ChatGPT Ad CTR Topped 1% In 4 Markets, Not In The U.S.: Report via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

ChatGPT ads received click-through rates between 0.6% and 0.75% for Free and Go users in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand through mid-September, based on a report by Graphite published on Sept. 29 that used data from the Similarweb panel. In Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and South Korea, the rates ranged from 1.21% to 1.91%.

The report, titled ‘The State of ChatGPT Ads,’ combines data from Similarweb’s user panel with Graphite’s review of U.S. ad copy and landing pages. Similarweb sells the ChatGPT ad tracking tool from which the panel data is sourced, while Graphite is a dedicated growth agency specializing in SEO and paid search strategies for its clients.

OpenAI’s help center notes that ChatGPT Ads currently lack performance benchmarks across different advertisers, industries, or campaign types.

CTR By Market

The report gives each market an all-time CTR for users on the Free and Go plans, measured from its first week in the data through Sept. 16. Brazil led at 1.91%, followed by Mexico at 1.55%, Japan at 1.53%, and South Korea at 1.21%.

The five English-language markets were closely grouped. Canada reached 0.75%, the U.K. 0.74%, the U.S. 0.73%, Australia 0.67%, and New Zealand 0.6%.

The markets don’t cover the same stretch of time, and the report says each has between five and 25 weeks of data. OpenAI began testing ads in the U.S. on Feb. 9, and its Aug. 11 update to the same post said ads had launched in the U.K., Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea. The U.K. was part of that later group, and its rate was nearly identical to the U.S. rate.

What The Numbers Count

This report explains how CTR is calculated as the number of clicks per ad-bearing exchange, which includes one user message and ChatGPT’s response. So, it’s essentially the total clicks divided by the replies that contained an ad, pooled across all advertisers in each market.

The method notes mention that Similarweb provides percentages and shares rather than exact counts. This means we can’t determine from the report how many individual users and replies contribute to each market’s rate.

The report also describes its coverage as “all nine live markets.” OpenAI said on Aug. 18 that ChatGPT Ads would expand to 31 European countries the following week, and its Aug. 31 update said ChatGPT Ads was available in more than 40 countries. None of those 31 countries appear in the report’s per-market charts.

Top Advertisers Changed Week To Week

Only Jotform and Resume.io ranked among the 10 largest ChatGPT advertisers by worldwide impression share in all 20 weeks from May 4 to Sept. 14, according to the report. Cursor and Monday.com made the top 10 in 15 of those weeks, Booking.com in 10, and Design.com in eight.

The report says advertisers are in “experimentation mode.” Among the 100 largest U.S. advertisers, it groups Zapier, SAP, Aikido Security, and The Wall Street Journal as “gone,” with weekly impressions that rose and then fell away before Aug. 17 in the report’s charts.

By category, B2B SaaS accounted for 19.9% of U.S. ChatGPT ad impressions from March 30 to Aug. 4, across 1,210 advertisers led by Monday.com. Retail & Consumer Brands ranked second at 10.4%, across 1,510 advertisers led by Home Depot. Graphite assigned the categories for the advertisers behind 98.95% of U.S. impressions.

Graphite also writes that retail and ecommerce advertisers “have been largely absent from the platform,” and ties that to product feeds that didn’t fit ChatGPT’s chat format.

Why This Matters

Brooke Osmundson wrote on Sept. 8 that advertisers still have little context for judging what good ChatGPT Ads performance looks like.

This report gathers clicks from all advertisers and counts them by reply, so it reflects a different measurement than the CTR of a single campaign. In this data, ChatGPT ads in Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and South Korea received more clicks per reply than those in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. If we pooled the CTR across all markets, we might miss that important difference. The data covers different periods in each market, and since the report doesn’t show the separate counts behind the rates, it’s harder for advertisers to compare a campaign’s CTR directly with these rates.

Looking Ahead

The U.S. category data in the report concludes on Aug. 4, prior to the launch of two new options for purchasing ChatGPT ads. On Sept. 10, Amazon Ads started a pilot program allowing chosen U.S. advertisers to expand Amazon campaigns into ChatGPT. Additionally, on Sept. 16, OpenAI announced Shopify as its first ecommerce partner.

OpenAI also began rolling out ChatGPT Ads on Sept. 23 in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan, and now says ChatGPT Ads is available in more than 60 countries.