How to Launch ChatGPT Ads Step by Step: From Eligibility Check to First Results

In short

Launching ChatGPT ads takes nine steps: check that your legal entity is registered in an eligible country, create and verify an account at ads.openai.com, invite your agency as a user, describe the conversations you want to appear in (intents, not keywords), write creative that answers the question being asked, set a budget from $25 a day, prepare a landing page that answers on the first screen, set up UTM and CRM tracking, and then optimize weekly.

Ukraine is not on the advertiser list, so Ukrainian businesses enter through a Polish or European legal entity or start with Microsoft AI Max. Benchmarks: a minimum budget of $25 a day, a starting bid of $3 to $5, and a CTR noticeably lower than search, but warmer clicks. Below is the full sequence we use to launch this channel for clients.

Step 0. Check eligibility before you open the dashboard

Ads in ChatGPT launched on February 9, 2026, the self-serve dashboard at ads.openai.com appeared on May 5, 2026, and by August 31, 2026 the product’s annual run rate reached $1 billion. This is already a real channel, but it is not open to everyone.

As of September 25, 2026, OpenAI’s help center lists 63 countries available for self-serve advertiser registration, including Poland and the rest of the EU.

Ukraine is not on the list. Poland is. That leaves Ukrainian businesses with two honest routes:

1. Advertise through a Polish or other European legal entity. The company that verifies the account becomes the official advertiser, so it needs to be your own entity or a partner you trust.
2. Start with Microsoft AI Max. It is an optional set of settings in an existing Microsoft Ads account, which Microsoft rolled out globally to all advertisers in August 2026: it lets ads appear for more complex conversational queries on Bing and Copilot and is the cheapest AI inventory on the market. For most Ukrainian companies this is a sensible first step while the European entity is being set up.

Do not try to work around the country rule with a borrowed account. Country and currency are locked at verification and never change, so a shortcut today becomes a dead account tomorrow.

Step 1. Create the account and verify the legal entity

Go to ads.openai.com and register with a company email that will outlive any single employee. During onboarding you verify the legal entity: the company name, registration details and the country of operation. Two things at this stage are fixed permanently (OpenAI Help Center, Account Setup):

• Country. It determines which markets you can target and which rules apply. It cannot be changed after verification.
• Currency. It is fixed together with the country. If you plan to report in EUR, verify with a European entity and choose EUR from the start.

One more detail about multiple countries at once: a new account can initially advertise only in the country where the legal entity is registered. Other supported countries open automatically once identity verification is approved and the account reaches a required level of spend in the home country; the amount of that threshold is not published (OpenAI Help Center, Create campaigns).

Get sign-off on the entity, country and currency from whoever handles finance before you confirm. A mistake here means a new account under a new entity.

Step 2. Invite the agency as a user

There is no agency manager account in ChatGPT ads, nothing like a Google Ads MCC or a Meta Business Manager that sits above client accounts. The advertiser owns the account and grants access to individual people.

Practical consequences:

• The agency is invited by email as a user with the role of admin or member.
• Use a shared agency mailbox rather than one person’s address, and keep at least two admins on the client side.

If an agency says it will “run it from our own account”, ask which legal entity that account is verified under, because that entity, not yours, will be the advertiser.

Step 3. Define the goal and the conversation intents

Targeting in ChatGPT ads is built around the topic and intent of the conversation, not around keywords in the classic sense. Instead of bidding on “dental implants price”, you describe the conversations in which your offer would be a useful answer. In the campaign settings you choose the conversation topics and intents you want to appear next to.

Start with one goal per campaign: a booked call, a demo request, a purchase. Then write intents as sentences a person would actually type. Three examples:

A clinic (aesthetic medicine, Warsaw)

• “Is it worth doing a facial treatment before a wedding, and when should I start?”
• “How do I choose a safe clinic for injectables in Warsaw?”
• “How is laser different from a chemical peel for acne scars?”

