A practical 5 minute guide for e-commerce businesses
Management Summary
- Already successful with Google Ads or Meta Ads? If your tracking is reliable and paid acquisition is a serious part of your business, ChatGPT Ads is worth testing now.
- The opportunity is different: ChatGPT can understand the context behind what somebody is trying to buy, not just a short search query.
- Our recommendation: Don't bet the webshop on ChatGPT Ads, but don't wait 12 months to understand them either.
- One caveat: ChatGPT Ads isn't available in every country yet. Scroll to the bottom to check your country, and if it's not available yet, sign up and we'll let you know when it is.
Why should an e-commerce business care?
Start with reach.
According to Pew Research Center, the percentage of US adults who say they have used ChatGPT has risen rapidly:
The more interesting question for advertisers, however, is what people are doing in ChatGPT.
People use it to research questions, understand products, compare alternatives and help make decisions. That puts ChatGPT surprisingly close to the buying process for many products and services.
For an advertiser, that's an interesting place to be.
The big difference: keywords vs. conversations
Someone looking for a laptop on Google might search: best laptop 2026. Google often starts with what somebody searched for.
But imagine the same person asking ChatGPT: ChatGPT can understand what they're trying to accomplish.
ChatGPT provides much richer context about a customer's needs, preferences and buying criteria.
Advertisers can use context hints to describe when their products are relevant. ChatGPT can then match ads to the customer's intent, without advertisers seeing the conversation.
The result: advertising matched to the problem the customer is trying to solve.
What does a ChatGPT Ad actually look like?
ChatGPT Ads can appear below ChatGPT's answer, visually separated from the answer and clearly labelled as sponsored.
ChatGPT Ads aren't ads inside the answer. They appear alongside a conversation that may lead to a buying decision.
Ofcourse you are going to click the ad...
How do ChatGPT Ads work?
If you're familiar with Google Ads, the basic structure won't feel particularly strange:
Campaign → Ad Groups → Context Hints → Ads → Products/Landing Pages → Conversions
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At campaign level, you determine things such as your objective, budget, dates and targeting.
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Within campaigns, ad groups organize related advertising themes.
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Then comes the more unusual part: context hints.
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Instead of thinking only in terms of a keyword such as:
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running shoes
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you can describe a relevant situation:
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cushioned everyday running shoes for beginners training for their first 5K
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You're helping ChatGPT understand the kinds of conversations and customer needs for which your product could be relevant.
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Ads then send interested users to the appropriate product or landing page, while conversion measurement tells you what happened afterwards.
From the ad onward, measurement has to be set up correctly. Clicks alone are not enough — you need to know which ads generate purchases, revenue and profitable customers.
At Wolf+Bär, we connect the advertising setup with reliable conversion tracking, so campaign decisions are based on real business results.
If you can’t measure the sale, you can’t properly optimize the ad.
How do you buy ChatGPT Ads?
This part is actually quite straightforward, and particularly important if you're using an agency.
Your company creates and owns the ChatGPT Ads account.
This is the same ownership principle we recommend for Google Ads. Your business should own its advertising account, history and data.
You create the ChatGPT Ads account. Your agency creates the ads, manages and optimises them.
So, what should you do now?
If you've made it this far, your gut feeling is probably already telling you: this is something we should test.
What happens next depends on one thing: is ChatGPT Ads available in your country yet?
As of August 2026, self-service access includes markets such as the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and New Zealand.
A large group of European markets including Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, are in the expansion pipeline.
If ChatGPT Ads are available in your country:
You can start now. Create your advertiser account, invite your agency and set up a controlled first campaign with proper conversion tracking.
→ Free Talk with Wolf+Bär about your potential ChatGPT Ads
If ChatGPT Ads aren't available in your country yet:
Don't waste time checking OpenAI's availability page every week. Leave us your email address and country, and we'll let you know when ChatGPT Ads become available in your market.
→ Notify me when ChatGPT Ads launch in my country