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In this newsletter, youâll find:
đ° Five steps to a ChatGPT ads test your finance team will approve and believe
đ ChatGPT gets new business tools as AI search changes how brands get discovered
đ Ad of the Day
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Together with New Engen
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If your Meta account has stalled, another month of the same creative gives you little new to work with.
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đ° Five steps to a ChatGPT ads test your finance team will approve and believe
Q1 budgets are being set now. The person proposing a ChatGPT ads test will hear two questions: what will it cost, and how will we know it worked? Hereâs whatâs known, per PPC.ioâs October 17 guide. Bidding is CPM or CPC.
OpenAI publishes no rate card or minimum. Third-party guides quote $25 to $60 CPM. Reporting is aggregate, and OpenAI points advertisers to geo tests with partners such as Haus, Measured, and WorkMagic to prove lift.
Step 1: Price a click three ways
At a $25 CPM, a 0.6% click-through rate means about $4.17 a click, 1% means $2.50, and 2% means $1.25. The 0.6% figure is the one named advertiser result in that guide. Plan on the middle and show the range.
Step 2: Size the spend
Say you need 40 purchases to judge the channel, and paid visitors convert at 2%. Thatâs 2,000 clicks: $5,000 at $2.50, about $8,340 at $4.17. Illustrative, so swap in your conversion rate.
Step 3: Design the holdout
Platform-reported conversions canât prove the ads caused sales. A geo test can. Split comparable regions into two groups with similar sales over the last eight weeks. Run ads in one group only, for four weeks. Ask a measurement partner to set it up, or check whether your account can restrict delivery by region.
Then do the math. Before the test, test regions sold 1.0 times what holdout regions sold. During it, test regions sell 1,150 orders and holdout regions 1,000. Incremental orders: 1,150 minus 1,000 = 150. On $6,000 of spend, thatâs $40 per incremental order. If the platform reported 220 conversions, 70 would have happened anyway. All numbers are illustrative.
Step 4: Set the bar and show the evidence
Agree in writing before launch: an incremental cost per new customer within 20% of paid search means expand. That threshold is my judgment.
Then show why your angle is worth testing. The AirOps ChatGPT Ad Library lists 6,000+ brands. Search competitors by brand name or domain to see their ad messaging, then explore the prompts where those ads appeared. Two or three real examples next to your angle answer âwhy this testâ before anyone asks. You can explore the ChatGPT Ad Library here.
Step 5: Write the one-page memo
Angle, budget range, holdout design, success bar, competitor examples, and a four-week timeline with no mid-test edits.
Today
Pull your paid search cost per new customer and weekly sales by region for the last eight weeks. The memo and the holdout both start there.
đ ChatGPT gets new business tools as AI search changes how brands get discovered
OpenAI is working on new ways for businesses to track their presence in ChatGPT and manage advertising costs, while developments in AI crawling and content optimization are changing how websites get discovered and used by AI assistants.
The Breakdown:
OpenAI is testing a Business Hub that shows how often brands appear in ChatGPT answers and how many website clicks they receive, with options to update business details and answer customer questions through AI agents.
ChatGPT Ads now lets advertisers set a target cost per conversion or click, with AI automatically adjusting bids toward those goals. The older Max Bid and Max CPC options will be discontinued on January 1, 2027.
OpenAI is paying Cloudflare to identify when websites update their content, helping its crawler avoid unnecessary visits. Meanwhile, Brave faces lawsuits over selling website data to AI companies without a separate crawler opt-out.
A study of 15 YouTube videos found that better-structured descriptions increased AI retrievals by 359%, compared with 17% for unchanged videos, although the study couldnât confirm that descriptions alone caused the increase.
Businesses are getting more ways to measure and improve how they appear in AI-generated answers. From tracking ChatGPT mentions to making existing content easier for AI to find, these developments could help marketers understand where their visibility comes from and how to improve it.
đ Ad of the Day
What Works:
Skin Sells Outcome - The close-up face makes glow the hero benefit before shoppers even read the copy, turning the modelâs skin into visual proof and strengthening product desirability.
Offer Feels Immediate - â15% off your first orderâ plus âthis week onlyâ combines acquisition incentive with urgency, giving first-time shoppers a clear reason to convert now.
CTA Closes Cleanly - The large âShop the serumâ button sits directly beneath the product and face, creating strong CTA clarity while keeping the conversion path simple on mobile.
For skincare, let the modelâs skin demonstrate the promise, then support it with one focused product, one offer and one unmistakable CTA.
đEvents
đ„ How to Show What Your AI Search Budget Actually Bought
November 20 | 2 PM ET | Virtual Event
Google Meridian creator Hitesh Wadhwani and AirOps COO Matt Hammel break down how to quantify AI search exposure, distinguish recommendations from simple mentions, and bring that signal into marketing mix models. Leave with the exact measurement gaps to fix before your next budget review.
Canât attend the session live? Register anyway, and youâll get the recordings in 24 hours.
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