Evido’s First ChatGPT Ads Campaign: What We Learned From Running Ads Inside ChatGPT

ChatGPT is becoming part of how people research products, compare solutions, and make business decisions. That makes advertising inside these conversations an interesting new opportunity — but also a very different environment from traditional paid media.

Before offering ChatGPT Ads to clients, we at Evido by Aitargetdecided to test the channel ourselves.

We launched a campaign in Cyprus to promote ChatGPT Ads to businesses that could potentially use the new advertising format. This gave us a chance to experience the platform from an advertiser’s perspective — from campaign setup and targeting to moderation and early performance.

Here is what we learned.

The experiment at a glance

We kept the first campaign deliberately simple.

Market: Cyprus

Goal: reach businesses that could advertise on ChatGPT Ads with us

Audience: B2B, companies weighing up new advertising channels

Setup: context hints at ad group level, single creative

Early results

The campaign started generating delivery within a few days.

These numbers should be treated as early indicators rather than benchmarks. ChatGPT Ads is still a developing advertising environment, and the Cyprus auction is relatively small. As more advertisers enter the platform and inventory grows, both CPC and CTR can change.

For us, however, the first campaign was less about establishing a benchmark and more about understanding how the channel actually works.

ChatGPT Ads requires a different approach to targeting

One of the biggest differences from traditional advertising platforms is the absence of conventional keyword or interest targeting.

Instead, advertisers use context hints to describe the types of conversations in which an ad should be relevant.

This changes the way campaign planning works.

Rather than thinking:

Which keywords should trigger our ad?

you need to think:

What is the user discussing, what are they trying to solve, and where could our product become relevant in that conversation?

For advertisers, this means the quality of the context description becomes an important part of campaign setup.

We tested the first campaign with a single set of context hints. Our next step is to create several variations and compare which types of conversational context generate the most relevant traffic.

Getting an ad approved can take more than one attempt

The campaign setup itself was relatively straightforward.

Getting everything through moderation was a different story.

Our first campaign required several submission attempts before it went live. The moderation process evaluates more than the ad creative itself. The creative, claims, brand assets and landing page all need to work together.

We found several areas that require particular attention:

Claims need to be precise

Statements are evaluated quite literally. Claims about results, comparisons or affiliations need to be supported and presented carefully.

Copy that may pass moderation on another advertising platform does not necessarily pass here.

Your creative and landing page need to match

The landing page is reviewed alongside the ad.

The messaging should be consistent across both assets, and the landing page needs to be accessible to the review system.

Brand assets matter

Advertisers should use assets they have the right to use. The creative should also be clearly distinguishable from ChatGPT’s own interface.

Some categories are still closed

Financial, health and legal services are largely US-only. Gambling, alcohol and dating are out everywhere. OpenAI says the list will grow.

Rejection feedback may be broad

One of the practical challenges is that moderation feedback does not always identify the exact element responsible for a rejection.

This means advertisers may need to isolate potential issues and resubmit the campaign until they understand what needs to change.

Our main takeaway: moderation is part of the campaign-building process, not a final checkbox before launch.

Targeting works through context hints

There are no keywords and no interest audiences here. Each ad group carries short descriptions of what you offer, who it helps, and when it comes in handy. OpenAI's own example: "cushioned everyday running shoes for beginners training for their first 5K" works better than "running shoes." Hints shape relevance, and OpenAI is explicit that they guarantee nothing about which conversations you appear in. Your hints, creative and landing page all need to tell one story. This is a new skill, and almost nobody has much practice at it yet.

Early performance is only one part of the test

Our first results — 0.64% CTR and $1.63 CPC — give us an initial reference point, but they are not enough to determine the long-term value of the channel.

The platform is still evolving, and the campaign itself was small.

That is why we are treating the first campaign as a learning phase rather than a final performance assessment.

Our next experiments will focus on:

• testing different context-hint formulations;
• introducing additional creative variations;
• adding conversion tracking;
• analysing which types of conversations generate more relevant traffic;
• expanding the test to a larger market.

This should give us a clearer picture of the relationship between impressions, clicks and actual business outcomes.

Why we decided to test ChatGPT Ads early

Six product releases in three months tells you something on its own. What tells you more is where they land: each one opens the channel up to another kind of advertiser.

Performance advertisers can measure and optimize. In June the platform had basic conversion tracking. Since then: Automatic Advanced Matching, pixel diagnostics, an Event Quality Score, conversion-optimized bidding, and as of September, optimization on click and view conversions together with flexible attribution windows. Budgets follow proof, and the tooling to produce that proof now exists.

E-commerce has a native format. Product feeds, cards with price and star rating, multi-product carousels, and a Shopify app that goes international this month. People already ask ChatGPT what to buy. A product card sits right inside that question.

Lead generation reaches the CRM. The HubSpot integration follows leads from ad to pipeline. Custom audiences now handle exclusions and can be updated without rebuilding them. For B2B and services, that connects spend to what happens after the click.

App advertisers get attribution. AppsFlyer and Adjust integrations, plus separate targeting and reporting across iOS and Android, app and web.

Small teams can run it alone. AI-assisted ad creation reads your landing page and drafts the copy and visuals. The Ads Manager plugin lets you manage campaigns in plain language. Text customization adapts headlines to the conversation and translates them into the user's language, which quietly removes a lot of production work in multilingual markets.

And then there is Sponsored Agents. OpenAI is testing it in the US: after clicking an ad, the user keeps talking — to a labeled agent run by the brand. That covers the same ground as messenger bots and chat funnels, except it happens where the user was already asking their question. It's a test, and we have no timeline for our markets. It is also the single clearest reason our expectations are high.

What's actually available differs by country. We check what is live in yours before planning anything.

Six months from now this platform will look different again. Whoever is running ads by then will have approved creatives, context hints that work, and their own conversion data. Everyone else will be starting the learning curve at that point instead.

You don't need a large budget for this. You need to start.

Launch your first ChatGPT campaign with Evido by Aitarget

What you get with Evido by Aitarget:

• A simpler launch. We built our own API integration. In our experience it takes less work than going through the native interface.
• Moderation know-how. We already made the first-launch mistakes.
• Support that answers. OpenAI runs self-serve, with sales support reserved for large advertisers and a Help Center for everyone else. Our clients get a team that reviews creatives before submission and stays with them through moderation.
• Payments that work for you. Local invoicing and the terms you already have with us.

💡 Want to try ChatGPT Ads? Find more on our website.