A B2B SaaS (invoicing tool for small companies)

• “How can I automate invoices and reminders for a business with 30 clients?”
• “What should I look for in an invoicing tool if I work with clients in the EU and the US?”
• “How do I stop manually chasing overdue invoices?”

An e-commerce brand (ergonomic office chairs)

• “Which office chair helps with lower back pain if I sit 10 hours a day?”
• “Is a mesh or a padded chair better for a hot room?”
• “How much should I spend on a chair I’ll use for five years?”

Write 10 to 15 such intents per campaign, group them by stage (researching, comparing, ready to buy) and give each group its own ad. Do this step together with the person who talks to customers every day, not with a keyword tool.

Step 4. Creative: what an ad inside a dialogue must answer

An ad in ChatGPT appears inside a conversation and is marked as an ad. The person is in the middle of a dialogue, not scrolling a feed. Good creative therefore does three things in order: acknowledges the question, gives one concrete reason to trust the answer, and names the next step. It does not shout.

Three examples built on this structure:

Clinic “Planning a treatment before an important event? Our Warsaw clinic will map a safe schedule of injectables and lasers so you have time to recover. Book a 15-minute consultation and get a written plan.”

SaaS “Chasing 30 overdue invoices by hand? Our tool automatically sends invoices, reminders and payment links in euros and dollars. Start a free trial and send your first invoice in ten minutes.”

E-commerce “Ten hours a day in a chair? Our ergonomic range has adjustable lumbar support and a 30-day home trial, so back pain is not part of the job. See the three models we recommend for long desk work.”

Rules we apply to every ad:

• One intent, one ad. Never a generic brand message.
• The first sentence mirrors the question the person is most likely asking.
• One proof point (a specific feature, a timeline, a return policy), not a list of adjectives.
• The call to action describes what happens next, not “learn more”.
• The landing page continues the same sentence, covered in Step 6.

Step 5. Budget: $25 a day and a 30-day test that can be judged

Minimum budget: $25 a day, starting bid recommended by OpenAI’s help center: $3 to $5. CTR benchmark: the analytics firm Adthena recorded 0.91% for one client in one sector against about 6.4% for Google Search in the same sector (Campaign); this is one client’s result, not a platform-wide average.

Two things follow from these numbers.

A low CTR is not a problem. Most people read an ad inside a conversation as part of the answer and keep talking to the assistant. The few who do click are further along than a search visitor, which is why in published case studies AI traffic converts significantly better than organic: Opollo reports 14.2% conversion from AI traffic against 2.8% from organic, Semrush finds a result 4.4 times better, Shopify shows almost 50% higher conversion for AI visits on product pages, and Ahrefs records 23 times more sign-ups per visit. Judge the channel by cost per qualified lead, not by CTR.

A 30-day test needs enough clicks per intent group. At the minimum: $25 × 30 days = $750. At a starting bid of $3 to $5 per click, that is about 150 to 250 clicks total. Split across three intent groups, the weakest group ends the month with a few dozen clicks, which tells you nothing. Our rule: budget for about 100 clicks per group you want to judge. Three groups × 100 clicks × $3 to $5 = $900 to $1,500 a month. Choose your test budget from that range, not from the $25 minimum.

Suggested 30-day structure:

Step 6. Landing page requirements

In March 2026, OpenAI wound down the initial version of ChatGPT Instant Checkout and moved checkout back to the seller’s side (CNBC), so the working model is “discover in chat, buy on site”. The whole conversion rests on your landing page. Requirements:

1. Fast. The visitor has just left a conversation that answered instantly. Slow pages lose exactly the people you paid for.
2. Answer on the first screen. The first screen repeats the question from the intent and answers it in plain words. No hero slogan, no carousel.
3. Matching the intent, one page per group. A “compare” intent leads to a comparison; a “ready to buy” intent leads to the product or booking page. Sending everyone to the home page is the most common way to waste this budget.
4. Form or booking above the fold. A short form, a calendar or a “buy” button visible without scrolling, followed by proof (reviews, case studies, numbers) for those who need more.
5. The same proof point as the ad. If the ad promised a 30-day home trial, the page shows that on the first screen.
6. Mobile first. Check the page on a real smartphone, not only in a desktop emulator.

