OpenAI's measurement gap is capping ChatGPT ad budgets

According to Digiday, seven months after OpenAI started selling ads in ChatGPT, marketers are still asking how they are supposed to measure them, and it has become the sticking point in almost every conversation the publication has had about the company as an ad seller, driven partly by a sense that OpenAI has not built much beyond the basics and partly by marketers' reluctance to hand over their data.

The specifics are uncomfortable. Digiday reports that the agency Accuracast ran a UK lead generationlead generationMarketing activities designed to attract and capture contact information from prospects interested in your offer, creating a pipeline of potential customers.View full definition → campaign on ChatGPT alone and watched form fills arrive while the platform still showed zero conversions two weeks later, and that the same agency saw around 100 clicks reported where its own tracking picked up 20, with OpenAI's support team unable to explain why. AdExchanger picked up the click discrepancy the next day, noting OpenAI could not explain it. Where conversions do register, Web Guide Partner told Digiday they land 24 to 36 hours late against a few hours on Google, and reporting carries no demographic or prompt data.

What is contested: the experience is not universal. Digiday says execs at AdRoll, Jellyfish and another independent US agency had not seen click discrepancies. The problems also only apply to advertisers who have switched conversion tracking on, and many have not, because doing so means signing OpenAI's tracking terms that plenty of legal teams refuse on liability grounds. That leaves a loop: advertisers want Google-grade optimisation, but OpenAI cannot deliver it without the conversion data those same advertisers will not share.

Why it matters for budget owners: cost per clickcost per clickCost Per Click (CPC) is the average amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad. It is a core pricing metric for paid search and social advertising.View full definition → now accounts for most ChatGPT ad spend, according to Digiday, and Jellyfish's Victor Batista said the bigger shift comes when OpenAI optimises toward cost per acquisitioncost per acquisitionCost Per Acquisition: the total cost to generate one customer or conversion, computed by dividing total spend by the number of acquisitions.View full definition → or return on ad spendreturn on ad spendReturn on Ad Spend (ROAS) measures the revenue generated for every unit of currency spent on advertising, calculated as revenue divided by ad cost.View full definition →, which requires OpenAI to trust its own numbers first; until then advertisers bid with little to go on.

What to watch: independent measurement. OpenAI's ads and monetisation lead Asad Awan told a press briefing that third-party measurement was in the works without partners or a timeline. LiveRamp has since become the first independent ad tech company piping conversion data into OpenAI's conversions APIAPIApplication Programming Interface: a standardised interface that lets applications communicate and exchange data without knowing each other's internal workings.View full definition →, scoped to the US and select mutual clients. AppsFlyer and Adjust are signed as mobile measurement partners.