ChatGPT advertising opens in Finland: how the platform works

ChatGPT advertising is now open in Finland and across Europe. OpenAI opened the self-serve platform to European advertisers on September 1, 2026, and you can create an account at ads.openai.com. The platform has grown fast: advertising launched in the United States in February 2026, and according to OpenAI there are already tens of thousands of advertisers. Here’s Mediashake’s first look at the platform: what an advertiser should know right now.

The short version for busy readers

ChatGPT shows ads only to users on the free Free and low-cost Go tiers. The ad manager is structured like Google Ads and Meta: campaigns, ad groups and ads in the same hierarchy. Targeting is based on the context of the conversation and the advertiser’s context hints, not keywords. The pricing models are CPM, CPC and conversion-optimized oCPC, and the minimum daily budget in Finland is 15 €/day per campaign. The ad format is stripped down: a headline of up to 50 characters, a 100-character description and one square image. Conversion tracking works with a pixel and a Conversions API, much like on Meta.

Where and to whom the ads show

The ad appears below ChatGPT’s answer, clearly labeled, with the advertiser’s name, logo, headline, description and image. Ads are shown only to adult users on the free Free tier and the low-cost Go tier.

Users on the pricier subscription tiers are out of advertising’s reach, which is worth factoring into your audience math. According to OpenAI, ads don’t influence ChatGPT’s answers, and advertisers don’t see users’ conversations. Ads are never placed next to sensitive topics such as health or politics.

Advertising is a different thing from showing up organically in ChatGPT’s answers. We cover the organic side, AI visibility, in more depth on our AI search expertise page.

The structure is familiar to every advertiser

If you’ve built a campaign in Google Ads or Meta, you can build one in ChatGPT. The hierarchy is the same: the campaign sets the objective and budget, the ad group handles targeting, and the ad carries the message.

There are three campaign objectives: reach, clicks and conversions. The objective and budget type can’t be changed after creation, so choose them carefully. Campaigns can also be bulk-imported and bulk-edited as CSV files, which speeds up building larger structures considerably.

Targeting runs on context hints

The most interesting difference from other platforms is contextual targeting. For each ad group you write context hints: verbal descriptions of the kinds of conversations, needs and situations your product or service relates to. OpenAI’s own example makes it concrete: “running shoes” is a weak hint, “cushioned everyday running shoes for beginners training for their first 5K” is a good one.

Context hints are not exact-match keywords and don’t guarantee showing up in specific conversations. They help the system understand when your ad is relevant. In practice you should still split ad groups by theme like in Google Ads: one ad group per topic or customer need.

You can also target by location and platform (iOS app, Android app, web).

Budget and pricing: CPM, CPC and oCPC

The minimum daily budget in Finland is 15 €/day per campaign. You can set a daily budget or a total campaign budget. The daily budget is an average over a seven-day period: spend on a single day can go up to double the daily budget, but spend over the seven-day period won’t exceed seven times the daily budget. The same practice as on Google.

There are three pricing models. Reach campaigns are bought on CPM, the price per thousand impressions. Click campaigns are bought on CPC, and OpenAI recommends starting with a maximum bid of 3–5 dollars per click. Conversion campaigns use the oCPC model: you set a bid cap per conversion, but billing still happens per click, and the bid cap is not a guaranteed acquisition cost. New ad groups default to the automatic Maximize results strategy, with a manual maximum bid as the alternative.

Ad slots are allocated through a relevance-weighted second-price auction. In practice the winner doesn’t pay their own bid; the price is set by the next-highest bid, and a more relevant ad can beat a higher one. The same principle is familiar from Google search ads and Meta’s auction, so you can set your maximum bid at your true maximum without fear of overpaying.

The ad format is stripped down

Creating an ad in the ad manager. On the right, a preview of how the ad looks in ChatGPT.

An ad has a headline, a description and one square image. The headline maxes out at 50 characters and the description at 100, so the fields are in Google Ads territory but clearly shorter than Meta’s ad copy. OpenAI recommends going even tighter: a 16–24 character headline and a 32–48 character description. If you want to test multiple images, each one gets its own ad.

It’s hard not to think of the early days of Facebook advertising, when ad images were the size of a postage stamp and the copy was tiny. The same applies here: room for creative testing is limited when a small image has to catch attention and very short copy has to stand out. That’s why precise copy beats clever copy.

OpenAI’s own guidance on ad copy is clear: specific, benefit-led copy works better than slogans. It pays to create several clearly different ad variations per offering, because a diverse set of ads helps the system find more situations where your ad is relevant.

One setting worth noticing right away: text customization is on by default, meaning AI creates adapted and translated versions of your headlines and descriptions that can be shown without separate approval. A familiar pattern from Google Ads automation, so go through the automation settings before launching a campaign.

Conversion tracking and your own data

Conversion tracking closely resembles Meta’s model: the OpenAI Pixel on your site, the Conversions API on the server side, and the most reliable measurement comes from using both. Set up tracking before your very first campaign, because without it the conversion objective has nothing to optimize toward. Conversions appear in reporting with a 24–48 hour delay.

UTM parameters can be added at the ad group level, for example for Google Analytics, and they persist through clicks, so you’ll see the traffic in your own analytics right away.

Audiences can be built from your own customer lists using email addresses or phone numbers, and used for inclusion, exclusion or bid multipliers. Inclusion targeting and bid multipliers require at least 25,000 matched users per OpenAI’s guidance, which limits them to large consumer brands. Smaller lists can still be used for exclusion. In Europe there’s also an open question about how well lists will match: personalized ads are not initially available in the EEA, and OpenAI hasn’t said whether that restriction also covers customer lists.

For ecommerce: feeds work, ROAS optimization is missing

Product feeds can be imported as CSV files, from a URL or over SFTP, much like in Google Merchant Center, and ad groups are built from the feed with product filters. According to OpenAI, feed-based ads have been among the platform’s best performers, so for ecommerce this is the natural place to start.

The other side is bid optimization: there’s no ROAS strategy yet, so for now ecommerce advertisers optimize for conversion volume rather than revenue. Reporting does show order-based revenue and ROAS once purchase events are connected to tracking.

Is now the time to start?

We recommend trying it, because new ad channels always carry a potential early-adopter advantage: competition is thin at the start, prices reflect that, and new mechanics like context hints are only learned by doing. The platform is also growing at a pace worth noting: according to OpenAI, ChatGPT advertising passed a one billion dollar annualized run rate in under 200 days. It took Facebook about three years to cross the same line after opening self-serve advertising.

What matters most is that your account is fully in order from day one, above all analytics and conversion tracking before launch. Business verification is nothing to worry about: in our case, filling in the company details was enough and the review cleared in under an hour. A sensible start is a small budget and a few clearly scoped ad groups whose data teaches you how the platform behaves.

We help both with launching ChatGPT advertising and, more broadly, with how your company shows up in AI search. Read more about AI search as an expertise area or ChatGPT as a channel.