Choice OMG's $415 ChatGPT Ads Test Nets 60 Clicks, No Sales

August 29, 2026 · mediapost.com

Nine thousand impressions arrived from a $415 ChatGPT Ads test that Peter Jaffray, managing director at Choice OMG in Edmonton, ran across three campaigns in June 2026 targeting Ontario and Alberta. He had forecast about 4,000 impressions for the two-week run, and the campaign delivered more than double that count, with a clickthrough rate of 0.6%, well under the 2% he typically sees from search ads. The 60 clicks cost about $7 apiece and came from real IP addresses, Jaffray said, though none of those visitors engaged with the site after landing or completed a purchase. OpenAI introduced geotargeting, custom audiences, conversion optimization and its Pixel Conversions API only in August 2026, months after Jaffray's test ran.

Tracking gaps compound the performance problem. Nicholas Verity, CEO of B2B lead-generation agency Cleverly, paused his own ChatGPT Ads test after OpenAI's dashboard reported 57 clicks while Google Analytics, tagged with UTMs, recorded fewer than 20 visits from the same traffic. "So if the platform's own numbers don't match reality, either the metrics are unreliable or it is double-counting clicks from the same user," Verity wrote on LinkedIn, adding he could not justify further spend on the channel. Daniel Johnson of We Scale Startups and Ryan Edwards of Camino5 reported comparable mismatches between OpenAI's reported clicks and their own analytics. Budgets aimed at ChatGPT Ads work best treated as a research line until OpenAI's measurement matches what independent analytics tools show, agencies said.