Set up the campaign in Ads Manager

Open the account at ads.openai.com. Build one campaign with one ad group per need. Choose conversions billed on impressions once your events are live. Set $25 a day and a manual bid cap for three days. Target the states you are licensed in, write short hints, run two ads, turn creative enhancement off, and read quotes started on day 14.

Setup takes under an hour. Most of the mistakes happen in that hour.

Leave the $100 default budget, and your $350 test costs $1,400. Pick Clicks when your pixel is live, and the campaign never learns what a quote looks like. Leave creative enhancement on, and AI rewrites copy your compliance officer signed. Seven steps. Here’s each one.

Step 1: open the account

Go to ads.openai.com and sign in with a ChatGPT account. The new onboarding asks for your website and drafts a first ad and campaign from it. Edit it or discard it.

Name the account. Pick the country, currency and time zone. Those three cannot be changed afterwards, so pick the ones the business reports in.

Add a card. Billing is postpaid, charged when unpaid spend reaches a threshold or at month end, and nothing serves without a payment method. Expect a business verification step. Guides quoting OpenAI’s help text put it at up to seven business days. As an insurer, have your licensure ready, because the financial-services policy says OpenAI may ask for it.

Using an agency? The advertiser owns the account and the agency is added as a user. Invite as Member, then upgrade to Admin. The direct Admin invite failed in one agency’s test.

Step 2: build the campaign

The structure is Campaign, then ad group, then ads. Objective, budget and geography sit on the campaign. Context hints and bids sit on the ad group. Copy and image sit on the ad.

One campaign for the test. One ad group per need: renters in Ohio is one, auto for teen drivers in Texas is another. Two ads in each.

OpenAI’s second best practice is fewer, better-funded campaigns. Its example: a budget split across two campaigns beats the same budget across ten. On $25 a day that means one campaign and at most two ad groups. Split it further and the learning never finishes.

Step 3: objective, budget and bid

Objective. Conversions, billed on impressions, if your pixel and server events are live before launch (Chapter 6). It learns from the click and from the person who saw the ad and started a quote the next day on a laptop. Tracking not ready? Choose Clicks for the first week and switch. You cannot change the objective on a running campaign, so that means a new one.

Free ad money. Look for a sign-up offer in Ads Manager. Ours said spend $500, get $500 back. If yours does, plan 20 days instead of 14: 20 days at $25 is $500, the credit kicks in, and it pays for the next 20 days. No offer? Run the 14 days and decide.

Budget. $25 a day, the minimum. The form pre-fills $100. Change it. Spend can reach $50 on a single day and $175 in a week on a $25 budget, so set the expectation with finance before the first invoice.

Bid. Two choices: Maximize results, or a manual maximum. OpenAI recommends automatic. Here’s what I do on a new account: a manual cap of $5 for the first three days, so one bad hint cannot spend the week. Then automatic once conversions arrive. Nothing serving by day three? Raise the cap $1 a day. Symphonic’s B2B test needed $12 before it spent. Workshop’s averaged $3.14. Consumer insurance should sit nearer the second.

Step 4: targeting

• Location. Include the US and the states you are licensed in. Exclude the rest explicitly. Don’t hand-pick ZIP codes for a test. It fragments the budget, and after the Brookings finding on income and delivery, it is a choice you would have to defend.
• Platform. Leave all five on (iOS app, Android app, iOS web, Android web, desktop web). Read the device split on day 7.
• Custom audiences. Skip inclusion until you have 25,000 matched people. Do use exclusion: upload hashed policyholder emails so the acquisition ad stops showing to customers. No minimum for exclusion.
• Negative Phrases. Only for qualifying advertisers, announced October 5. Not part of a first test.

Step 5: context hints and the two ads

Five to ten hints per ad group. Each one a sentence that describes the offer, who it helps and the situation. Examples are in Chapter 4. Not a keyword list. Not a list of exclusions.

Two ads per ad group. Same headline and description with two images (logo against a picture of the moment), or same image with two specifics. Headline inside 24 characters. Description inside 48. Square image of at least 640 pixels. Landing page that answers the prompt.

Then find the creative-enhancement toggle on the ad and turn it off.

Step 6: the checks before launch

1. The pixel fires on the quote page and the thank-you page. Watch the event stream in Ads Manager and see the events arrive.
2. Server events deduplicate against the pixel (same event ID). The Event Quality Score is above 7.
3. HubSpot is connected with Auto tracking on, so UTMs are added and contacts attribute to the ad.
4. The landing page loads without a sign-in wall, and OpenAI’s crawler is not blocked in robots.txt.
5. The licence line, the state and any filed disclosures are on the page. Creative enhancement is off on every ad.
6. The daily budget reads $25, not $100.

Step 7: the 14-day readout

Days one to three: do nothing. No bid changes. No new hints. Check the Event Quality Score each morning and the spend each evening.

Day seven, the first read: impressions, clicks, cost per click, and clicks that reached the site as sessions. Ad hasn’t served at all? Raise the cap. Served, but clicks are not reaching the site? The problem is the page, not the ad.

Day fourteen, the decision: quotes started per $100 spent, by ad and by ad group. Not click rate. Click rates on this platform sit under 1% and tell you little.

Compare the cost of a started quote to what Google gives you for the same line. Then decide: keep and widen to a second state, rewrite the losing ad, or stop. Write the three numbers that would trigger each decision before day one, as Search Engine Journal advises, so the readout cannot talk you into anything.

FAQs

What if I cannot get conversions billed on impressions?

It has to be enabled on the account, and a few accounts are still click-only. Run Clicks with the pixel live for the two weeks. The conversion data accrues either way, and the next campaign can switch.

Can I pause for the weekend?

There is no ad scheduling. You can pause the campaign by hand. For a 14-day test, don’t. Weekend prompts are real, and the learning period restarts if you keep stopping it.

How do I run the same test in three states?

Three campaigns with the same ad groups, which is what bulk CSV upload is for. But not on $25 a day each in the first two weeks. One state first.

Does the $500 credit cover the test?

Only if your account shows the offer, and only once you’ve spent $500. A 14-day test at $25 is $350, so it stops short. Run 20 days and you hit $500 and unlock it. OpenAI shows this offer inside Ads Manager when you sign up. It isn’t on a public page, and the amount isn’t the same for everyone: trade press reported $50 and $100 versions earlier this year. We saw $500, and OpenAI showed the same offer in its own webinar demo.