OpenAI has positioned its ChatGPT ad placements at the upper end of the price spectrum, asking advertisers to pay premium rates that sources say rival the cost of sought-after televised video inventory. According to people familiar with early buys, those rates exceed what some large digital platforms such as Meta charge.
At the same time, advertisers told media buyers they are receiving only foundational metrics about campaign performance. The data being shared with early partners consists of impressions - the number of times an ad is viewed - and total clicks across placements, according to a media buyer working with some of the initial advertisers.
An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the company will supply advertisers with high-level insights, including aggregate counts of ad views. That level of reporting was described by the spokesperson as similar to the kind of summary metrics television networks traditionally provide to their advertising clients.
What is not being provided today are finer-grained analytics. OpenAI, at least in the initial rollout, is not supplying advertisers with information on the query responses that accompanied ads or whether users who saw ads then completed specific actions such as making purchases or visiting external websites.
Observers in the advertising and technology communities note that more comprehensive measurement - for example, linking an ad impression to a query response or to downstream user actions - would demand additional engineering and more sophisticated ad tooling. While they say such capabilities could be introduced later, doing so would require time to design, build and deploy those systems.
The current approach positions ChatGPT ad inventory as costly but measured with metrics that are intentionally high level. Advertisers weighing the trade-off are being asked to accept television-style summary reporting in exchange for access to a platform commanding premium rates. How those advertisers ultimately assess the value of that trade-off may depend on whether OpenAI expands its analytics offerings over time.