Client: VSSL
Services: Paid Media
ChatGPT Ads: What We’re Seeing So Far
Published
When ChatGPT opened ad placements to advertisers, we didn’t wait to read about it. We built a campaign and put it live — partly to evaluate the channel for our clients, partly because the fastest way to understand a new placement is to spend real money in it. What follows is an early test on a small budget: preliminary findings, not a finished story.
Across two weeks and $400 in spend, we recorded a 0.53% CTR, an $11.65 CPC, and a $61.62 CPM. At this volume those are a baseline to build from rather than a verdict, which is the point — we’re sharing where the channel is right now, not declaring it solved.
The most interesting result is in the creative. Our top-performing headline wasn’t a call to action at all: a plain statement (“Paid Media That Performs”) outperformed direct CTAs like “Audit Your Paid Strategy” and “Is Your Brand Visible in AI?” Our working theory is that in a conversational placement, a statement reads as part of the experience while a hard CTA reads as an ad. We’re testing it further before treating it as a rule.
Two other early reads: targeting preference shifted with ad group specificity — broader groups did better with queries, tighter groups did better with search terms — and CTR looks like a real optimization lever, with higher-engagement ads earning noticeably more impressions. In that respect the placement behaves more like display than search.
The clearest operational lesson is about pacing. We set a $1,000 lifetime budget and the campaign spent only about 40% of it, so lifetime budgets appear to underdeliver. We’ve since switched to daily budgets and are rebuilding the campaign to see whether that steadies performance.
What’s next is a cleaner build on daily budgets, more headline and targeting tests, and a larger sample before we draw firm conclusions. We’ll update this entry as the data matures.
We’re already running campaigns on this channel and learning fast. If you’re weighing whether ChatGPT Ads make sense for your brand, book a free strategy session — we’ll give you a straight read either way.
