In Brief: Kylie Chen examines how hotels can use ChatGPT ads, outlining setup procedures, associated costs, and potential results, and provides hospitality professionals with practical guidance on leveraging this emerging digital marketing channel to drive bookings and brand visibility.
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ChatGPT Ads for Hotels: Setup, Costs & Results – Image Credit Unsplash
Earlier this year, OpenAI started testing ChatGPT ads in the US for Free and ChatGPT-Go tiers. OTAs like Expedia were quick to jump on the bandwagon. Minimum budget was $200K with $60 CPMs, and no conversion pixel. This blog is written as of July 30, 2026, so check back regularly for updates due to ChatGPT Ads’ frequent changes!
Ads appear after the AI-generated answer and are shown based on conversational context, inferred intent, relevance signals, and advertiser “context hints.”
In May, they moved from a limited ads pilot to a scalable platform by adding self-serve buying, a new performance-based CPC model, and better measurement. With the new CPC model, there is no spend minimum, but a daily budget of $25/day is required.
Cogwheel Marketing applied and was accepted into the OpenAI ChatGPT beta as of June 2026.
What Does Targeting Look Like within ChatGPT?
To set up ads, there are 3 Objectives or Goals: Reach, Clicks, or Conversions (Once an Objective is selected, this cannot be changed later).
Locations can be set up for the U.S. and the following international countries:
By clicking on “Enter another location,” advertisers can search for DMAs like San Diego, Indianapolis, Fort Myers – Naples, etc.
As of the most recent update, specific geographic locations from campaign targeting can also be excluded to better align delivery with your audience and business needs. Landing page query parameters can now also be added on a campaign, ad group, or ad level.
Custom audiences can also be created by uploading raw or hashed emails and phone numbers to use as audience filters for campaigns. By uploading an audience list (has to have at least 25K or more users), advertisers can also exclude these audiences on a campaign for pure prospecting. Bid multipliers can also be set for audiences at the ad group level.
What seems to guide a successful campaign is the CPC bid and context hints. Minimum CPCs are $3-$5 for “strong delivery.” Anything less than $2.99 is unlikely to serve. The sweet spot, based on what we have seen, is setting a minimum CPC of $3 to start and then slowly increasing by $0.50 increments when delivery starts to slow down.
Context hints are marked as an optional field but should definitely be completed. Think about the traveler you want to target and describe the conversations, topics, or keywords where your hotel or services may be relevant. OpenAI specifically mentions that “These hints guide matching but aren’t exact-match targeting rules.”
The Limitations of Ads within ChatGPT
- Image – only one image can be used per ad, and it has to already be in a square format, similarly to Google Ads’ logo requirements.
- Headline – max 50 characters allowed, although any text after 24 characters will most likely get truncated.
- Description – max 100 characters allowed, although any text after 48 characters will most likely get truncated.
- URL
If your campaign could benefit from broader content coverage to optimize delivery, you may see the option to select ‘Add new ad’ in the campaign view once a campaign has been running. This feature uses existing website metadata to prefill an ad draft with an image, title, and description for you to review, edit, and assign to a campaign and ad group. It does not generate new copy or imagery with AI.
Included in the July 2026 release was a “refreshed static ad card format” where ChatGPT Ads will be more compact and easier to read on desktop and mobile, with larger visual elements:
What Does ChatGPT Ads Performance for Hotels Look Like?
Currently in OpenAI’s Ads Manager, the following metrics can be pulled at the campaign-level, ad group-level, and/or specific ad:
- Impressions – higher than 20K in less than two months
- Clicks
- Conversions (depending on what you set your conversions as in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Tag Manager) – we’re seeing about a 2.2% conversion rate from total impressions
- Spend – Daily budget cannot be set to anything less than $25/day
- CTR – averaging between 1.6-1.9%, much higher than display campaigns.
- Average CPC – $3-$3.50
- Average CPM – $49-$60
The Overview tab allows you to monitor account health, review recommended tasks that can help improve campaign performance, and analyze key performance metrics in a larger, more flexible trend chart.
The Details You Need to Know to Run ChatGPT Ads for Hotels:
- ChatGPT doesn’t currently allow the creation of a master manager account, although the option is available when creating a new account. For now, each advertiser needs to create an individual business account.
- For an individual hotel, the only campaign type you can select is “Standard.” The other campaign type, “Product Feed,” uses feed items and ad group product filters to generate ads, which is something that overarching Brand marketing may be able to capitalize on in the future.
- OpenAI’s Ads Manager is still in beta mode as new features and updates seem to get added almost every 2 weeks.
- There is a 5-10% discrepancy between what OpenAI’s Ads Manager reports on clicks and conversions, and what we’re seeing in GA4.
- Although ChatGPT Ads are capturing the majority of website traffic across all ChatGPT sources (31-56% of total AI traffic), all conversions are being attributed to “AI Assistant.”
- Engagement rate is lower than other ChatGPT sources but still higher than 20%. (Organic AI sources are seeing an average engagement rate of 66-70%.)
New Features for ChatGPT Ads for Hotels as of July 2026
- Conversion-optimized campaigns: Create conversion-optimized cost-per-click (oCPC) campaigns by selecting the Conversions objective in campaign setup. These campaigns optimize delivery toward clicks that are more likely to drive your conversion event, while billing remains based on valid clicks.
- Daily budget update: Daily budgets will change from fixed daily limits to average daily budgets, the average you want to spend per day over seven days. No action is required, and your total budget is not changing. Spend may vary by day while staying within daily and seven-day limits.
- Spend pacing for daily budgets: Daily budgets now pace automatically throughout the day, helping distribute spend more evenly.
- Mobile measurement partner integrations: They recently launched integrations with AppsFlyer and Adjust to measure and attribute app installs and in-app events from ChatGPT Ads.
- Automatic advanced matching (AAM): Improve website conversion measurement by matching more conversions to ads using hashed customer information.
- Bulk API: Create and update campaigns, ad groups, and ads in bulk asynchronously through the Ads API.
- Refreshed ad format for product feed campaigns: They’re starting to roll out a refreshed product card format featuring price and star ratings.
What Cogwheel Recommends for LLM Ads
ChatGPT Ads would be a great supplemental strategy to add to your paid media toolbox as an upper-funnel tactic, especially if AI visibility is a concern or goal.
So how do you determine what your AI visibility is like? As part of Cogwheel’s SEO services, we provide an AI Baseline Overview and Visibility Report that shows visibility score, brand sentiment, brand mentions, pages cited, Share of Voice (SOV), and top cited domains. In our Cogwheel Analytics BI Tool, you can also check Top Referring Domains and Source Traffic reports to see if ChatGPT.com or other AI sources are listed.
If your hotel is already showing up organically in AI responses by being cited, consider running a Google Demand Gen campaign instead.
Kylie Chen, Director of Paid Strategy, Cogwheel Marketing & Analytics. Connect with Kylie on LinkedIn.
Source: View the original article at Cogwheel Marketing.
