OpenAI shipped its self-serve ChatGPT Ads Manager yesterday, opening up the platform to any U.S. advertiser, dropping the previous $50K minimum spend floor, and introducing CPC bidding alongside the existing CPM model. We shipped four OpenAI Ads nodes for Profound Agents the same day.
That speed matters. ChatGPT ads are a brand new performance channel, the benchmarks don't exist yet, and the marketers who get instrumentation in place first will be the ones who actually learn what works. Profound customers can now pull OpenAI Ads performance data directly into their Agent workflows on day one of the public rollout.
What's in OpenAI's announcement
Yesterday's launch is the biggest expansion of ChatGPT advertising since the pilot began in February 2026. The headlines:
Self-serve Ads Manager (beta). Any verified U.S. advertiser can now register at ads.openai.com, add payment info, set budgets, upload ads, and manage campaigns directly. No agency or holdco required.
CPC bidding. Previously, ChatGPT ads were CPM-only. Now advertisers can buy on a click basis, with OpenAI recommending starting bids of $3–$5 per click. CPM is still supported in parallel.
Conversions API and pixel-based measurement. Advertisers can now close the attribution loop between an ad click in ChatGPT and downstream actions on their own properties such purchases, sign-ups, and lead form submissions.
Expanded partner ecosystem. Agency partners include Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP. Technology partners include Adobe, Criteo, Kargo, Pacvue, and StackAdapt.
This is OpenAI moving from a closed, high-touch pilot to the kind of standardized advertising infrastructure performance marketers actually expect: self-serve buying, click-based bidding, conversion tracking, and partner integrations. The platform is still early. Independent estimates of ChatGPT ad CTR sit around 1.3% versus Google Search's 29.2%, and aggregated reporting means you don't get conversation-level visibility. But the pieces marketers need to test it as a real channel are now in place.
The four OpenAI Ads nodes in Profound Agents
Each node targets a different level of the OpenAI Ads hierarchy and returns structured performance data you can route into any downstream node for analysis, reporting, or alerting.
Get Ad Account Insights
Retrieve top-level performance data across your entire OpenAI Ads account. Configure it by selecting your connected ad account, setting a time range, and choosing an aggregation level: Ad Account, Campaign, Ad Group, or Ad. This is the fastest way to get a holistic view of how spend is performing across your full account.
Get Campaign Insights
Retrieve performance data for a specific campaign. Supply a Campaign ID and time range, and the node returns impression, click, spend, CTR, CPC, and CPM data broken out at the cadence you choose, from daily granularity up to the full window.
Get Ad Group Insights
Go one level deeper, returning performance data for a specific ad group within a campaign. Same configuration pattern: Ad Group ID, time range, and optional time granularity.
Get Ad Insights
Return data at the individual ad level. Useful for creative performance analysis and for identifying which specific ads are driving results within a campaign.
All four nodes share consistent configuration patterns across time range, time granularity, and pagination controls (After, Before, Limit), so once you've built one workflow, the others follow the same logic.
What this unlocks for marketers
Reporting without the dashboard tax
OpenAI's Ads Manager portal works fine for spot checks, but it's another tab in another browser window for your team. Build an Agent that pulls account-level data on a daily schedule, formats it into a digest, and routes it to the Slack channel or email distribution list where your team already lives. No one logs into a separate ads platform unless something interesting shows up in the digest.
Cross-channel visibility reporting
This is the workflow only Profound can power. Pair OpenAI Ads performance data with Profound's organic AI visibility metrics to see paid and organic ChatGPT presence side by side. Are you spending CPC dollars in a category where your brand already has strong organic citation coverage in ChatGPT answers? Are you investing in campaigns for queries where you're invisible in AI-generated responses? Connecting the two views, in one Agent, in one report, has not been possible until now.
Anomaly monitoring and automated alerting
Build an Agent that pulls campaign and ad-level performance daily, compares it against a rolling baseline, and fires a Slack alert when CTR drops, CPC spikes, or impression volume falls off a cliff. New channels are noisy, and the cost of finding out about a broken creative or runaway spend three days late is significantly higher when benchmarks aren't well established.
Creative performance analysis with LLM summarization
Chain a Get Campaign Insights node with a Get Ad Insights node to break down performance from the campaign level down to the individual ad. Feed the output into an LLM node to generate plain-language summaries of what's working and what isn't, and route those summaries to your team. You go from raw numbers to "here's what to do about it" inside a single workflow.
Early-mover benchmarking
ChatGPT ads benchmarks barely exist right now. Pull your impression, CTR, CPC, and CPM data on a regular cadence and you'll be building your own baseline before the rest of the market has theirs. The teams that instrument early are the ones whose Q3 strategies will be informed by data instead of guesses.
Get started
The OpenAI Ads nodes are available today for all customers of Profound.
To connect your OpenAI ads account to Profound, simply:
- Navigate to the Integrations Hub from Settings → Integrations in your account
- Locate OpenAI Ads, click ‘Connect Account’
- Enter your OpenAI Ads API Key and your unique Connection Name (both can be found by admins of OpenAI Ads accounts within the OpenAI Ads platform settings)
If you are not yet a user of Profound Agents, we encourage you to get a demo to see these nodes in action.
