ChatGPT Ads: setup, conversion tracking and billing, from an account we run

What ChatGPT Ads are, and who sees them

OpenAI announced ads in ChatGPT on 16 January 2026, began showing them to Free and Go users in the United States on 9 February, opened the self-serve Ads Manager on 5 May, and through the summer added Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Mexico and Brazil, then 31 European countries and, in September, the Gulf, North Africa and India. As of 21 September 2026 the self-serve list is: Algeria, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States.

An ad sits below the end of a response, labelled sponsored and visually separate from it. It carries the advertiser's name and logo, a title, a line of copy, an image and a landing page. It is selected by the context and intent of the current conversation, the ad's landing page and copy, the advertiser's context hints and targeting, and, where the user has personalisation on, signals from their wider ChatGPT use. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts never see ads; neither do users identified as under 18, Temporary Chats, or conversations about health, mental health or politics.

Two facts shape everything else on this page. First, ads do not touch the answer: OpenAI's own words are that advertisers have no ability to shape, rank or alter responses. Second, advertisers get aggregate views and clicks, never the conversation. So an ad buys the slot under the answer; being named inside the answer is a different job, and it is the one our report measures.

ChatGPT Ads setup, step by step

1. Create the advertiser account at ads.openai.com with an OpenAI login. Enter the legal business name, website, logo, industry, country, currency and time zone. Country, currency and time zone are permanent.
2. Verify through Persona (identity and business questions). Applications are reviewed in a queue; you get an email when the account is open. Do not file a second application while waiting.
3. Set the account name and logo under Settings, Account info. This is what appears on the ad unit, and ads will not serve until it is done.
4. Billing: create a billing profile (business name, address, invoice email) and add a card in the account's country. Expect a temporary authorisation hold. Billing is postpay: the card is charged when unpaid spend reaches your payment threshold, and at month end.
5. Conversions under Tools, Conversions: create a data source (a pixel id), create the conversion events you will optimise to (Lead created, Checkout started), install the pixel. Details below.
6. Campaign: name, objective (Views, Clicks or Conversions), the conversion event, countries, platforms, daily or total budget. A new account may be limited to its home country until it has spent there.
7. Ad group: bid strategy (Maximize results or a manual max bid), tracking parameters such as utm_source=chatgpt_ads&utm_content={ad_id}, a default landing page, and the context hints: a paragraph describing the conversations where the ad belongs. They guide matching; they are not keywords.
8. Ad: a title of up to 50 characters, a description of up to 100, a square PNG or JPG of at least 256 by 256, the landing URL. Then Review, then Publish, which accepts the Advertising Tool Terms and starts spend after ad review.

The whole flow took us an afternoon on 21 September 2026, most of it waiting. The parts that cost us time were the ones the docs only hint at: the AI-generated campaign draft that opens first (it guessed our country and set a budget of 2,900 in our currency; check every field), the text customisation toggle that lets OpenAI generate translated headlines shown without your review (we turned it off), and the tracking field that keeps whatever was typed into it.

ChatGPT Ads conversion tracking: the pixel, the events, the shapes that validate

Conversions are measured by the OpenAI Pixel, a Conversions API, or both. The pixel is one script in your site's head, loaded from bzrcdn.openai.com/sdk/oaiq.min.js, initialised with oaiq("init", {pixelId}). On a landing page it captures the click reference oppref from the URL into a first-party cookie for 30 days, and every event you send afterwards is matched to that click. It also does automatic advanced matching: when a form on your site has an email or phone field, the SDK hashes it with SHA-256 in the browser and sends the hash, never the raw value, so conversions still match when the cookie is gone.

Events are sent with oaiq("measure", name, data). The standard names and the payload each one validates against:

The shape matters. The SDK validates every event in the browser and drops one that fails with a single console line, [oaiq] validation failed; event dropped, and nothing reaches OpenAI. Our first install sent {type: "contents"} for everything and lost every lead for an hour. A lead_created is a customer_action; everything with a thing in it wants a contents[] row with an id, a name and a content_type. Keep debug: true in the init while you test, and watch Tools, Conversions, Event Stream with polling on: an accepted event appears there within a minute with its JSON.

