How to advertise on ChatGPT: a setup guide for chat card ads

What are ChatGPT Ads?

ChatGPT Ads is OpenAI’s ad platform for placing ads inside ChatGPT. You run it from ChatGPT Ads Manager at ads.openai.com. Every ad is a chat card: a short title, a line of body text, a square image and a link. A campaign holds ad groups, and an ad group holds chat cards, the same three levels as most ad platforms.

The difference from search advertising is targeting. There are no keywords and there is no search-term report. You choose where the campaign runs and describe the context your ad suits, and the platform decides the rest.

Before you build anything

• The account passes review. ChatGPT Ads reviews the ad account and the brand behind it, separately from each ad. A missing brand favicon has been enough to hold delivery on a live account. Check the account status in Ads Manager first.
• A pixel, if you want conversions. A conversions campaign optimises towards a conversion event, and that event has to be firing on your site. Set up the pixel and confirm it has received an event before choosing that objective.
• A landing page on https. The destination must be an https URL and open without a login.

Step 1: choose the objective

There are three. The objective decides what the platform optimises for, and it also decides what your bid means, which is the part people miss.

The last row is the trap. On a conversions campaign a bid of 100 means a target of 100 per conversion, even though you pay per click. Enter a cost-per-click figure there and the campaign bids far too low to deliver.

Step 2: set the budget

A campaign has a lifetime budget or a daily budget. It cannot have both, and a campaign on a daily budget cannot be switched back to a lifetime one, so decide before you create it.

• Lifetime: the minimum is 1.00 in the account currency. Good for a fixed test with a hard ceiling.
• Daily: the minimum depends on the currency and is not published. A budget below it is refused with the required amount in the error, so the first attempt tells you the floor.

The automatic bid strategies, which maximise clicks or conversions without a bid, need a daily budget. A lifetime budget means a fixed bid.

Step 3: choose where it runs

Location targeting is a campaign setting, not an ad group one. If you leave it empty, the platform decides where the campaign runs. Set it every time, even for a single country: an empty field is the most common reason a small test spends in markets the business does not serve.

Step 4: build the ad group

The ad group carries the bid and the context hints.

• Bid. On a fixed-bid ad group the maximum bid is required, and its unit follows the objective (step 1).
• Context hints. Up to 20 short phrases, each up to 200 characters, describing the audience or the conversation your ad suits. They steer where the ad appears. Write them the way a person would describe their problem, not as a keyword list: “planning a first trip to Japan on a budget” says more than “japan travel cheap”.

Step 5: write the chat card

One format, four parts, and the limits are strict.

The card crops the image to a square. Upload a wide banner and the platform chooses the crop, which usually cuts the product in half. Crop it yourself first.

A hundred characters of body is one sentence. Spend it on the offer and the reason to click, and let the title carry the product name. The ad appears beside an answer the reader asked for, so copy that sounds like a banner reads worse here than it would on a website.

Step 6: review, then turn it on

Every ad is reviewed before it serves, and each carries its own verdict: in review, approved or rejected, with a reason when it is rejected. Build the campaign paused, wait for the ads to be approved, then turn the campaign on. That way the first day of spend happens when you are watching, not at whatever hour review finished.

Why is my ChatGPT ad not delivering?

Work down this list in order. The first four account for nearly every case.

1. The campaign, the ad group or the ad is paused.
2. The ad is still in review, or it was rejected. The reason is on the ad.
3. The account or the brand has a review outstanding, or the platform reports a serving issue on the account. A missing favicon is one of them.
4. The bid is too low for the objective, most often a per-click figure on a conversions campaign.
5. The budget is spent: a lifetime budget that has run out stops the campaign.
6. On a conversions campaign, the pixel has not received the chosen event, so there is nothing to optimise towards.

How to measure it

With no search terms and no placement report, the useful breakdown is by ad. Compare cost per result across chat cards in the same ad group, and change one thing at a time: the image, the title or the context hints. Give each variant enough spend to mean something before you call it. A dozen clicks is noise.

Doing it from an AI assistant

Every step above has a rule a person can get wrong: the bid unit, the budget type, an empty location field, a card one character too long. They are the kind of rule a tool can check before anything is created.

With ChatGPT Ads connected to Adako, you describe the campaign in plain language. Adako checks the card against the rules above, resolves the place names to location ids, states what the bid means for the objective you chose, and shows the whole campaign as one proposal. On approval it uploads the image and creates the campaign, the ad group and the ad, with the campaign paused. Asking why a campaign is not delivering is a read: it comes back with the review verdicts and serving issues at every level, and it costs nothing.

The short version

• Check the account review and, for conversions, the pixel before you build.
• Choose the objective first: it decides what the bid means. A conversions bid is a target cost per conversion.
• Lifetime or daily budget, never both. Daily cannot go back to lifetime.
• Always set a location. Empty means the platform decides.
• Context hints are not keywords. Describe the situation your customer is in.
• Title 3 to 50, body up to 100, square image of at least 400 px, https link.
• Build paused, wait for approval, then turn it on.