GoKawiilI have been experimenting with buying ChatGPT ads for my event seating assignment software. Here are the overall results from 05-Aug-2026 to 28-Aug-2026:
Total spend on ChatGPT ads £289.52 Total clicks 2,988 Average CPC £0.10 Average time on page (Google analytics) 7s Bounce rate (Google Analytics) 69% Total installs (Google Analytics) 14 Conversion rate (click to install) 0.46% Cost per conversion £20.68
ChatGPT recommends bidding somewhere around by £2 per click, but I bid between £0.15 and £0.07 and was still able to get traffic. However 0.46% is a shockingly low conversion rate. Given what I know about the lifetime customer value and install to purchase rates for PerfectTablePlan, I’m not close to making any money on these ads.
Comparing engagement with other sources in the same period:
Metric ChatGPT ads (paid) Google ads (paid) ChatGPT referrals (free) Average time on page (Google Analytics) 7s 20s 23s Bounce rate (Google Analytics) 69% 46% 39% Conversion rate 0.46% 5.3% 4.2%
So the problem is clearly the ChatGPT ad traffic, rather than my website/product. It seems one of several things might be happening:
OpenAI is charging for more clicks than they are sending. My context hint is bad. My ads are bad. A high proportion of the clicks are from bots, not humans. The traffic is very badly targetted.
The clicks reported by OpenAI are close to what Google Analytics reports, so we can rule 1 out.
My context hint seems uncontroversial, so that rules out 2.
The ads are very similar to ones I have been running in Google Adwords for years, so we can rule 3 out.
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