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ChatGPT ads are here, but can we measure their performance?
Posted by on May 26, 2026 at 9:22 amChatGPT ads are starting to show up more often now but tracking their performance is a headache compared to normal paid channels. A Saas friend of mine said that they got a wave of demo requests after their first trial of these ads, but analytics only labelled most of it as direct traffic. There was no clear source or data they could use for attribution.
Is it possible to measure ChatGPT performance yet? -
1 Reply
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Yep, I’m not surprised the ChatGPT is obfuscating their traffic reports and likely blocking UTMs and other tracking codes until they can evaluate and improve performance internally.
Even if you could track results, which would be helpful, that’s not the same as native tracking to help with optimization and bidding.
For my clients there’s no way I’m spending ad dollars without some basic tracking in place.
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I imagine it will start mainly for reach and awareness, with impressions being a key metric. I know clients that would happily do this ‘just to be on chatgpt’ so they can tell the board they are doing it. It will take them a long time to refine the ad platform and even then I doubt it will be extensive. They’ll need to bundle searches into semantic themes for ‘search term reports’ as it will be so long tail and contextual. It will ikely work more with audience classifications.
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In most cases, users convert later through branded search or direct, so ChatGPT gets none of the credit. In tools like Google Analytics, it just records this as direct traffic unless you build custom tracking or landing pages.
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Sounds like your friend had a setup issue. You can absolutely put whatever tracking query parameters you want (e.g. UTMs) on paid ad URLs for it. Or install their pixel / CAPI and measure within their universe based on attribution.
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Attribution is probably going to be messy for a while. I’d treat it less like a normal paid channel at first and more like dark social or influencer traffic, where you need clean UTMs where possible, dedicated landing pages, promo codes or offer variants, and a before/after read on branded search and direct conversions.
The hard part is proving incrementality. A spike in demo requests is nice, but without a holdout or some kind of geo/time split, it’s easy to over-credit the shiny new channel.
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Feels like we’re in the early “dark social” phase. You can infer impact through lift in branded search, direct traffic, demos, or post-purchase surveys, but clean attribution still seems pretty messy.
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Between lack of pixel tracking, and the weird favicon “give us the image hosted on your domain” Handling of logo and 1200×1200, I don’t have faith in paying them the $50 USD CPM they’re asking for in Australia. Which is beyond reasonably expensive to target mere consumers and not B2B/E decisionmakers
Any other Aussies here thinking about or starting to run gpt ads?
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