Seven months after OpenAI started selling ads in ChatGPT, marketers are still asking how they’re supposed to measure them. It has become the sticking point in almost every conversation Digiday has had about the company’s progress as an ad seller. Part of the frustration comes from a sense that OpenAI hasn’t built much beyond the basics. Marketers’ own reluctance to trust the company with their data accounts for the rest.
On the product side, agencies running campaigns describe gaps that would be unusual on Google or Meta. Accuracast ran a U.K. lead-gen campaign on ChatGPT alone and watched the form fills come in, but two weeks later the platform still showed zero conversions. Accuracast’s group CEO Farhad Divecha, said the problem on Google and Meta tends to be the opposite, with the platforms claiming more conversions than they drove. The same agency found ChatGPT reporting around 100 clicks where its own tracking picked up 20, and OpenAI’s support team at the time couldn’t say why.
It’s far from a universal problem, though. Execs from AdRoll, Jellyfish and another independent U.S. ad agency said their execs hadn’t seen click discrepancies. For Web Guide Partner, though, it’s more about the timing of those insights. Where conversions do register on ChatGPT, the agency sees them arrive 24 to 36 hours late, against a few hours on Google. Reporting carries no demographic or prompt data.
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