Step-by-Step Guide to ChatGPT Ads

By Kornelija Janute - Monday July 6, 2026 Share (Twitter) WhatsApp Summarize ChatGPT Perplexity Grok Google AI There’s a new way to get in front of millions of people, and most brands haven’t caught on yet. OpenAI’s official advertising platform is now available for businesses to place their ads directly below ChatGPT responses.

In March 2026, OpenAI’s advertising platform reached Australia and New Zealand, then on May 5, 2026 the fully self-service platform was opened to advertisers in the United States And then a few months later in June 2026, it reached Japan and South Korea as well as the United Kingdom, which became the first European market to launch ChatGPT ads.

There are a lot of mysteries around LLMs themselves, so it’s not surprising that OpenAI’s advertising platform is also mysterious for some of the advertisers. But it shouldn’t be. As a media buyer myself I always used to say – once you know one advertising platform very well the others will be easy to unlock because most of the logic will be the same.

The same is with OpenAI’s Ads Manager and campaign setup. Overview of The Ads Manager When you come to Ads Manager first of all what you will see is the Performance Trend dashboard, where you can see your data (spend, Impressions, Clicks, CPC) on different date ranges.

There are by default date ranges like 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, or you can choose a custom date range. The Ads Manager overview and Performance Trend dashboard. If you want to see deeper data, you can also use segments and filter your campaigns by device or country.

On the left side you can find a menu which includes Overview, along with: Campaigns – That redirects you directly to the campaign manager. Tools – Under which you can find change history Conversions – Where you can set up a Data source, create a conversion event, implement and log events, and link events to campaigns.

Conversion tracking set up in a few guided steps. Feed – Here you can upload your product feed, which helps you to keep your ads updated with the latest items, prices, discounts and availability. Billing – Here you can choose a billing method and create a billing profile.

Settings – Here you can simply add general information about the account, such as account name, timezone and logo. You can also find API keys here. API keys help you connect your apps or tools to OpenAI’s models. They allow you to automate tasks like generating ad copy, analyzing campaigns, creating content variations, and integrating AI into your workflows.

In short, an API key acts as a secure access pass for using OpenAI programmatically. Campaign Creation The logic for creating a campaign itself is very simple and similar to other platforms. First you create a campaign, then an ad group and ad. Campaign creation starts from something very simple but yet very important – the campaign name.

Some marketers don’t spend a lot of time on such things as campaign names, but actually it’s very important so you can track your campaigns properly and also keep your ad account hygiene. During the campaign creation process you need to choose an Objective, it can be Reach, Clicks or Conversions.

Think very well what kind of end result you want from your campaign and based on that choose the objective. Remember that the algorithm does what you asked for – if you asked for as many clicks as possible – it will do so, if you asked for conversions – it will bring conversions.

If you want to run campaigns with a conversion objective, you need first to set up conversion events in the conversion section on the left side of the page under the tools. After you choose the objective on the campaign level you also need to add a location for the campaign.

Compared with other advertising platforms, location is usually under the ad group but in OpenAI’s advertising platform this is slightly different. At the moment you can choose from 7 locations where your ads can appear: United States Australia Canada Japan New Zealand South Korea United Kingdom The last thing to do on a campaign level is to set a budget.

You can choose whether to have a daily budget or a campaign total budget. Remember after you launch the campaign you can’t change the budget type but you can adjust the budget itself. Ad Group When creating your ad group, first remember to keep the naming convention simple yet informative about its purpose.

The second step here is to set your bid, which depends on your chosen objective: If you choose clicks as your objective – you are bidding on CPC (Cost Per Click). If you choose Reach objective then you are bidding on CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions). For conversions you are bidding on CPA (Cost per Action/Conversion).

If you are confused what kind of bid to enter, there is a nice helper on the side to understand what kind of bid to choose. It shows you whether or not your bids will de