In Ads Manager, a conversion event is a name over a base event and a data source: we made 'Free report lead' over lead_created and 'Plan clicked' over checkout_started. A Conversions campaign optimises to one of them and is billed per valid click (oCPC) or per thousand impressions (oCPM), never per conversion. Attribution windows default to 30 days click-through and 1 day view-through. If you also send events server-side through the Conversions API, use the same event id so OpenAI can deduplicate.

ChatGPT Ads billing: thresholds, budgets and the numbers that cannot change

Billing is postpay. Spend accrues as ads deliver; the saved card is charged when unpaid spend reaches the account's payment threshold, which starts low, rises with payment history and cannot be changed by support, and again at month end for any balance. A daily budget is a seven-day average: a single day may spend up to twice it, the Sunday-to-Saturday week never more than seven times it. A campaign-total budget is the stricter cap. You can change the amount later, not the type.

The minimum daily budget by billing currency, from OpenAI's table as of 21 September 2026:

Three things are fixed at account creation and cannot be edited afterwards: country, currency and time zone. The card must be issued in the account's country. A business that needs to bill in another country creates a second advertiser account; one login can hold up to ten. VAT and tax ids go on the billing profile and apply to future invoices only. Billing questions go to ads-support@openai.com with the ad account id, invoice id and campaign ids.

Objectives, bids and what an ad may look like

Three objectives. Views buys impressions (CPM) and optimises for reach. Clicks buys valid clicks (CPC) and optimises for traffic; OpenAI suggests a starting maximum bid of $3 to $5. Conversions optimises toward your chosen standard event and is billed by click or by impression. The objective cannot be changed after creation; make a new campaign instead.

The ad itself: title up to 50 characters, description up to 100, a square image of at least 256 by 256 pixels, a landing page with optional tracking parameters ({campaign_id}, {ad_group_id}, {ad_id}, {oppref}). Copy may be truncated in some placements, so the first eight words carry the message. Product-feed campaigns exist for catalogues, with country-level targeting only. Custom audiences can be included (25,000 matched users minimum) or excluded, though not for the EEA and Switzerland while personalisation is off there.

The setup we ran, with numbers

For our own campaign we chose one niche and one country: dental and aesthetic clinics in the UAE, targeting the whole country, objective Conversions on the lead event, a daily budget of about $20, Maximize results, a single ad group whose context hints describe clinic owners asking about patients, rankings and whether ChatGPT recommends their clinic, and one ad: 'Does ChatGPT recommend your dental clinic?' over a square card that shows a mock answer to 'best dentist in Dubai' with the clinic missing from it. The landing page is our free report, which fires lead_created at the email gate.

We will publish the click and lead numbers here once the campaign has run for a month. What we can already say is that a first campaign is cheap to set up and cheap to test: at the minimum budget, a fortnight of data costs less than one client's first month on our lowest plan.

The ad slot is not the answer

Ask ChatGPT 'best dentist in Dubai' and it names four or five clinics from the pages it read: review sites, directories, roundups, the clinics' own pages. An ad can appear under that list. The clinic in the ad is not in the list unless those pages name it, and when the campaign stops, the ad stops. The names in the answer stay.

That is the case for doing both. Run the ad to be seen today; fix what the engines read so you are named tomorrow. The free report asks fifteen of your buyers' questions on four engines and shows which ones name a rival and not you, which pages decided it, and what to change. It is what we send ad traffic to, and it is what we would do first with any budget.

And on the one large assistant with no ad slot at all, it is the only route: Claude ads: there are none.

Sources

• OpenAI Help Center: Ads Manager Availability, Ads in ChatGPT, Ads in ChatGPT: The Basics, Create Campaigns, Billing & Payment, Account Setup, Conversion Measurement (help.openai.com, checked 21 September 2026)
• OpenAI developer docs: Measurement Pixel, Conversions API, Campaign Targeting (developers.openai.com/ads)
• OpenAI: Our approach to advertising and expanding access (January 2026); ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe (2026)
• Our own advertiser account, set up and measured on 21 September 2026

Questions about ChatGPT Ads