ChatGPT Ads Tutorial - 2026 FREE COURSE for Beginners

ChatGPT is about to release adverts to 800 million users, yet almost nobody is talking about what this means for business. If you're a marketer and you're not paying attention to this shift, you're going to miss one of the biggest business opportunities of this decade. I'm going to show you the strategy that you need to create ads that actually convert and the infrastructure that you need to build right now before this opportunity disappears. My first business was a digital marketing agency that I launched 17 years ago now. I remember the moment that Google first released its adverts within search. It changed everything. We could get our clients clicks and revenue for a couple of dollars. And then I remember Facebook launched their advertising, and again, the cost to advertise was so much cheaper than Google. And for 3 years, we watched brands like Gymshark, Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker build empires on the back of cheap Facebook traffic before anyone else caught on. In 2000, Google Ads used to cost 5 cents per click, but now they cost closer to $5 per click. That is a 10,000% increase. And with Google and Facebook now making $200 to $300 100 billion a year from ad spend. They're not going to drop that price anytime soon. So the problem is the more people who use it, the more saturated it gets, and that cheap opportunity has completely disappeared. So for those of you that don't know, digital ads are structured around a bidding system. So Google AdWords use keyword-based targeting. You bid on search terms and the highest bidder typically wins, whereas Facebook Ads uses demographic and interest targeting. So you're bidding on different audiences. ChatGPT, however, uses intent-based targeting. You bid on conversations. The more in-depth the conversation about the topic, the more relevant the OpenAI ChatGPT will try and be with the advert. But what gives ChatGPT the edge over both Google and Facebook is that it's combining intent-based targeting with the depth of understanding it has about each user, and then the memory it has on each user based on their previous chats. You see, people don't just type keywords and then move on to another site. On chat, they explain their problems, their constraints, their budgets, and their goals. They have far more detail. And in fact, the average Google search is 3 to 5 words, whereas the average ChatGPT query is 5 to 10 words. So when you're using ChatGPT, you are quite literally in problem-solving mode and actively trying to figure something out. That means when the ad appears along with helpful information from an AI that you trust, you are far more likely to click that ad than if something similar pops up during some sort of doom scroll that you're doing on Instagram or TikTok. So how do ChatGPT ads actually work. The platform pulls from 3 layers of data simultaneously. The first is the live conversation, which covers everything that the user is asking right now in their own words with full context. The second is their interests based on their history, which is a tab inside ChatGPT settings that builds over time based on how a user is interacting and giving feedback on previous chats. And the third, for users who've opted in, is memory. ChatGPT has the ability to reference past conversations to serve ads that are relevant not just to today's conversation, but what a user has been working on, struggling with, or researching over the last few months. So when you combine contextual intelligence, deep conversational data, and memory, you get a level of personalized marketing that has never existed before, which gives us the chance to have incredibly effective adverts when targeting our customers. And that is exactly why you, why early adopters, will have such a huge advantage when ChatGPT ads is rolled out for everyone. So now that you understand the basics, the next step is to make your ads feel like a natural extension of a conversation and not an interruption to the user's session. The problem I've always had with Google Ads is that when someone searches a term, you're really missing a lot of contextual information. So if they search car repair London, you don't know if they're researching how many garages there are, if they're looking to have an apprenticeship at a garage, if they're looking for a recovery truck, or even if they need a service or bodywork repair. So what is so exciting about these ads is that when someone is having a 5-minute conversation with ChatGPT, they're saying, I need to book a car in for my service. It needs a new set of tires and an oil change, and my availability is between like March 10th and March 20th, and I'm in Southwest London. You've suddenly got an incredibly qualified buyer describing their exact problem, their availability, and their willingness to pay. And that is the type of customer that I want to bid on. So your challenge becomes, how do I, as a business owner or marketer, set up my ads to appear in these queries? So the first thing that you need to do is to map your organic to paid pipeline, which means how does AI currently talk about your business and how do you support that with paid ads? So I have spent honestly thousands of hours over the past year understanding how AI searches, how it cites, how it mentions, and how it sends organic traffic to businesses. And from this, I have developed a framework to help businesses show up organically, which is going to be so important because organic relevance is how OpenAI will assess whether your business should appear for an ad. So step 1: identify conversations already happening around your product category or your service category. So to do this, you need to map out the conversations that your ideal customers are already having, and that means listing things like what problems do they have day to day, what questions do they ask day to day about the product or service, and what alternatives do they consider to your product. And as a founder and marketeer, you are probably dealing with these questions every single day in your business. So you are best placed to take action on this today. But if you're not, you can pull up all of your customer complaints, your CRM data, and run them through an LLM to spot common themes or topics that are coming up very regularly. So once you have identified these, step 2 is to understand where you're currently being mentioned and cited and where you're not in ChatGPT. Therefore, you need to know what your customers are typing in to find a product or service like yours. And this strategically will allow you to map gaps between where your customers are having problems and where your business is not even being mentioned. Now, OpenAI keeps this data very guarded, but that is the exact reason that I have built a tool that helps businesses