We got hands-on access to OpenAI's new Ads Manager beta. Here's a first look at how the platform is built, what you can set up today, and the parts that still aren't clear.
OpenAI is building an ads platform — and it looks a lot like Google Ads
OpenAI has quietly started rolling out Ads Manager, its own self-serve advertising platform, currently labelled Beta. We got into the beta and spent time walking through every screen. If you've ever run a Google or Meta campaign, the structure will feel immediately familiar: a campaign → ad group → ad hierarchy, objective-based campaigns, daily or total budgets, conversion tracking and product feeds.
This is a “what it looks like” tour rather than a results write-up — the platform is brand new and our account isn't serving ads yet. But it's one of the first proper looks at how OpenAI is approaching advertising.
The layout: four sections you'll live in
- Campaigns — your main workspace, with sub-tabs for Campaigns, Ad groups and Ads.
- Tools — Change History (a full audit log), Conversions (tracking setup) and Feeds (product catalogue uploads).
- Billing — Overview, Activity, Documents and Settings.
- Settings — account General settings and Users.
The campaigns table will be instantly readable to any PPC marketer: an Active toggle, then Name, Status, Type, Actions, Impressions, Clicks, Conversions and Spend, with a date-range picker and the usual filter and column controls.
Creating a campaign: a familiar three-step wizard
Hitting Create → Create campaign opens a three-step flow — Create Campaign, then Create Ad Group & Ads, then Review. The first step is where the interesting choices live:
- Campaign type: Standard or Product feed. Product-feed campaigns auto-generate ads from an uploaded catalogue plus ad-group product filters — clearly aimed at e-commerce advertisers.
- Objective: Reach, Clicks or Conversions — the metric the campaign optimises towards.
- Locations: geo-targeting (defaulted to the UK on our account).
- Budget: a Daily budget or Campaign total.
- Conversion event (optional).
One gotcha worth flagging now: your budget type (daily vs. campaign total) is locked at the moment of creation and can't be changed later — only the amount can be edited afterwards. Choose deliberately.
Conversion tracking and product feeds are already here
Two things tell you OpenAI is building this for serious, performance-focused advertisers.
Conversions. There's a full conversion-tracking system with a clear four-step model: create a data source, create a conversion event, log the event (via an API integration), then link the event to a campaign. API keys are managed inside the conversions settings.
Feeds. Product catalogues are ingested by uploading a product feed over SFTP, keeping ads in sync with your latest items, prices, availability and metadata — the same pattern you'll know from Google Merchant Center.
A proper audit log
The Change History tool logs every action — campaign created, status changed, budget edited — with the before and after value, who did it and when, plus filtering and export. For agencies managing accounts on a client's behalf, that accountability out of the gate is genuinely useful.
Recent changes in OpenAI Ads Manager
Update — 26 June 2026. Since this first look published we’ve been scanning the platform daily, and OpenAI is iterating fast. The headline addition is a brand-new Overview dashboard.
- A new Overview dashboard. Now the first item in the left-hand nav, with a Tasks feed for recommendations and a Performance trend panel tracking Spend, Impressions, Clicks and CPC across 7-, 14- and 30-day windows.
- Billing has gone live. Accounts can now complete billing setup with threshold-based automatic charging, which flips a campaign from “Not serving” to serving.
- The setup prompt has moved on. The original yellow “set up billing” banner is gone, replaced by a nudge to configure conversion tracking.
- Budgets can be changed programmatically. The audit log now records budget edits attributed to an “API” actor — a sign that API-driven campaign management is in play.
- First delivery. Our test campaign logged its first impressions, confirming the serving pipeline works end to end.
Update — 11 July 2026. A month on, the platform has filled out well beyond a bare beta:
- Conversion tracking is now working. Creating a web data source (a “pixel”) populates the Conversions area, and a new Warnings panel flags setup gaps — separating account-level issues, such as no active campaigns using conversion events, from data-source ones like no recent events received.
- A new Audiences tool. Under Tools you can now upload raw or hashed emails and phone numbers to build reusable customer-match audiences that filter campaigns — the same first-party-data targeting you’ll know from Google and Meta.
- Revenue reporting has arrived. The campaigns table gained Attributed sales value and Sales ROAS columns, pointing to proper e-commerce value tracking tied to the conversions and feed pipeline.
- A “Use Codex” shortcut. The conversion-tracking checklist now offers a Use Codex option to help write and install the event-logging code — OpenAI leaning on its own tooling to lower the technical barrier.
- The billing model is now clear. Accounts run on postpaid autopay: you’re charged after spend accrues, automatically, either monthly (anchored to month-end) or whenever you reach a £25 billing threshold — whichever comes first.
The core structure — Campaigns, Tools, Billing and Settings — is otherwise unchanged, so the walkthrough above still holds. We’ll keep logging changes as the beta evolves.
Update — 13 July 2026. Our first campaigns went live — and immediately surfaced the beta’s biggest operational gotcha so far: billing and reporting are two different worlds.
- Spend accrues before it’s reported — anywhere. Within about three hours of activating campaigns, Billing → Overview showed a £21.14 outstanding balance. At the same moment every reporting surface read zero: the Overview dashboard, the campaigns table, and hourly, daily and per-campaign insights via the API — even Billing → Activity still said “No activity yet”. The only number moving anywhere in the product was the outstanding balance itself.
- There’s no billing endpoint in the API. We probed for one — balance and billing activity exist only in the web UI. That combination matters: any programmatic budget cap that polls reported spend (as ours does) is effectively blind until reporting catches up, while delivery keeps charging the account.
- Control is real-time even when reporting isn’t. Pausing a campaign reflected in the API instantly. So a scheduled hard stop works reliably; a spend-triggered kill switch can’t be trusted in the first hours of delivery.
- Practical advice: treat the Billing → Overview balance as the only truthful spend number early on, schedule hard pauses (overnight serving windows) rather than relying on spend caps alone, and remember the platform’s own protections — daily budgets and the £25 billing threshold — both act after delivery has happened.
What we still don't know
- Where the ads actually appear. Presumably inside ChatGPT experiences, but the exact placements and formats aren't confirmed yet.
- Creative specs. We’ve since confirmed the ad’s core fields — Title, Description, Link and Image — but exact character limits and how the ads render are still unconfirmed.
- Pricing and auction model. Ad groups expose a Max Bid and a Fixed Bid strategy (with Click as the billing event), but overall pricing, minimum spend and the wider auction mechanics remain unconfirmed.
- Targeting depth. We now see location, free-text Context Hints and the new customer-match Audiences — but deeper interest and keyword controls are still unclear.
- Performance. Our account hasn't served yet, so there are no real numbers to share.
Why this matters
If ChatGPT becomes a place where hundreds of millions of people research products and ask for recommendations, advertising inside that experience is a fundamentally new channel — and the brands who learn the platform early will have the advantage. The infrastructure OpenAI has shipped — objectives, conversion tracking, product feeds, audit logging — signals they're building this to be a real, measurable performance channel, not an experiment.
We'll be testing it properly as our account goes live, and will follow up with a hands-on guide covering ad formats, targeting and — most importantly — what actually performs.
Thinking about how your brand shows up inside AI tools like ChatGPT? That's exactly what we help with. Get in touch and we'll talk through where AI search and AI advertising fit into your strategy.
This is a first look at a beta product as of July 2026; OpenAI's Ads Manager is changing quickly and specifics may differ by the time you read this.
