ChatGPT Ads vs Google Ads (Episode 525)

Chris Chaefer spent a small budget testing ChatGPT’s new advertising platform for his own PPC management business. His ads reached thousands of people across the United States and generated plenty of clicks. But no one contacted him. No leads, no conversions, no way to tell whether the clicks came from people who might actually need his services. That outcome, while not surprising for a small test, led him to a larger realization: ChatGPT Ads is nearly opaque to advertisers, and that lack of transparency throws Google’s real strengths into sharp relief.

What ChatGPT Ads actually shows you

When Chaefer logged into the ChatGPT Ads dashboard, he saw impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and cost per click. If a conversion had occurred, it would have appeared too. That was the entire dataset. There was no way to see which search queries triggered his ad, what users were looking for, what time of day they clicked, what device they used, or where they were located. He could not confirm that the right kind of people were seeing his ads, let alone whether the ad copy was resonating. “I can’t make any kind of assessment other than say, well this ad group got a certain click through rate and it did or didn’t get a conversion,” he said. The platform gave him no context for his spending.