ChatGPT Ads Agency: What We Learned From Over 200,000 Impressions

Since 31 August 2026, any business in Germany, Austria and Switzerland can book ads in ChatGPT itself. We started one week later, with our own money and in 4 industries: our own agency, driving experiences in a Porsche, an accessory for electric cars and a home care service. By early November we had set up 12 campaigns, with more than 200,000 impressions and over 2,000 clicks.

In this article we share all the numbers, the mistakes we made along the way and what a ChatGPT ads agency actually has to deliver today. How ads in ChatGPT work in general is covered in our overview ChatGPT Ads 2026: What advertising in ChatGPT means for B2B companies (in German). The platform is still in beta, so everything here reflects the state of November 2026.

Key takeaways

• Products and experiences perform clearly better than services. Around 1.5% CTR at around €1 per click, compared to below 1% and around €1.40 for services that need explaining.
• Clicks are easy to get, conversions are the real work. Whether a click turns into a customer is decided by the landing page and measurement, not by the ad.
• Without measurement, every report stays empty. The OpenAI pixel only counts events that the website actually sends.
• Health, legal and finance are practically blocked outside the US. In the health sector, the review rejected every single one of our ads.
• A good ChatGPT ads agency checks policy and measurement before the first euro is spent, switches off automatic text adjustment and judges success by real conversions instead of clicks.

Our benchmarks from 12 campaigns

All campaigns ran with the goal Clicks, so billing was per click, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Values are rounded, as of November 2026.

So far, the conversions that came in were early purchase signals, such as a started checkout and a click on the buy button. The campaign for the car accessory is still running.

Our own service pages

We ran a separate campaign for each of 6 marketer UX service pages. The price per click depends heavily on the topic: topics with a clear outcome such as “website design” came in at around €1.15 per click, topics that need explaining such as SEO at almost €3. Visitors from ChatGPT mostly stayed on the page for less than 20 seconds, for GEO and LLMO more than a minute.

One tip for your own analysis: in our case, clicks in Ads Manager and sessions in Google Analytics differed a lot. Compare the two before you draw conclusions.

Which ads worked

Within a campaign, the platform distributes the budget very unevenly. Still, individual ads show clear patterns:

• An award beats a rating: “German Web Award” got around 70% more clicks per impression than “5 out of 5 stars”, at a third lower cost per click.
• A provided car beats your own: the ad for a driving experience in a provided Porsche got around 25% more clicks per impression than the one in your own sports car. The difference is statistically significant.
• Place and month in the headline: an ad with “… in January” reached about twice the CTR of its campaign. It only ran briefly, so it is a hint, not proof.
• The benefit in 3 words: “Mounted without tools” was among the cheapest ads of all our tests.
• A keyword list as the headline: “Webflow agency, SEO agency, SEA agency” got around 40% fewer clicks per impression than the award.
• Suggested by the platform: an ad that ChatGPT had created itself ran for weeks without approval, with a typo in the name and a below-average CTR.

What we learned

1. Context hints instead of keywords

ChatGPT has no keywords and no search terms report. Targeting works through free text, the context hints. They describe the conversation in which the ad fits, and also the one in which it does not. This is what it looked like for the car accessory:

“Users from Germany, Austria or Switzerland drive an electric car, often a Tesla Model Y or Model 3, and are looking for accessories for the time when the car is parked. […] Questions about use while driving are not a fit.”

At around 70 cents, this campaign had the cheapest clicks of all our tests. Our impression after 4 industries: the more precisely the situation is described, the better the clicks match.

2. Products and experiences before services

Driving experiences and the car accessory together reached around 1.5% CTR at around €1 per click. Our agency campaigns came in below 1% and at around €1.40. The most expensive were SEO at almost €3 per click and GEO at just over €1.80. Our explanation: people who ask ChatGPT about SEO or GEO usually want to understand how it works first and are not yet looking for a provider.

3. The landing page has only seconds

Just over 20 seconds on the page on average means the landing page has to answer the question from the chat immediately and lead straight to the conversion. For the driving experiences, the landing pages only led to a filtered calendar, not to a bookable date. For the car accessory, the ad therefore points directly to the product page with the buy buttons, not to the home page. What makes a good landing page is covered in Optimize your landing page: more enquiries from the same traffic.

4. Measure first, then spend

• No event sent, no conversion. Ads Manager only counts what the OpenAI pixel or the Conversions API actually reports. An event created in Ads Manager without a tag on the website stays at 0 forever.
• Events are not conversions. For the driving experiences, the pixel counted dozens of booking events in one week. None of them came from ChatGPT. They came from Google, the newsletter and direct visits.
• OpenAI attributes across devices and sessions. The conversion for the ice training in the Alps came from a different session than the click. Ads Manager shows the timing only by day.
• The pixel assumes consent. According to the documentation, consent is the default unless someone explicitly reports otherwise. In Europe, the pixel therefore has to be actively tied to the cookie banner. Anyone who creates a data source in Ads Manager accepts OpenAI’s conversion terms and confirms that the necessary consents have been obtained. How to set this up properly is explained in Google Consent Mode v2 and web tracking 2026 (in German).
• UTM parameters on every campaign. This includes the placeholder “{oppref}”, which OpenAI uses to attribute the click. An early test campaign ran without UTM parameters and could hardly be analysed in Google Analytics. Since then, they are part of every campaign.

