How ChatGPT Ads work (and how conversion tracking works)

ChatGPT Ads are sponsored placements inside ChatGPT conversations, bought through OpenAI Ads Manager (Beta), OpenAI’s self-serve advertising platform. This explainer covers the mechanics: who sees the ads, how OpenAI decides which one to show, what you pay for, and how a lead or sale on your website gets credited back to the ad. Every claim links to OpenAI’s own documentation.

Who sees the ads, and where

Ads show to people on ChatGPT’s Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts never see them, and OpenAI does not show ads to accounts it identifies as under 18. An ad appears below the end of a response, labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the answer. Ads do not appear in temporary chats, and they are not eligible near sensitive topics such as personal health, mental health or politics (OpenAI: Ads in ChatGPT).

OpenAI is explicit on two points: ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers, and conversations are never shared with advertisers.

What an ad is

Each ad carries your advertiser name and favicon, a title, a short line of copy, a square image (PNG or JPG, up to 1200 by 1200 pixels) and a landing page link (The Basics). The ad earns the click; the landing page does the selling.

How OpenAI decides which ad to show

There are no keywords to bid on. When a conversation reaches a point where an ad is eligible, OpenAI runs what it describes as a relevance-weighted, second-price auction. The signals are the context and intent of the current conversation, your landing page, your title and copy, and the context hints attached to your ad group. If a user has ad personalisation switched on, select signals from their broader ChatGPT use can also apply (The Basics).

Context hints are short natural-language descriptions of what you offer, who it helps and when it is useful. OpenAI calls them broad thematic signals rather than exact-match keywords, and says they do not guarantee delivery (Create Ad Groups). Relevance-weighted means a closely matched ad can win placement without the highest bid, which is why landing page quality and specific copy matter as much as budget.

How you buy

Ads Manager has three levels (Create Campaigns): a campaign sets the objective, budget, dates and targeting; an ad group holds ads around one theme, with its context hints; an ad is the creative. Objectives are CPM (billed per thousand impressions), CPC (billed per click) or conversion-optimised (still billed per click). Budgets are campaign-total or daily. You set a maximum bid per ad group; OpenAI recommends starting CPC campaigns at US$3 to $5 per click and publishes no minimum monthly spend. Billing is postpay: the card on the account is charged when spend reaches a payment threshold and again at month end (Billing & Payment). Reports cover impressions, clicks, spend, CTR, average CPC and CPM, and conversions.

Before any of that, the business verifies itself (OpenAI uses Persona) and passes account review, and every ad and landing page is reviewed against OpenAI’s ad policies. The account belongs to the advertiser; an agency is invited in as a user.

How conversion tracking works

This is the part most first-time advertisers skip.

1. Create a data source. In Ads Manager, under Tools and Conversions, you create a data source for your website and get a Pixel ID. Conversion events reach that data source via the OpenAI Pixel, the Conversions API, or both (Conversion Measurement).

2. The click reference. When someone clicks your ad, Ads Manager appends a parameter called oppref to your landing page URL. The OpenAI Pixel on your site reads it and stores it in a first-party cookie, so a conversion minutes or days later can be tied to that click.

3. The conversion event. When the visitor does the thing you care about, the pixel or your server sends a standard event such as lead_created, appointment_scheduled or order_created (supported events). OpenAI counts a conversion when the event matches one configured for the campaign, falls inside the attribution window and can be connected to an eligible ad click. View-through conversions are reported separately with a fixed one-day window (Measure Results).

4. Matching and modelling. With automatic advanced matching, the pixel detects details such as an email typed into a form, hashes them in the browser with SHA-256 and sends only the hash. Using the pixel and the Conversions API together, with the same event ID on both, deduplicates and gives the most complete picture.

5. Reporting. Attributed conversions take 24 to 48 hours to appear in Ads Manager, and you can break them down by event, device and country.

Why tracking unlocks better bidding

Conversion-optimised campaigns bid per click on predicted conversion likelihood, toward one standard conversion event chosen at creation. They require tracking already in place and at least one supported standard event; the event cannot be changed later, and an existing CPC campaign cannot be switched over (conversion-optimised campaigns). No tracking, no conversion optimisation.

Where to go next

If you would rather not build this yourself, Nitro Ads for ChatGPT handles verification with you, installs the tracking and runs the campaign inside your own Ads Manager. We work with businesses in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US and Canada. Nitro Ads includes a custom funnel page for your offer, built and hosted by us, so you do not need a website to start.