ChatGPT Ads for eCommerce: what it is and how to start advertising

We have been testing ChatGPT ad manager in its Beta phase, and the first impression is clear: this is very interesting for eCommerce, but it is different. It is not operated like Google Ads or like Meta. Here the user does not type keywords, they tell you their problem in detail and decide to buy in the context of a conversation.

For an eCommerce, we are facing a new channel, with its own rules, formats, mechanics and its own numbers. It is advisable to understand ChatGPT Ads before it fills up with competition.

The ad stops appearing attached to a two-term query, to “slip” into the middle of a conversation, in which someone thinks out loud, compares and gets closer to buying, sometimes unconsciously. That moment, that of mature intent, is exactly where an eCommerce is interested in appearing.

Let's go step by step: we are going to tell you what it is, why ChatGPT Ads interests you in your online store, how it differs from what you already use and, while we are at it, how to get started.

It is the self-service (self-serve) system you create your own campaigns and advertise with within ChatGPT, managed from ads.openai.com.

The ads, which are simple cards made up of text and image, appear identified as sponsored content, separate from the assistant's response, never integrated into the chat responses.

Are they shown on all accounts? Well, the truth is that they are not: ads will only be shown to adult users who are logged in, and within the Free and Go plans; that is, those who pay for Plus, Pro or Business will not see advertising.

OpenAI highlights two important things: advertising does not alter what ChatGPT answers under any circumstances, and the advertiser will never receive access to anyone's conversations, history or personal data. The dashboard receives aggregated metrics (impressions, clicks and the conversions that you measure), and, by the way, it is not in real time, bear in mind that the report is delayed by up to around seven hours. Therefore, do not judge a campaign by what you see on the first afternoon.

The auction is second-price and weighted by relevance, similar at its core to Google's, but with one substantial difference: your ad does not bid on a keyword; in the case of ChatGPT, the target is a conversation.

Because the ad appears at the exact moment when someone is deciding what to buy and, on top of that, during the organic process of the conversation, they have generated a very detailed context to get there.

Whereas, on Google, any user writes "Italian coffee maker"; on ChatGPT they tell you that they want it for two cups, that their kitchen is small, that they will not go over 40 euros and that the previous one rusted. That person is one step away from buying and has given the system all the detail of their key points, fears, motivations and barriers.

To this we are going to add the volume of interactions that ChatGPT records today, which is around hundreds of millions of users each week, and an increasingly large proportion use it to compare products and decide on purchases, not only to write emails; it is throughout the conversion funnel.

All that traffic today is untouched, it is not impacted either from Search or from social networks, and it arrives with a more mature intent than that of scrolling on Instagram or TikTok. That is, there is an incredible window of opportunity.

The channel is new, competition is still scarce in the majority of sectors and costs per click are not as inflated as on Google... arriving early means learning cheaply before bids rise.

The three platforms bring you customers, but each one impacts them in a different state of mind and stage of the customer journey and at a different level of motivation.

On the one hand, we have Google Ads, which works on what people type: keywords (keywords), match types and declared intent in two or three terms.

It is extremely powerful when someone already knows what they want, but it gives you very little context. "Running shoes" does not tell you whether they are for preparing for a marathon or for going to the gym on Tuesdays.

Meanwhile, Meta Ads goes in the opposite direction. There is no search there, there is interruption: you appear in the feed of someone who was not looking for you, segmented by interests, behaviour and demographic data. Although it works wonderfully for discovery and generating demand, purchase intent at that moment is usually low.

ChatGPT Ads positions itself in the middle and, above all, changes the concept when it comes to working. You do not bid on a keyword or build an interest audience: you describe, with context instructions (context hints), the situations in which your product helps, and the system decides which conversations to match you with.

They are not exact matches, nor do they guarantee that you will appear for a specific phrase; they are broad thematic hints more similar, if you like, to the search signals of Max Performance in Google Ads, but with many more nuances.

You will notice the practical differences immediately. Bidding is done by CPM (per thousand impressions), CPC (per click) or oCPC (click optimised for conversion), well, more precisely, it will be bid according to OpenAI's documentation, because for the moment in the Beta the only options are clicks, reach or conversions, more in line with TikTok Ads.

I can also say, based on the beta, that the references in accounts are between 3 and 5 euros recommended CPC and around 60 CPM by default, with a recommended daily budget of 65 euros, figures that change depending on the currency and the account.

It is to be expected that everything will become more sophisticated as the full launch takes place, but for the moment there are important limitations in the European Economic Area and Switzerland, such as the creation of custom audiences, which is very basic, so all the precision is placed on context and intent, not on audience lists.

With ChatGPT Ads we are facing a paradigm shift which, despite being anticipated, has caught us 100% prepared. For more than 20 years, performance marketing has revolved around the keyword: reducing someone's intent to a string of text and competing for it.

ChatGPT breaks that mould because people do not speak to it in keywords, they speak to it in complete sentences, semantically rich, with nuances, doubts and conditions. The unit of planning stops being the word and becomes the moment of intent: at what point in the process that person is and what they need to resolve.

Another example? Of course, imagine an online pet store. The user goes from giving you this input "Dog food" to "what do I give my twelve-year-old dog who barely moves anymore and has gained weight". Sure, we agree that they are the same product category, but they are two conversations that are nothing alike.

The second tells you the age, activity, problem and even the owner's concerned tone. Here, what makes the difference is recognising that situation and appearing with the product that fits, not hitting the exact keyword.

For an eCommerce, this has a very important consequence: you stop organising campaigns by search terms and start organising them by real needs, something Google has been fantasising about for decades, the famous semantic web.

The catalogue is reorganised around the questions that people ask themselves before buying, and not around the labels with which you have it classified in the store.

First, registration. You enter ads.openai.com with your OpenAI account (preferably with a company email), create the advertiser account with a single owner, and later you will invite the team or your agency from Settings. It is very quick and quite simple.

You fill in the business details (name, website, logo and sector) and the account details (country, currency, time zone), which cannot be changed later, pass identity verification and set up billing: tax profile and payment method.

Approval arrives by email and it can take from days to weeks, but the truth is that in our case it was almost immediate. Even so, it will be better if you start early; that may be the real bottleneck, but  technically it has no complication whatsoever, do not expect to encounter a maze like Meta Ads or a million options like in Google Ads.

Once the account is ready, the campaign has three levels that will remind you of many other platforms, since they are account > campaign > ad group > ad.

For the first pilot, three things that have worked for us:

In the case of eCommerce, in addition, we see that it is possible to upload a product feed in the purest style of Google Shopping, which makes the results richer and deeper. You can do it with a CSV, a URL or through an SFTP connection.

Installing the pixel for tracking and configuring conversions are also important; without this, logically, you are not going to be able to do much because you will be going in blind, so you can forget about measuring. 

It is not complicated, but perhaps you need the help of a technician to install it on your website, create the events, implement and register. In any case, it is very well documented.

One final common-sense warning: creating the campaign is not publishing it. Before considering it live, check that verification and billing are complete, that the dates include today, that the campaign and ads are active and that the review has finished. The only proof that it is running is seeing impressions and spend in the dashboard.

ChatGPT Ads does not replace Google, Meta or your SEO. It adds a new moment, that of the conversation in which the customer explains to you in great detail what they want to resolve. The store that gets the most out of it will not be the one that bids the most, but the one that best understands those questions, organises the catalogue around them and has each landing prepared to respond.

The good thing is that you can start doing almost all of this today, whether or not you have access to the manager: identify the doubts that appear just before buying, group them by intent and refine the pages that answer them. When your turn comes, you will not start by improvising ads, you will start with an advantage.