Lisa runs a house cleaning company in University Place. She has read about ChatGPT ads for months, and she has finally decided to try them. Her plan is simple: spend about $750 over one month, see whether any new customers come from it, and then decide whether to keep going.
On a Saturday morning, coffee in hand, she opens ChatGPT Ads Manager for the first time. Within a few minutes, it asks her to choose a currency and a time zone and warns her that these cannot be changed later. A little further on, it mentions business verification that can take up to a week.
Lisa realizes this is not quite like boosting a Facebook post. A few early choices matter, and a few checks take time.
(Lisa is an example we made up for this guide, but every step she takes is one you will take too.) This guide walks through the whole setup the way Lisa experienced it, one step at a time, explaining what each step means and why it matters. If you are still deciding whether ChatGPT ads are worth testing at all, read our guide to the 2026 ChatGPT ads update first, then come back here.
A quick note before we start: ChatGPT Ads Manager is still a beta product, and OpenAI says it will keep evolving. The steps and numbers below describe the platform at the time of writing. Check OpenAI’s Ads Manager overview and OpenAI’s quickstart guide for anything that may have changed.
What is ChatGPT Ads Manager?
ChatGPT Ads Manager is OpenAI’s self-serve tool for creating and managing ads that appear inside ChatGPT. If you have used Google Ads or Meta Ads Manager, the idea is familiar: you create an account, set a budget, choose who should see your ads, write the ads, and pay for the results.
Not long ago, advertising on ChatGPT meant talking to OpenAI’s sales team and committing a large budget. The self-serve Ads Manager changed that. Now a small business like Lisa’s can set up a campaign on its own, at ads.openai.com.
Step 1: Create the account, and choose carefully
Lisa signs in with her OpenAI account (the same one she uses for ChatGPT). Ads Manager asks for an advertiser name, which it uses for the account, the brand and the legal name of the business. These can be edited separately later, but changing the brand name triggers a brand review that pauses your ads until it is approved, and changing the legal name restarts business review. So it is worth getting them right now. OpenAI’s account setup guide covers each field.
Then come three choices that cannot be changed later:
- Country: where her business is based.
- Currency: this also sets her minimum daily budget.
- Time zone: this decides when her budget “week” starts and ends.
Why does time zone matter? Imagine Lisa accidentally picks Eastern Time. Her daily budget would reset at 9 p.m. her time, and her reports would never quite line up with her own records. Choosing Pacific Time from the start avoids months of small confusion.
One more thing: if your company already uses OpenAI’s business products, an IT admin may need to give you the Ads Admin role before you can continue.
Step 2: Verify the business
Next comes business verification. OpenAI wants to confirm that her business is real and that she is allowed to advertise for it. OpenAI’s onboarding troubleshooting page says this can take up to seven business days. Verification can also fail if the business name does not match the website domain. So if the business trades as “Sparkle Home Cleaning” but the website is lisascleaning.example, she should be ready to explain the connection.
Lesson from Lisa: the same page explains that some accounts can start delivering ads before business verification is required, and that extra verification can be requested later, once spend passes a threshold. Either way, starting verification early makes it less likely to hold up a campaign you are ready to launch.
Step 3: Set up billing
Lisa creates a billing profile with her business name, address and the email where invoices should go, then adds a card issued in the same country as the account.
Billing is postpaid. That means OpenAI charges her card after she has spent money, either when her unpaid spend reaches a set amount (called the payment threshold) or at the end of the month. That threshold is not a spending limit. What actually controls how much she spends is the budget she sets on each campaign. OpenAI’s billing and payment page explains how charges work.
Step 4: Set up tracking before spending a dollar
This is the step most people rush, and it is the one Lisa will be most grateful for later. Without tracking, she will know how many people clicked, but not how many booked a cleaning. And booked cleanings are the whole point.
There are four pieces, and each one is simpler than it sounds.
The OpenAI Pixel or Conversions API
A pixel is a small piece of code added to your website. Think of it as a counter at the door: when someone who clicked your ad books an appointment or submits a form, the pixel tells Ads Manager. The Conversions API does the same job from your website’s server instead of the visitor’s browser, which makes it harder for browser settings to block. You need one of them working before you can run a campaign that optimizes for conversions.
UTM parameters
UTM parameters are labels added to the end of the link in your ad. They tell Google Analytics, “this visitor came from ChatGPT ads”. Without them, ChatGPT visitors can get mixed in with other traffic and become hard to measure. Lisa adds labels to every landing page link and makes sure her website does not strip them off when it redirects.
Letting OpenAI’s crawler in
OpenAI uses a crawler called OAI-AdsBot to visit the pages your ads link to, checking that they are safe, follow its policies and match the ad. OpenAI’s crawler documentation explains how it works. If your website blocks it, or puts a CAPTCHA or login in its way, your ads may not run. Lisa checks with her web developer that nothing is blocking it.
