My experience buying ads in ChatGPT: the good, the bad and the ugly

OpenAI's ad platform, launched with a $50,000 minimum spend, delivered a 7.9% click-through rate but a 76% bounce rate and 5-second average engagement for PerfectTablePlan, according to founder Andy Brice. Brice reported that OpenAI ads lack negative keywords and conversion tracking issues, and are only shown to Free and Go tier users, making them less effective than Google Adwords.

When OpenAI dropped the minimum $50k spend on their ad platform, I thought I should give it a try for my seating planner app https://www.perfecttableplan.com/ . Perhaps I can get some cheap and well targeted clicks, before all the corporate behemoths lumber in and push up the bid prices? This is a quick summary of my initial experiences. The good I had to wait about a week for OpenAI to decide I was worthy to give them money. After that it was all pretty straightforward. The setup is familiar to anyone with experience of PPC Pay Per Click advertising: campaigns, adgroups, ads, conversion tracking. At the campaign level you set options such as: The countries you want your ads to appear in, from the 7 currently available: And the platforms you want to be shown on: I’m only targetting web here, as PerfectTablePlan doesn’t run on mobile devices. At the Ad Group level you set your maximum bid and ‘context hints’. This is where OpenAI differs from other PPC platforms. In Google Adwords you can choose which keywords to bid on. With OpenAI ads you provide a prompt saying how you want your ads targetted. OpenAI will then use that and, presumably, what it knows about your product plus your bid, to decide when to show ads. At the ad level you define one or more ads for each ad group. The ads are a 50 character maximum title, a 100 character maximum description and a small image: So far I have 1 campaign, with 1 ad group, which contains 3 ads. I set the conversion tracking to fire when the person who clicked on the ad arrives at the web page that gets shown when they install PerfectTablePlan on Windows or Mac. It is all refreshingly simple compared to the lumbering monstrosity that Google Adwords has become. Take the recommended bids with a pinch of salt as with Google Adwords . I quickly started to get a clicks at a reasonable price, much lower than the recommend bid price. Click through rate is 7.9%, which is a bit lower than I manage with Google Adwords, but still decent. The bad Your ad show up in ChatGPT looking something like this: The fact that they can arbitrarily truncate the text is not ideal. The first few days, clicks reported by OpenAI did not match clicks reported in Google Analytics. I found out you have to add a utm source tag to your website URL to track the traffic: Choosing search keywords is pretty straightforward, but context hints less so. Guidance from OpenAI is vague and I have no idea if my context hint is any good. There is no equivalent of negative keywords. I have added an OpenAI tracking pixel, but it shows zero conversions. I’m not sure why. Several Youtube videos I watched reported 0 conversion events triggered from spending substantially more than me. So I have to rely on Google Analytics and utm source for my conversion tracking. When it comes to advertising, targetting is everything https://successfulsoftware.net/2007/06/07/the-importance-of-targeted-website-traffic/ . But I have no idea who my ads are being shown to, or in what context. In Google Adwords I can at least see what search queries people typed and infer their intent from that. But in OpenAI ads, I have no idea what people were prompting ChatGPT before they clicked my ad. This requires me to trust OpenAI. But I really don’t trust them. It should also be noted that OpenAI are not showing ads to customers on higher tier plans. This means that your ads are only being seen by cheapskates on Free and Go tier plans. Hardly an ideal market for paid software. The ugly Behold the engagement metrics from Google Analytics: Source | Average engagement time s | Bounce rate % | | Google organic | 48 | 35% | | Bing organic | 54 | 29% | | Google Adwords | 16 | 46% | | ChatGPT | 27 | 38% | OpenAI Ads | 5 | 76% | 5 seconds. That is horrible. Even worse than my experiment with Reddit ads https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spending-851-on-reddit-ads/ . It is also noticeably worse than people clicking organic non-ad links in ChatGPT. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the people clicking on my ads are either extremely poorly targetted or have clicked on the ad unintentionally. Or, putting my tin foil hat on, maybe are bots or AI agents. But there is worse. According to Google Analytics, 857 clicks have resulted in exactly three completed installs. That is 0.35% click to install conversion ratio . This is an order of magnitude below what I need to just break even on the ads. For other sources PerfectTablePlan averages between 2% and 8% click to install. Given that I have no information on the context my ads are being shown, I don’t think there is much I can do to improve the situation. I might try changing the context hint and reducing the bid. But it will be just trial and error guesswork. It feels like shovelling money into the void and it isn’t clear that this situation will improve. I would be interested to hear what other people’s experiences are.