This morning I found an email from OpenAI in my inbox. It said that Ads Manager is now available to advertisers in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Advertising on ChatGPT has been available in Europe since last week, though so far only through large agencies. From today, small businesses can also book adverts directly. I had a look at it straight away, and here’s what I can tell you about it.
Where the advert appears
Imagine someone asks ChatGPT whether a heat pump is worth it for their detached house. They get their answer, as always. And below that, clearly marked as an advert and separated from the answer, is a local installer. No search term triggered this advert. The intent behind the question was enough.
Two things are important to me in this regard. OpenAI does not pass on conversations to advertisers, and no adverts appear at all when discussing sensitive topics such as health or politics. And anyone with a paid Plus subscription sees no adverts whatsoever. Adverts are only shown in the free version and in the low-cost Go subscription. Even there, you can choose to opt out, but you’ll then have to put up with lower limits. So, with ChatGPT, adverts are the price you pay for greater usage, not for the service itself.
Intent rather than keywords
With Google Ads, you bid on search terms. Anyone who types in ‘heat pump costs for a detached house’ already knows pretty much exactly what they want. With ChatGPT Ads, you target the context of a conversation. Anyone who asks ChatGPT whether a heat pump is even worth it is two steps earlier in the process, and that’s exactly where you can reach them. OpenAI analyses what the conversation is about, rather than which words appear in it.
For regional businesses, another new feature is at least as important: campaigns can be targeted geographically. And for anyone who gets nervous when privacy comes up: for the time being, there are no personalised adverts in Switzerland or the EEA. Only the current conversation counts, not what someone asked last week.
Who it’s suitable for, and who it isn’t
The channel is most effective where people do their research before making a decision. Heating, kitchens, cars, travel, restaurants, trades: anything where someone first asks «is it worth it?» or «what should I look out for?» before getting in touch. A manufacturer of specialised machinery with just five orders a year, on the other hand, is unlikely to find anyone on ChatGPT who is actively searching for them. The closer your business is to people’s everyday lives, the better it suits this platform.
And there are sectors where OpenAI takes a particularly close look. Healthcare and finance are permitted only under strict conditions, whilst political advertising is not permitted at all. Anyone working in such a sector should clarify this before spending the first franc.
How much it costs
Payment is made per click or per thousand impressions; it is now also conversion-optimised per click, and the account is held in CHF. You set the bids yourself, just as with Google Ads. No one can give you a reliable figure for how much a click costs in Switzerland at the moment; the channel is simply too new for that. Prices will stabilise as demand increases.
OpenAI provides a pixel and an interface for tracking conversions. Without proper tracking on your website and without a correctly configured cookie banner, even the best click is of no use to you, because you’ll never know whether it led to an enquiry. This applies just as much to ChatGPT as it does to Google.
What your website needs to be able to do for this
Something that’s often overlooked: OpenAI reads your landing page. How relevant an advert is deemed to be also depends on the content of the page it links to. And adverts won’t be served at all if the landing page blocks OpenAI’s crawlers. Many websites do exactly that, often without the owner realising it, because a security plugin or the robots.txt file blocks all AI bots across the board. This needs to be checked before launching your first campaign.
Then there’s the tone. For many people, an advert appearing directly below a reply comes across as a recommendation, and that carries a responsibility. Anyone who makes big promises in their advert but fails to deliver on the landing page will get burned more quickly than they would on Google. An honest advert, a clear landing page, a genuine reply. It’s that simple, and that demanding.
Is it worth it now?
No one has any reliable figures from Switzerland at the moment, not even me. The reach is certainly there: according to OpenAI, more than a billion people use ChatGPT regularly, and most of them are likely to be using the free version, the very one in which the adverts run. On the other side are the advertisers. Less than 200 days after its launch, the advertising business is already worth one billion dollars on an annualised basis, according to OpenAI. So the demand is certainly there. Only time will tell whether the clicks ultimately generate enquiries.
That’s why I don’t see ChatGPT Ads as a replacement for Google Ads, but rather as a complement. Anyone getting started should do so with a small budget, clear objectives and proper tracking. And not just because everyone’s talking about it at the moment.
How I go about it
Of course, I tried it out straight away. The Ads Manager generated an initial advert from my website in less than a minute, and it was closer to what I would have written myself than I’d have liked. What the machine can’t do is assess whether the channel makes sense for your business at all, what a reasonable budget would be, whether the advert fits your brand, and how you measure its success. That’s exactly what I do.
The first campaign for Swiss Media Design is running as a trial, funded out of my own pocket. I’d be happy to tell you how it’s going in person, rather than on the blog. If you’d like to try out ChatGPT Ads for your business, get in touch via the contact form. And if it doesn’t make sense for your business, I’ll tell you that just as plainly.
Sources: OpenAI: ChatGPT Ads to be rolled out across Europe, OpenAI Help Centre: Ads in ChatGPT, OpenAI Help Centre: Ads Manager Availability, retail-news.de: OpenAI launches ChatGPT Ads for self-service advertising in Europe and OpenAI Ads: Advertising on ChatGPT