Glossary — Context Hints

Ad group: The targeting and bidding unit inside a campaign. An ad group holds your context hints, max bid, and one or more ads. The recommended pattern is one ad group per audience-and-intent combination.
Ad unit: The visible ad placement that appears below a ChatGPT response. Contains the advertiser name, favicon, title, description copy, image asset, and a landing-page link.
Ads Manager Beta: OpenAI's platform for creating, launching, and managing ChatGPT ad campaigns. Supports both individual campaign creation and bulk CSV upload.
Advertiser account: The verified business identity that owns campaigns. Each business has one advertiser account. Agencies managing multiple clients create one account per client.
Bulk upload schema: The CSV format Ads Manager Beta accepts for creating campaigns, ad groups, and ads in batch. Each row represents an object, linked by name references to its parent.
Brand safety: OpenAI's policy of placing ads only near conversations that are safe and appropriate. Sensitive contexts are excluded from ad-eligible inventory.
Campaign: The top-level container that holds ad groups. A campaign specifies the objective (Reach or Clicks), the daily budget, and the schedule.
Clicks objective: The campaign objective that bills on CPC. Choose this when you have a measurable conversion event and want to pay per outcome rather than per impression.
Context hint: A short description of the conversations, topics, or keywords where your product is relevant. The primary targeting signal in OpenAI Ads Manager Beta. Not exact-match; not a delivery guarantee.
Conversion: A trackable downstream action (signup, purchase, lead form submission) reported in Ads Manager Beta after a user clicks an ad. Configurable via Ads Manager Beta's measurement tools.
CPC (cost per click): The amount you pay each time a user clicks one of your ads. OpenAI recommends a starting max CPC bid of $3-5 USD.
CPM (cost per mille): The amount you pay per 1,000 ad impressions. The default max CPM bid in Ads Manager Beta is $60.
CTR (click-through rate): Clicks divided by impressions. Reported in the Ads Manager Beta dashboard alongside spend, CPC, CPM, and conversions.
Eligibility: Whether a user can see ads. Today, ChatGPT ads serve to Free and Go plan users in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Plus, Pro, Business plans, and users predicted or declared to be under 18 do not see ads.
Favicon: The small advertiser logo that appears in the ad unit. Required as part of account info before campaigns can deliver.
Free and Go: The two ChatGPT plan tiers that show ads. All paid plans (Plus, Pro, Business) do not show ads.
Impression: One serving of an ad unit to one eligible user. Counted in the Ads Manager Beta reporting alongside clicks and conversions.
Landing page: The URL a user is sent to after clicking the ad. One of the four relevance inputs evaluated by the auction (alongside context hints, ad title, and ad copy).
Max bid: The most you are willing to pay for a click (CPC) or per 1,000 impressions (CPM). In a second-price auction you almost never pay your max — you pay one cent above the next-highest eligible bid.
Negative hint: Not currently available in the Ads Manager Beta. The conceptual equivalent of a negative keyword — a description of conversations where your ad should not appear. Widely expected as a future feature.
Objective: The campaign-level goal: Reach (CPM buying) or Clicks (CPC buying). Determines the auction model and bid options.
Persona verification: The identity-verification step in Ads Manager Beta onboarding, handled through Persona. Required before account approval. Reviewed in a rolling queue.
Reach objective: The campaign objective that bills on CPM. Used for awareness or brand-introduction campaigns where impressions are the goal.
Relevance-weighted auction: An auction format where each bidder's bid is multiplied by a relevance score before ranking. The advertiser with the best combined score (bid × relevance) wins.
Second-price auction: An auction format where the winning bidder pays one cent above the next-highest eligible bid, not their own maximum. This makes truthful bidding (bidding the real value of a click) the rational strategy.
Trust principles: OpenAI's three rules for ChatGPT ads: ads must be clearly labeled, ads must be separate from ChatGPT's answers, and users have choice and control over how their data is used for ads.
UTM parameters: Static tracking parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content) that persist on a ChatGPT ad click and flow into your downstream analytics tools.