If you sell products, keep your product feed in order too: the emerging standards are ACP (Stripe, OpenAI and Meta) and UCP (Google together with Shopify).

Step 7. Tracking: UTM, GA4 events, CRM source and assisted conversions

ChatGPT often names a brand without a link, so last-click reporting will undercount this channel. Build your measurement before you spend the first dollar.

UTM on every landing URL. For example: ?utm_source=chatgpt&utm_medium=paid_ai&utm_campaign=clinic_prewedding&utm_content=compare_group

GA4 events. Define the events that matter before launch: form_submit, booking_confirmed, trial_started, purchase. Mark them as key events and make sure they fire on the landing pages from Step 6, not only in the site’s main template.

CRM source “chatgpt_ads”. Every lead that arrives with the UTM above gets the source chatgpt_ads in the CRM. Sales marks it as qualified or not, and you get cost per qualified lead, the number that decides whether the channel stays.

Assisted conversions. Because the brand can be mentioned without a link:

• Add a “How did you hear about us?” field with “ChatGPT / AI assistant” as an option.
• Watch branded search volume and direct traffic during the test compared with the four weeks before it.
• Compare this traffic’s conversion with organic and search ads; the difference is the argument for the channel.
• Report Share of Voice in ChatGPT answers alongside campaign metrics. This overlaps with organic AI visibility, covered in how to get your site indexed by ChatGPT.

Step 8. Week-by-week optimization checklist

Week 1: delivery

• Spend is close to the daily budget and impressions appear next to the intents you wrote, not unrelated topics; if not, narrow or split the groups.
• Every landing URL has a UTM, and every key event fires.

Week 2: engagement

• CTR per intent group. A figure well below the CTR benchmark mentioned above usually means the ad does not mirror the question.
• Landing page behavior: time on page and scroll depth per group; a fast bounce points to a gap between the ad and the page.
• Rewrite the two weakest ads, leave the rest unchanged.

Week 3: conversion

• Cost per lead and cost per qualified lead by group, from the CRM, not the ad dashboard.
• Move budget to groups that produce qualified leads; pause groups with clicks and no leads unless the sales cycle is long. Check the assisted signals from Step 7.

Week 4: scale test

• Raise the budget of the winning group and check whether cost per qualified lead holds.
• Draft the next 10 intents based on what actually converted.
• Write a one-page verdict: keep, stop or restructure.

Step 9. When to stop, and which channel to launch first

Stop or restructure when, after a full 30 days with the tracking from Step 7 in place:

• no intent group has produced a qualified lead at an acceptable cost even after optimization;
• impressions consistently appear next to topics unrelated to your intents, and splitting the groups did not fix it;
• landing pages convert AI traffic worse than search traffic. That is a page problem, and a bigger budget will not solve it.

Do not stop because the CTR is below 1%, because the first week produced no leads, or because clicks cost more than in Google Search. All three are normal for this channel.

If you are choosing between ChatGPT Ads and Microsoft AI Max, here is how we choose:

According to Financial Times reporting, Perplexity closed its advertising program in February 2026, and in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode there are no separate ad placements to buy: ads from existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns become eligible there automatically, and the advertiser can neither target that placement separately nor opt out of it (Google Ads Help). So the real choice is between ChatGPT Ads and Microsoft AI Max.

At MOVE we run this sequence as a service: eligibility check and entity choice, account setup, intent mapping with your sales team, creative, landing pages, tracking and the weekly optimization loop, from 15% of ad spend. If you want the channel launched and managed rather than learning from your own mistakes, see AI advertising or contact us: we start with a 30-minute call about your entity, your offer and your first ten intents.