Advertisers testing ChatGPT are eager for more campaign control and measurement tools

If you build it, they will come. And as OpenAI builds ChatGPT’s fledgling advertising business, the marketers are coming—slowly but surely.

With the platform crossing 1 billion monthly app users in May, according to Sensor Tower, some advertisers said they feel compelled to hop on the channel—at least to try it out.

“As a brand whose consumer is parents looking to keep their kids safe online, it would be crazy to not test that channel,” said Titania Jordan, CMO and chief parenting officer at digital safety firm Bark Technologies, which provides services including monitoring kids’ online activity. “We want to be where the parents are.”

But marketers told us that those tests have also revealed a number of product gaps that some advertisers would like to see filled from the platform, they told us, including more sophisticated campaign toggles and more comprehensive measurement tools.

Early bird gets the worm?

Bark began advertising on ChatGPT in May of this year because it was finding that parents were using ChatGPT and other tools like Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude to ask safety-related questions, Jordan told us; common queries included, “Is Roblox safe?” Since then, Bark has used ChatGPT ads to connect with users on topics around children’s online safety. One ad from the brand appearing on ChatGPT that Marketing Brew reviewed offers guidance on the “best phone for kids.”

Jordan said it’s still too early to glean much insight into ChatGPT ad campaign performance.

Marketers at subscription meat-delivery service ButcherBox were also interested in investing in ChatGPT ads given how “top of mind” LLMs are for marketers right now, Leah Melnick, VP of growth marketing at the company, said; the brand began trying out ads in March. While ChatGPT ads make up only a small part of the brand’s overall media mix at the moment, the brand is seeing an increase in click-through rate and traffic from them.

ButcherBox’s strategy for courting consumers on ChatGPT involves emulating keywords and ad copy that have performed well for the brand on its Google search campaigns, she said. So far, ButcherBox’s highest-performing query signals stem from topics like protein, meal prep, and overall diet.

However, Melnick said that ChatGPT lacks certain “levers” for customizing campaigns, such as the ability to set the desired search volume for a campaign.

“There just is a little bit less control than maybe a Meta would [have],” she said. “The levers in ChatGPT are just low right now. I think we’re very curious to continue to evolve this and see how we can actually get it to grow to be a real channel mix.”

Wish list

It’s not just more campaign toggles that some advertisers want embedded in ChatGPT. Some are also waiting on the platform to provide more measurement offerings. So far, OpenAI announced pixel-based measurement in ChatGPT in May.

While it’s early days for ChatGPT ads, OpenAI plans to expand measurement, formats, objectives, and offerings for campaign management in the future, Taya Christianson, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told Marketing Brew.

For now, marketers are finding alternate methods. At the agentic trust platform Vanta, where the team is looking to understand the impact of generative AI on consumer discovery, marketers are relying on internal attribution tools to measure campaigns on ChatGPT, Kaveh Motamed, head of growth marketing at the company, told us. Vanta’s team, which began advertising on ChatGPT in May, monitors top-of-funnel traffic, which includes examining whether Vanta’s ChatGPT campaigns are having a “halo impact on other channels,” he added. The company plans to explore tracking tools that OpenAI may roll out in the future.

ButcherBox has been relying on urchin tracking module (UTM) data, among other tools, to get a sense of how its ChatGPT campaigns are performing, Melnick told us. Like Vanta, her team is eager for ChatGPT to offer more of its own measurement capabilities.

“The conversation around incrementality and scale is really the big one that’s on our minds right now,” she said.