We tested ChatGPT Ads with a small budget budget: €6 per signup and one weird result

 

TL;DR

In September 2026 we ran Grafista's first ads inside ChatGPT, in Greece, Cyprus and the UK. We spent €213.74 and got 38,247 impressions, 1,082 clicks and 35 signups, almost all from Greece. That works out to about €6 per signup. The weird part: our impressions campaign got clicks for €0.12 each, while the two campaigns built to get clicks paid €1.13 and €1.67.

Grafista is an AI design tool for founders, SMEs and marketing teams. You add content for a social media post, presentation, flyer or brochure, and it generates a fully editable design. People already ask ChatGPT "how do I make a flyer" or "what's a Canva alternative for presentations" every day, so putting an ad right under that answer felt like an obvious test. Here is what €214 taught us, plus a step-by-step guide if you want to run your own.

 

The setup: 3 campaigns, 6 ads, €230 of budget

We kept it small on purpose. Three campaigns, staggered over about two and a half weeks:

• Impressions campaign, Greece and Cyprus. €100 budget, started 15 September. Two ads: one for flyers and decks, one for AI social media posts.
• Clicks campaign, UK. €65 budget, 20 to 26 September. One ad, the same flyers and decks creative.
• Clicks campaign, Greece. €65 budget, 25 September to 2 October. Three ads: social posts, presentations, and flyers and decks.

Every ad was a single image of real Grafista designs, a short headline ("AI presentations", "AI social posts", "Generate flyers, decks...") and a one-line description. Nothing fancy. We wanted to see what the platform does with plain, honest ads before getting clever.

 

The results: €6.11 per signup

Across all three campaigns we spent €213.74 for 1,082 clicks, an average of €0.20 per click. 35 of those clicks became Grafista signups, a 3.2% click-to-signup rate and €6.11 per signup. Almost every signup came from Greece. Here is each campaign for 20 September to 3 October:

The impressions campaign also ran 15 to 19 September, before the other two started. Counting those days, it used its full €100 budget for roughly 1,000 clicks.

 

The weird part: impressions beat clicks at getting clicks

A campaign built to get clicks should get more clicks per euro. Ours did the opposite, by a factor of 9 to 14. The gap comes from two numbers multiplying each other:

• Cheaper views. The impressions campaign paid €4 per 1,000 impressions. The clicks campaigns ended up paying €7.65 (Greece) and €13.56 (UK) per 1,000. Same euro, 2 to 3 times fewer people seeing the ad.
• More clicks per view. The impressions campaign hit a 3.20% CTR. The clicks campaigns hit 0.67% and 0.81%. For context, Lapis, an agency running ChatGPT ads, calls 0.5% a solid first week and 1% top quartile.

Why the CTR gap? Honestly, we don't know, and OpenAI doesn't document how delivery changes per objective. What we can rule out:

• Not the creative: The exact same ad, Grafista Ad 1, got 3.34% CTR in the impressions campaign and 0.81% in the UK clicks campaign.
• Not just the country: The Greek clicks campaign did even worse than the UK one, at 0.67%.
• Not bots: Almost all 35 signups came from Greece, and roughly 96% of our Greek clicks came from the impressions campaign. Cheap clicks, real people.

Our best guess is that each objective places ads in different conversations, and the impressions campaign happened to find people asking about design. It also ran first and longest. The two clicks campaigns produced 82 clicks combined, which is too little data to say more. One small bonus: inside the impressions campaign, the system gave one of the ads 94% of all impressions. It picked the winner on its own, fast.

 

How to create OpenAI ads in 6 steps

ChatGPT ads show up below ChatGPT's answer, labelled as sponsored. Only people on the Free and Go plans see them. Plus and higher plans stay ad-free. Ads reached 31 European markets on 24 August 2026, and the self-serve Ads Manager followed in early September. Here is the setup we went through:

1. Create an advertiser account: Go to ads.openai.com, sign in with an OpenAI account, and fill in your business details: legal name, website and industry. Add a billing profile and a card.
2. Install the pixel first: Go to Tools > Conversions > + Create > Data source, name it, and paste the code on your site. Then create a conversion event (a signup, a purchase, a booked call) and add its code to the page where that action happens.
3. Create the campaign: Go to Campaigns > + Create > Create campaign. If Ads Manager suggests a ready-made campaign, pick "Create from scratch" instead. Set the name, objective (reach, clicks or conversions), locations, budget and dates. In Europe the minimum is €15 per day, and you can also set a total budget for the whole campaign.
4. Write your context hints in the ad group: ChatGPT has no keywords or interest targeting. You describe the conversations you want in plain language, up to 280 characters. For a design tool, a hint could read: "Founders, small business owners or marketers asking how to design a flyer, social media post or presentation, or comparing tools like Canva, Gamma or Visme."
5. Build the ads: Each ad is a headline (up to 50 characters), a description (up to 100) and a square image. On some phones the headline gets cut after 16 to 23 characters and the description after about 50, so put the point first. Add UTM parameters to your landing page URL so your analytics can tell ChatGPT traffic apart. Launch 2 or 3 variants per ad group so the system has something to choose from.
6. Submit and wait for review. Lapis reports most ads get approved in 2 to 6 hours, up to 24 for manual review. OpenAI doesn't allow ads about politics or health, so check the policy if you're near either.