About two weeks after OpenAI opened self serve access to its ads manager, a marketer on r/PPC documented his first campaign setup screen by screen. He is explicit that he had no performance data yet, so treat this as a field guide rather than a case study.
How to write context hints for ChatGPT ads
The structure will feel familiar: campaign, ad group, ad, a reach or clicks objective (conversions labelled coming soon), campaign or daily budgets, a web pixel, and, at the time, only the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He found no minimum spend.
The novel part is targeting. Instead of keywords or audiences there is a blank text box for context hints, which OpenAI describes as descriptions of the conversations where your product may be relevant, guiding matching rather than acting as exact match rules. His working theory: too narrow under delivers because the model expands semantically, too broad tanks relevance, and the sweet spot is scenario plus intent, for example taking notes during long meetings rather than just notes.
Creative is tight: a 50 character headline, a 100 character description and a small square image, with the preview truncating headlines around 35 characters. So front load the value proposition, skip fine image detail, and test by building several ads in one ad group since there is no A/B tooling yet.
Why it works
The ad sits under a ChatGPT response, so relevance is decided by language, not a bid on a string. Hints written the way a user describes their situation give the model something to match.
How to copy it
Apply for access, start with a small daily budget, write five scenario hints, and tag every URL with UTMs.
Credit: u/Ray_Dev_SG on Reddit