to rank organically in ChatGPT and drive revenue from ChatGPT. The business is called Searchable, and we launched 3 months ago. We've now helped over 600 companies to drive traffic and revenue from ChatGPT, and now you can use the agent to help you actually understand what to target and how to go about targeting it. I've actually just released a free feature on Searchable where you can see the exact prompts people are typing and where your business is being mentioned or where your competitors are being mentioned. So if you want to try it out, click the link in the description for free and give it a go. So to build upon the example we used before, car repair shop in London, it could be things like how to find a reliable mechanic in London, how much should a full service cost, my car is making a strange noise, what should we do about that. And to take this a step further, you can always ask the agent in Searchable, give me more similar prompts that customers are typing in today to find a mechanic in London. And you can then use this data and start ideating on it to think of what prompts you should be ranking for. And then the next section, which is what content I should be creating. So step 3 is about creating content that wins organically in high-value conversations. So you can look at which content from your website or your competitor's website is actually being used by ChatGPT to create an answer to a specific question. So you can either check those out on like the Sources tab within Searchable, or you can just ask the agent, which pieces of content from my competitors is being used to to answer my core prompt targets. Therefore, it's these pieces of content that you want to be creating, and it's these answers that you want to be providing, and that will get you mentioned in ChatGPT. So this might feel like a lot of work and a lot of content that you're creating without necessarily an immediate tangible benefit, but there are actually two very fast and big benefits that you will feel. First, what each of these pieces of content is doing is sending a signal to ChatGPT's algorithm about what your business actually does, what you specialize in, and how you can help. And when you as a business create answers, as in content, to questions, ChatGPT knows that you are the authority to go to. And this means when ads are being rolled out, you will already have data on what conversations convert and when you want to target conversations to guarantee that you're in the answer. And ChatGPT will cross-check the relevance of your business against the ad that you want to serve, meaning it will be cheaper and more effective for you. So the second part of this Step 4 is to use your organic performance data to inform your paid marketing strategy. So the content you've created in step 3 will get you mentioned and cited in ChatGPT, which is likely to bring in traffic from AI search. So once you have this data flowing and you can see the traffic, you can then use your analytics to track which of these terms and prompts is driving the most leads and the most traffic. And this will give you a really strong understanding of what types of conversation that you want to actually boost with ads because that will guarantee that you're coming up for specific prompts of highly qualified customers, which leads us on to step 5. Step 5 is scaling with ads once you know what converts. So a slight nuance in prompts could mean there are very similar conversations happening that you're not appearing in. So the role is to target all these prompts with ads to target that intent of the user. So begin by bidding on the most valuable terms that lead traffic to your site organically and then diversify. So start at the core, and then spread out. And these conversation patterns become your targeting strategy. You're not just bidding on car repair shop London, you're bidding on conversations where someone describes needing their car repaired in Tottenham or West London. But maybe there's a specific service you offer that is better than anyone else within 50 miles. So this approach will give you a wide net whilst remaining highly targeted. So now that you understand your targeting strategy, we move on to designing the ad for ChatGPT. However, if you want to be as successful as companies like Gymshark were, or Warby Parker the early days of Facebook ads, you need to understand how to acquire customers profitably and how to actually create a reliable marketing budget. So when I was running my marketing agency, clients would come to us and say, I have $120,000 to spend this year. What can you do for me? And the problem is that they would often take $120,000 and just spread it across the year and say that our marketing budget is $10,000 a month. Now, this is an easy calculation. Of course it feels really organized and you can present it to investors and relevant parties and feel good about that. But in my experience, this is not how scaling works because the real question that you should be asking is how much can we spend to acquire one customer and still make profit? So this gives you your target CPA, your cost per acquisition. And once you have an approved cost per acquisition, the equation is very simple. So we want to look at first revenue per customer minus cost to deliver the service or product. Which gives you your gross profit per customer. So if you sell something at $1,000 and it costs you $300 to create or to fulfill, your gross profit is $700. Now you simply decide how much of that $700 you're willing to reinvest into ads to acquire more customers. So if you're happy to spend $200 to acquire a customer, then your target CPA is $200. And when you've properly calculated your cost per acquisition, your marketing budget basically becomes unlimited because you can consistently buy customers for less than $200 or up to $200. And so you don't want to be spending $10,000 a month in total, you want to spend as much as you possibly can to acquire customers at that target price. Now, this is how real businesses scale, and that is why this matters so much for you right now when considering ChatGPT ads. Now, in a similar way to Google Ads at the beginning, or Facebook Ads, ChatGPT ads are probably going to be cheap to begin with because they will want customers and businesses to use them. So your opportunity now is to work out what your cost per acquisition is and what is an acceptable spend to acquire one customer, because if you can get there, With ChatGPT ads, you can just turn it on. You can spend, spend, spend, and deliver yourself an enormous amount of new customers at an approved cost per acquisition. So the final step is crucial. Most people will rush on this point, but if you get it wrong, everything is going to be wasted. Now, creative for ChatGPT ads are going to be entirely different to traditional display or