Are ChatGPT Ads right for your company?

Some of you are chomping at the bit to advertise on ChatGPT. However, as with all things in digital marketing, please don’t pick a tactic without a strategy. Before we talk strategy, first understand what OpenAI ads can and can’t do.

Targeting

Within the OpenAI ads interface, you can choose where those ads will show up. Edit: At first, I thought you were limited to nationwide targeting only. The interface is a little confusing- if you select an “other” location, you can be more specific to state and even DMA or Zip Codes.

Impressions or Click Bidding

You can direct OpenAI ads to bid for impressions or clicks, focusing on eyeballs to your ads or eyeballs on your website. Bidding for conversions is coming.

Bidding like this can lead to success, but only from a law-of-large-numbers perspective: if enough people see your ad, or your site, some will inevitably become customers. This might work for you, especially if you have consumer-driven products or want to drive demand for your solution. But if not, this could be a large waste of money.

Context Hints

When will your ad show up in ChatGPT? Based on the context hints you give it in your Ad Group: “Describe the conversations, topics, or keywords where your products or services may be relevant; these hints guide matching but aren’t exact-match targeting rules.”

If you’re experienced with Google Ads, this might resemble broad matches with given “keywords.” Then again, if you’re experienced with Google Ads, you know that broad match keywords match very loosely- leading to lots of wasted spend.

Optionally, you can omit these context hints from your ads and let OpenAI determine when to show them.

Again, if you’re experienced with Google Ads, this more resembles a Performance Max campaign, which can be a big waste of spend if you don’t watch it carefully. You’re essentially giving Google or OpenAI your checkbook and inviting them to show the ad to whoever they want. There’s no financial incentive for relevance.

Audiences

You can add and exclude audiences from your ads: “Upload raw or hashed emails and phone numbers to use as audience filters for campaigns.” This is a great ability to target or avoid people, depending on your needs. It’s especially important when your audience is so broad, nationally or by context hints.

Product Feeds

With OpenAI ads, you can “Upload your product feed via SFTP to keep your ads updated with the latest items, prices, availability, and metadata.” This is an excellent way to offer products to people when they need them.

Ad Copy Limits

In OpenAI, your ad can contain a small, square logo, a 50-character headline, and a 100-character description. That’s not the whole story. If your headline exceeds 24 characters or your description exceeds 48 characters, you receive a cautionary note: “Copy may be truncated in some placements.” To maximize your message, keep your headlines and descriptions even shorter.

This can be challenging when you want to serve a nuanced message to your audience.

Recommended Strategies

Now that you have a better understanding of what OpenAI ads can do, let’s talk about when you should use them.

Brand awareness and protection

If your brand is new and trying to reach a new audience, ChatGPT might help get the word out. This is especially helpful when you have a solution that people don’t know exists, or they don’t know they need. OpenAI ads can help you create demand for your products by brand.

On the other hand, if your brand is struggling with a bad (even undeserved) reputation, this might be a good way to respond to critics.

When I say “brand” here, I do worry about the idea that “everyone is a brand.” Yes, in a way, that’s true. However, in a world dominated by social media, where every guru tells you to develop your personal brand, that’s not a good solution here. Instead, it will help fund OpenAI more than it will help you.

Consumer products

It’s clear to me that OpenAI has developed its ad product around selling products. They make it easy to add a product feed to their ads, for instance. Additionally, the ability to add or exclude an audience makes it a great way to upsell to existing customers or even exclude them as needed.

On the other hand, this is not ideal for service-based companies, at least until you’re able to bid for conversions. You could spend a lot of money nationally and get many clicks on your website before you realize these ads aren’t paying for themselves. Again: you’d be helping subsidize OpenAI rather than grow your business.

Track Everything!

No matter how you decide to use OpenAI ads, be sure you use Google’s UTM builder to create your landing page URLs. This ensures your visits from ChatGPT are properly attributed to your paid efforts, not to organic traffic. This also, thanks to your Google Analytics conversion tracking, will tell you if you’re getting people to actually convert into customers- and not just end with impression or click data. With this, you’ll have the additional benefit of comparing your ad spend in ChatGPT against your other paid platforms and calculating your ROI. This is essential, and I would not recommend running ads in OpenAI (or anywhere, for that matter) without this kind of tracking in place!

When it comes to any ad platform, whether OpenAI, Google, Facebook, or even Bing, you’re spending money, and that money needs to deliver results. You must be able to do the calculation: I spent $X and received $Y; so long as $Y is greater than $X, it’s worth the spend, to oversimplify. If not, you’re not doing advertising; you’re just being philanthropic to a company that already has billions of dollars behind it.