OpenAI opened self-serve ads to any US advertiser. No agency, no minimum spend, no waiting list. Just register at ads openai com and go.
Before anyone asks: CTR is sitting around 1.3% industry-wide versus 29.2% on Google Search. This is not a performance channel yet. It's a first-mover channel. The marketers who instrument it now will have real benchmarks when everyone else is still speculating in planning decks.
Here's what to actually do.
Step 1: Pixel before spend.
OpenAI has a JavaScript pixel that ties a click inside ChatGPT to a conversion on your site. Without it you have click data and nothing else — no lead attribution, no way to know if any of this is working. Install it site-wide, fire the lead event on every demo and contact form, confirm it's working. Then and only then run spend.
Step 2: Build the pipeline.
The OpenAI Ads API returns performance data at four levels: account, campaign, ad group, individual ad. All four return the same response shape so one Python function handles everything. I asked Claude to write the data pull and had it running in 20 minutes. It pulls daily snapshots, runs them through Claude for a plain-language brief, and routes that to Slack every morning.