When ChatGPT ads were first announced to be coming to the UK, we immediately got ourselves on the waitlist. Well, as of a few weeks ago we were let into the beta and we’ve had a snoop around and we’re here to report on our findings!
As you'd expect from a beta product, things are fairly stripped back at the moment. There aren't pages of settings or advanced features to get lost in. Instead, the focus is on getting campaigns live quickly while OpenAI continues to develop the platform.
Right now, there are just three campaign objectives to choose from: Reach, Clicks, and Conversions.
If your goal is driving measurable business results, you would naturally lean towards the Conversions objective, although the right choice will always depend on what you're trying to achieve.
Targeting is equally straightforward. You can choose the locations you want to reach, then set either a daily budget or a total campaign budget. That's about as complex as it gets.
Instead of building campaigns around keywords, you provide a prompt describing the types of conversations you'd like your ads to appear alongside. ChatGPT then uses that context to decide when your business is relevant.
It's an interesting reflection of where search is heading. As we've explored in our article on Google AI Max, platforms are increasingly moving beyond exact keyword matching and towards understanding user intent. Google is evolving in that direction, but ChatGPT has been built around conversational intent from day one. Advertising on the platform naturally follows the same principle, making intent the foundation rather than something layered onto a traditional search model.
The platform is still in beta, so we're not drawing any big conclusions just yet. What we're seeing today is almost certainly the starting point rather than the finished product.
As more features are introduced and advertisers spend more time testing the platform, we'll continue to share what we learn. For now, it's another sign that advertising is becoming less about matching keywords and more about understanding what people are really trying to achieve.