ChatGPT ads swap maximum bids for cost targets on 9 November

A cap stops every bid at your number. A target is looser: the email says any one auction under Target CPC can land on either side of your figure while the system works towards that average. Campaigns already running keep their old bids until 1 January 2027, when Max Bid and Max CPC retire and those campaigns move to the targets. The fully automatic option stays, under the name intelligent bidding.

OpenAI’s warning is the useful part: a tight target or thin conversion data can slow your ads down until part of the budget never gets spent. Its advice is to start from what your clicks and conversions have actually cost lately.

Those costs are hard to pin down. Digiday reports a New Street Research estimate of about $5 a click, which the firm says could be too high, and a working paper under review, based on ecommerce sites, that puts paid ChatGPT traffic at a 0.37% conversion rate, against 1.17% for paid Google search.

On the audience side, ChatGPT’s Go plan card said it “may include ads” when we read it on 31 October (our ChatGPT page).

Put those two separate figures together and one conversion costs about $1,350 in clicks, so a Target CPA set far under that is the kind of tight target OpenAI says can leave budget unspent.