5. Use the goal “Conversions” only once the pixel attributes

Every new campaign defaults to the goal “Conversions”. This switches billing from clicks to impressions. Only choose this goal once the pixel demonstrably attributes conversions. Otherwise you pay per impression for a signal that never arrives.

6. Check the policy before the first draft

According to OpenAI’s ad policies (as of 10 September 2026), ads for health services outside the US are generally prohibited, and so are ads for legal services. Outside the US, financial services are only possible for a few selected advertisers. A table in the Help Center lists this by category and country.

In our test for a home care service, the review rejected every ad, category “Health - In-person treatment”. The rejection only came after publishing. The draft gave no warning.

7. Your own images, no third-party brands

Images with a third-party brand at the centre are rejected, with the reason “content does not match”. A large share of our images with website mockups from the portfolio failed this way. Allowed are PNG, JPEG and WebP in a square crop, at least 256 × 256 pixels, no video and no GIF. A rejection before launch is not always final: one ad was approved after launch without any change.

8. Switch off automatic text adjustment

“Creative optimization” is switched on by default and lets ChatGPT rewrite the headline and description itself, without approval. For any business with legally sensitive claims, that is a risk. Two traps: the setting at account level does not apply retroactively to existing campaigns, and in a draft it switches back to “on” after saving.

9. Check suggested ads

The platform creates ads on its own, and they can run without further approval. In our case, one such ad ran for weeks with a typo in the name. Check your list of ads regularly for entries you did not create yourself.

10. One ad account per client

The name and logo in the ad come from the ad account, not from the campaign. An agency that runs clients in its own account advertises for the client under its own name. The clean way is a separate ad account per client, in the client’s name.

11. Small things with consequences

• The daily budget is at least €15. The default is €65.
• Start and end have a time that the campaign list does not show.
• A campaign’s toggle reacts without confirmation. A double click switches it off again immediately. For us, that meant one day without delivery.
• About 26 characters of the headline and 51 characters of the description are visible in the ad, even though the editor allows 50 and 100. The rest is cut off.
• Custom audiences are not available in the European Economic Area and Switzerland. Targeting works through context and location, down to postcodes.
• The current day’s numbers are preliminary and still change.

What a ChatGPT ads agency actually does

This is how we work today, after 12 campaigns in 4 industries:

1. Check up front: ad policy against industry and country, the client’s stock and dates (no ads for anything sold out), measurement with pixel, consent, event and UTM parameters, a separate ad account.
2. Structure: one campaign per product with its own budget, one ad group per landing page, 3 to 6 ads with different angles such as place, car, travel or experience.
3. Copy: only claims and numbers that also appear on the landing page, full sentences instead of keyword lists, no promises.
4. Checklist before publishing, see below.
5. Ongoing: read the change history, check suggested ads, decide per ad and campaign after 1 to 2 weeks and hold the result against the client’s real conversions.

Our checklist before publishing

1. Copy checked against the client’s language rules
2. Characters counted, nothing gets cut off
3. Every number in the ad found on the landing page
4. Every image viewed at full size
5. Text adjustment switched off in campaign and account
6. Goal Clicks, as long as no conversion demonstrably arrives
7. The conversion event has a tag on the website
8. Budget, start and end including time checked
9. UTM parameters set
10. Spelling checked

How to spot a good ChatGPT ads agency

Many agencies now offer ChatGPT ads. Hardly any show their own results from the channel. These questions separate experience from announcements:

• Which campaigns has the agency run itself, and what did they cost?
• Does it check the ad policy for your industry and country before making an offer?
• How does it measure conversions? A good answer names the pixel or the Conversions API with a real event, tied to your consent management, plus UTM parameters.
• Is the ad account in your name?
• Does it switch off automatic text adjustment?
• How does it measure success? By clicks, or by enquiries and revenue in your CRM?
• Does it name stop criteria in advance, defining when a test ends?
• Does it promise results? Then be careful. There are no reliable benchmarks for the German market yet.

Who ChatGPT ads are worth it for right now

• Good chances: products, experiences, travel, digital products and local services. According to its policy, OpenAI focuses advertising on these areas in the early phase, and this is where we saw the cheapest clicks.
• With caution: B2B services that need explaining. Only with working measurement, a small budget, fixed stop criteria and a landing page that convinces within seconds. How to set up such a test is shown in the section on the 90-day pilot in our overview of ChatGPT ads (in German).
• Currently not possible: health, legal and most financial services outside the US.

Regardless of paid ads, it pays off for almost every business to appear in ChatGPT’s answers themselves. How that works is described in AEO: How your company becomes visible in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers (in German) and on our page for the GEO and LLMO agency.

Conclusion

Clicks from ChatGPT are cheap to get when the offer and the context hints match. Whether they turn into customers is decided on the landing page and in measurement. Both have to be in place before the first budget runs. That is the real work of a ChatGPT ads agency, and that is where we learned the most.

If you want to test ads in ChatGPT, we check the policy, measurement and landing page for your offer up front. Get in touch.

Sources

• OpenAI: ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe, 18 August 2026, updated 31 August 2026
• OpenAI: Ad policies, as of 10 September 2026
• OpenAI Help Center: Troubleshooting Common Onboarding and Policy Issues, table of industries by country
• OpenAI for developers: Measurement Pixel and Conversions API
• OpenAI: Conversion terms
• Own data: OpenAI Ads Manager and Google Analytics 4 of marketer UX, retrieved on 6 November 2026