search advertising. So the main reason for that is that ChatGPT users, as discussed, are in problem-solving mode. They're not being entertained on Instagram. They're actively trying to figure something out. And so your ad appears just after they've received very helpful information from an AI that they trust. So if we look at this example from ChatGPT, you can see how simple and relevant this is to the conversation that they've been having. So as you can see from the ad, this is someone who is searching for a holiday or a villa within Santa Fe, New Mexico, and you can see the advert appears and it's taking up about 25% of the screen. It's incredibly relevant to the conversation you've just been having, and so it's giving you the option to look Desert Cottages, and then you have the ability within the chat immediately there to click chat with the company. And so you can see just quite clearly how effective that ad would be if you're in shopping mode. And if you're in shopping mode and you've just had a conversation about cottages and accommodation and this comes up, how likely are you to click on that ad? And now if you think about this from an Instagram perspective, I'm just scrolling Instagram, I'm looking at my For You page, and then I get an advert for a cottage there. I'm actually not looking for the cottage in that moment. And so it's very important think about this from your business perspective. If someone is having a deep conversation about a problem or a product or a service and you're able to deploy an ad like this and give them the ability to talk to your business, how effective would that be for you? This changes how you need to think about your approach to creative and about your approach to ads in general. You can't just take your Meta ads and drop them into ChatGPT. Your ad needs to feel like a natural extension of a conversation that the user is already having. It can't feel like an interruption. And so what does that look like practically? I've given you 4 steps here, which I call the P.A.C.E framework, which we'll need to go over now so you can understand how to create a problem and solve a problem within an advert. So P.A.C.E stands for pain, agitation, solution, and evidence. And you can break it down really simply into 3 parts: your hook, the offer and the proof, and your call to action. So part 1, the hook, which covers the pain and the agitation. The role of the hook is vital. It's the thing that will capture someone's attention and make them think. But a great hook needs to do two things. First, it needs to state the pain, and this is the problem that your audience is actually feeling, something that they recognize immediately based on the conversation that they've already been having. Second, you need to agitate that pain. So you are twisting the knife a little bit here. You remind them why this problem is costing them time, money, or even just their sanity. So for example, imagine you've been talking to ChatGPT about wanting a beach holiday, but the prices are too high for you. And so So where can you get cheap flights in Europe but with good sun for your holiday? So a budget holiday provider like TUI might deploy an advert that says something like, package holidays don't have to break the bank. All-inclusive food, drinks, and sun in Greece that cost less than a city break. So the second part is about the offer and the proof. So now you present your solution and you back it up immediately. The trick here is to not overcomplicate things. You simply share what we do and the outcome that you get. Then you follow it up with evidence. So explain why they should believe you. Share results, credentials, and then social proof. So following on from the TUI holiday example, it might be 5 out of 5 on Trustpilot and 30% cheaper than booking direct. And finally, now you want to finish with a very clear call to action. You need to tell them exactly what to do next. Make it simple and try and make it as low friction as possible. There are 3 CTAs that work well in digital advertising. Number 1 is talk to a human. So this is for high consideration purchases where they need personalized advice. Number 2 is try it now, For products where the experience of the product sells it. Or number 3, buy now for simple, low-cost offers where the decision is easy and quite impulse. And let's look at the TUI example. It could be as simple as book your holiday now for $595. So the last thing to focus on is quite possibly the biggest mistake that most businesses make when they think about paying for advertising. There's actually work that you need to do right now. Otherwise, all of this extra traffic and customers that you receive will be worthless. And that is that you need to set up Set up very clear funnels for traffic. If you're paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for traffic to your website, make sure that you're actually capturing it when they arrive. So you need to have a clear CTA, you need to have lead magnets, you need to have data capture so that traffic arrives at your website or your app and you don't lose it because that user clicks off. So you've paid for them to arrive and then they click off. That's wasted money. So to stay with the holiday example, sign up now to secure a 30% discount. It's a reason why they would do it right now. If you run a service business, it could be as simple as download a free guide on how to optimize your sales this year, or sign up to our newsletter to receive new insights or future discounts. So if you want to get more sophisticated, you might want to look at putting some form of questionnaire or quiz that asks your customers a set of questions that helps them understand their problem and then sends them a detailed report on how to solve that problem. So if you get this right, these are going to be some of the warmest customers that you'll ever receive and something that you could only have dreamt of off 10 years ago. But trust me, this opportunity isn't going to be around forever. It's going to be similar to the early days of Google and the early days of Facebook advertising. As more businesses begin to understand the potential here, the more competitive the bidding will become and the higher the prices will be. So my message is very simple to you: you need to start now. You need to start figuring this stuff out now. Start working out what conversations people are having in ChatGPT about your product or your service, see how they are performing, and start putting together a core targeting strategy that you can run adverts against. Set up your landing pages, set up your lead magnets, and test creative before, and be ready to capitalize on this opportunity when it lands. And finally, if you want to understand how your business can appear in ChatGPT organically, make sure that you check out this video that I made.