ChatGPT ads are coming to Europe

Topical and location-based ads, but no personalization

First of all, it’s good to know that OpenAI does not intend to start showing personalized ads (yet) in this first rollout on a for them quite foreign continent. Throughout the first months, the focus will be on topic- and location targeted ads. In addition to these options, advertisers will get the option to target (or more likely, exclude) specific devices in their campaign settings.

This careful rollout sets them apart from companies like Meta and Google, where hyper-personalized ads have always been part of the core of their advertising platforms. A more limited set of targeting options of course begs the question of how relevant advertising through ChatGPT will be. But OpenAI’s showpiece software platform has of course one big win opposed to its search ad competitors: topical advertising.

Google’s broad match keywords and AI max audiences have always done their best to find the right people, through a more broad lens than just your classic exact match keywords. Fact is, that conversational interfaces like ChatGPT and Claude, offer a way broader and more semantic type of search. Keywords are replaced by conversational search terms, grouped into grounding queries. That opens up a world of possibilities for advertisers, with hopefully more insights than the more black-box-methods like Google’s Performance Max.

Your next steps to hit the ground running

Of course, a new platform comes with a lot of questions, and it’s always preferable to have the answers ready beforehand. No worries, I’ve got you covered. Here’s your setup guide to a flying start with ChatGPT ads:

Prepare your target audience

Step one is to create your target audience. This is done in a slightly different way than you might be used to: through something OpenAI calls ‘Context hints’. Context hints are simply descriptions of the conversations, topics, and keywords that you want to target. As the name suggests, this is not limited to just keywords, but gives you the opportunity to give real body and broadness to your ad group’s targeting. So that’s where you start out: think of all locations and contexts in which your audience could potentially be interested in your ad content. Be creative! Note: location targeting is done in campaign settings, and does not have to be included in your context hints, but stuff like your DMU might very well be interesting to include.

Get your ad content ready

As with any advertising platform, you’ll need to prepare ad content. I know, it might not be your favorite thing to do, same here, but prepping a lot of ad variations beforehand, will save you a lot of go-to-launch time, when the time comes that ChatGPT Ads unlock in your country. What you’ll need is, luckily, very basic ad content: a headline, a description, a website URL, and images. Note: ad images are not optional but mandatory, and adding videos is not yet an option at this point in time. Prep a few ad groups and ad variations, so you can start off with some good old A/B testing.

Don’t forget to sort out your tracking

When starting off on a new platform, you of course want to start running ads as soon as possible. But before you start bombarding your eager customers with ads, please make sure that you sort out your tracking settings properly. Set up and validate your tracking pixel, conversion events, maybe even some soft conversions. There have been some reports of tracking issues as well, so make sure to always include proper UTM variables for all of your landing pages as well, to make sure that everything is measured properly.