better results with fewer, sharper groups than with many hints in one, but we have not tested their structure head to head, so treat both as starting points. For a worked example of a weak hint rewritten into a strong one, from the same account, see the context hints section of our six-month results write-up.

Step 5: budgets and bid types

The US minimum is $25 a day per campaign, set in your billing currency. There is no account-level minimum. Treat the $25 as a floor rather than a recommendation, because the platform will accept it and then give you too little data to make any decision at all: a campaign at $25 a day in a competitive category can take weeks to produce enough conversions to judge, so scale the daily budget to the number of conversions you need to make a decision, not to the minimum.

For a Clicks bid, OpenAI's guidance has been a starting maximum of $3 to $5 per click, and advertisers report paying anywhere from $3 to $22. Bids under $3 may not deliver. The auction is reported to be relevance weighted, so a better context hint and a matching ad can win placements at a lower bid than a lazy one.

Clicks or Conversions: the decision we made twice

Our account offers two bid types, Clicks and Conversions, and Clicks was available first, which is the only fixed fact in a story where the answer to which one is better has already changed once in our account and may change again before you read this. This is the setup decision we have changed our minds on, so here it is in order.

As a pilot advertiser we had Conversions before its public rollout, so we ran a Clicks campaign and a Conversions campaign in parallel rather than picking one. By month three, Clicks was clearly winning. Our landing pages are long, descriptive advertorials that explain the service, who it suits and what happens after you submit the form before they ask for anything, so the page itself did most of the qualifying and a cheaper click was all we needed to get a serious person onto it. The Conversions campaign paid more per click, and each conversion it bought cost far more. Our reading at the time was that people in a personal finance conversation with ChatGPT are guarded about what they share. In month three we moved the whole budget to the Clicks campaign, and cost per approved lead started to fall the same month.

By late October 2026 that had reversed. Conversions was beating Clicks again in the same account, so our PPC lead switched the Clicks campaign off and moved the whole budget to Conversions. We do not have a confirmed reason. Our working hypothesis is an optimization change on OpenAI's side, given how much the bidding system has shipped since July, but OpenAI has not said so and we cannot prove it.

What to do with that

Run both bid types side by side from the start. Judge them on approved leads in your CRM, not on cost per click and not on the platform's conversion count. When one wins, move the budget, then re-test the loser every month or two, because this platform is changing faster than any conclusion you reach about it.

Step 6: creative specs

The 50 and 100 are hard limits we confirmed in our own account in September. The 16 to 24 and 32 to 48 ranges come from OpenAI's bulk upload checklist and are recommendations, not maximums. Older guides cite 30 and 60, which is stale.

One interface quirk will cost you an afternoon if nobody warns you. A red notice saying your text might be truncated in certain placements fires regardless of length. We have seen it on a ten-character headline. It tells you nothing about your copy, so write to the limits above and ignore it.

Our ads cleared review in a few hours. The most common rejection reason in published guides is a destination that does not match the ad, usually a homepage.

Step 7: install the pixel before the first dollar

Measurement is set up under Tools, then Conversions, in Ads Manager. You create the OpenAI pixel, install it on the site, and define the events that count: a form submission, a booked call, a purchase. The Conversions API has been available since the May launch for server-side events, and the August update added one-day view-through reporting.

Do this before launch. A Conversions bid cannot optimize toward events it cannot see. And the platform's conversion count is not the number that matters. Tag every ad URL with UTMs so the traffic lands in GA4 with its source intact, then pass the leads into your CRM and judge the channel on approved leads, because a conversion the platform counts and a lead your sales team would actually accept are different numbers, and on this channel the gap between them can be large. In our account, getting that chain right was the precondition for every later decision, including both bid type moves above.

What we would tell anyone starting now

Get the advertiser's sign-up done in the first week, because nothing else can start without it, and tax and payment setup sits on the advertiser's side. Build three ad groups with three different context hints. Give the bid test a budget large enough to produce approved leads, not just clicks. Install the pixel and the CRM feed first. Then leave it alone long enough to learn something; our own curve, shown in the case study, did not bend until month three.

If you would rather hand the account to people who have set this up before, that is what our ChatGPT Ads management team does: we work inside your account as invited users, set up approved-lead measurement before launch, and run the bid type tests above. If ChatGPT is one channel among several for you, we run it alongside paid search campaigns from the same team.