Tracking phone calls
Many of Lisa’s customers would rather call than fill in a form. If she only tracks forms, every ChatGPT customer who calls will look like a non-result. A call tracking number on her landing page solves this.
Step 5: Create the campaign
Now the fun part. A campaign has a name, an objective, a budget, dates and targeting. The objective is the most important choice, and it cannot be changed later. There are three:
- Views: you pay for every thousand times your ad is shown. Good for getting your name in front of people.
- Clicks: you pay each time someone clicks. A sensible first choice if your tracking is not sending conversion events yet.
- Conversions: ChatGPT tries to find people likely to take the action you care about, such as booking. You still pay per click or per thousand views, but the system optimizes toward conversions.
Lisa’s pixel is installed, but she has never seen it record a booking. So she starts with Clicks, and plans a separate Conversions campaign once the data is flowing.
Targeting her area
Standard campaigns can target countries, states, cities, markets and postal codes where available. Lisa selects University Place, Lakewood, Fircrest and the Tacoma ZIP codes she actually serves. There is no point paying for clicks from Spokane when she will never send a cleaner there.
She can also choose platforms, such as iPhone or Android, app or web, and desktop. For now, she leaves them all on, so she can see where her customers are.
Setting the budget
At the time of writing, the minimum daily budget in the US is $25. That works out neatly for Lisa: $25 a day for 30 days is $750, her whole test budget.
One thing surprises her. Daily budgets are averaged over a week that runs from Sunday to Saturday. So on a busy Tuesday, Ads Manager might spend up to $50, twice her daily amount, and less on a quiet Thursday. Over the week, it balances out. OpenAI recommends that new advertisers start with a daily budget rather than a total campaign budget.
One quirk to know: on a first campaign, the start and end date settings may not appear until after you publish. OpenAI’s guide to creating campaigns advises against publishing just to reach them, because your ads could start running straight away. So Lisa finishes the rest of the setup first.
Step 6: Build ad groups and context hints
Inside the campaign, Lisa creates ad groups. Each ad group should cover one distinct customer need, with its own ads and its own landing page. She makes two:
- Move-out cleaning, for renters and sellers who need a deep clean before handing over the keys.
- Regular house cleaning, for busy families who want help every week or two.
For each one, she writes context hints. Instead of keywords, these are short descriptions of moments when her ad would genuinely help. For move-out cleaning: “a renter in Tacoma moving out this month who wants their deposit back”. For regular cleaning: “a working parent in University Place looking for someone to clean the house every two weeks”.
Next comes bidding. Ads Manager now selects Maximize results by default for eligible new ad groups, which lets the system set bids automatically. Lisa wants a firmer grip on her small test budget, so she switches to Manual: Max bid and sets the most she is willing to pay for one click. OpenAI’s guide to ads in ChatGPT recommends $3 to $5 per click for Clicks campaigns. Ad relevance counts in the auction alongside the bid, so a well-matched ad can compete without always paying the most.
Step 7: Write the ads
Each ad needs a title of up to 50 characters, copy of up to 100 characters, a square image and a landing page. Lisa writes three different ads for each ad group, each with a different angle, so she can learn which message works.
Writing for ChatGPT is a little different from writing for Google, because your ad appears below an answer in a conversation. We cover this in detail, with examples, in our guide to writing ChatGPT ads that fit the conversation.
Step 8: Launch, and be patient with the checks
Lisa clicks launch. Then nothing happens, and that is normal.
Ad review, business verification, account approval and billing are all separate checks. Clearing one does not clear the others. Her ads only start delivering once all of them are done. OpenAI suggests waiting at least 24 hours after launch before worrying about zero delivery. If an ad shows any status other than “Serving”, hovering over it explains why, and she can fix it and resubmit.
The first 30 days
Once her ads are live, Lisa follows a simple plan:
- Week 1: confirm ads are serving and that clicks appear both in Ads Manager and in Google Analytics, labeled correctly.
- Weeks 2 and 3: look at which ad group brings calls and bookings. Pause ads that get clicks but no inquiries.
- Week 4: compare her cost per booking with what she pays on Google Ads, then decide whether to continue, adjust or stop.
Whatever the result, she will finish the month with something valuable: real data about her own customers on a brand-new channel, gathered with a budget she chose in advance.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to launch ChatGPT ads?
Building the campaign takes an hour or two. Business verification can take up to seven business days, so start it first.
Can I target only my city?
Yes. Standard campaigns can target cities and postal codes where available, not just whole countries.
Should I choose Clicks or Conversions for my first campaign?
If your tracking has not recorded any conversions yet, start with Clicks. Once conversions are flowing reliably, create a new campaign with the Conversions objective, because the objective cannot be changed later.
Want us to set it up with you?
At Around29, we set up and run ChatGPT ad campaigns for local businesses, with tracking tested before anything goes live. See our ChatGPT ads page for Tacoma businesses, or run a free audit to see where your marketing stands today.