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.
Automatic Advanced Matching (AAM): A Web pixel setting that automatically captures customer information entered into forms on your site, hashes it with SHA-256 in the browser, and attaches it to conversion events so more conversions can be matched to ads. It is the default for new Web pixels, and OpenAI enables it on existing Web pixels on August 17, 2026. Opt out via Tools → Conversions → Data Source → Edit pixel. See the AAM guide.
Brand safety: OpenAI's policy of placing ads only near conversations that are safe and appropriate. Sensitive contexts are excluded from ad-eligible inventory.
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.
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.
Content hints: A common misspelling of context hints. There is no separate feature called a “content hint” in ChatGPT Ads — if you have seen the phrase, it refers to the natural-language targeting descriptions set at ad group level. See context hints.
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.
Conversion bid cap: The ceiling you set on what a conversion is worth in a conversion-optimized campaign. Even though you are billed per valid click, the auction optimizes against this value. The product feed oCPC beta requires a positive cap — there is no automated option in that release.
Conversions API: The server-side route for sending conversion events to ChatGPT Ads from your own systems rather than from the browser. It captures offline, delayed and consent-blocked conversions the pixel misses, and deduplicates against pixel events on a shared event_id. Partners including Hightouch can send events on your behalf.
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.
Dynamic URL parameters (macros): Placeholders such as {campaign_id}, {ad_group_id}, {ad_id} and {ad_account_id} that you place in a landing page query string and OpenAI populates automatically at delivery time. Used to join ad structure to GA4 and CRM data. Do not URL-encode the braces. See the URL parameters guide.
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.
Multi-product carousel: An ad format OpenAI has begun testing for product feed campaigns that shows several products from one advertiser in a single unit, rather than the single-product sponsored card. It rewards coherent product sets with consistent imagery and comparable price points.
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.
oCPC (conversion-optimized cost per click): A buying model where you nominate one standard conversion event and the auction biases delivery toward the clicks most likely to produce it, while you continue to pay per valid click. Available in beta for product feed campaigns as well as standard campaigns. See the oCPC guide.
oppref: OpenAI's privacy-preserving click identifier, appended to your landing page URL and stored by the pixel in a first-party cookie named __oppref. It is the linchpin of conversion attribution — stripping it at a redirect or consent wall breaks conversion tracking entirely.
Persona verification: The identity-verification step in Ads Manager Beta onboarding, handled through Persona. Required before account approval. Reviewed in a rolling queue.
Pixel (oaiq): The JavaScript SDK that measures conversions in the browser. It captures oppref, stores it in a first-party cookie, timestamps and batches events, and sends them to OpenAI. Loaded from bzrcdn.openai.com; events post to bzr.openai.com.
Pixel validation diagnostics: A panel in Ads Manager under Tools → Conversions, on the right-hand side, that reports why events were dropped before being sent — the affected field, the error type, and a recommended fix. The first place to look when conversion counts are lower than expected.
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.
Standard conversion event: One of the thirteen predefined events — such as order_created or lead_created — that ChatGPT Ads recognises. Only standard events can be used as the optimization goal for a conversion campaign; custom events cannot.
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.
Maximize results: An automated bid strategy in ChatGPT Ads that sets and adjusts bids on your behalf, optimizing toward your selected campaign goal to get as many results as possible from your budget. Selected by default for eligible new ad groups. It prioritizes result volume and does not guarantee delivery against a specific CPA, CPC or ROAS target; the alternative is Manual: Max bid.
Manual: Max bid: The manual bid strategy in a ChatGPT Ads ad group, chosen instead of Maximize results when you need to stay within a specific bid limit. Set at ad group level, so a single campaign can mix manual and automated ad groups.
Platform targeting: A campaign-level control determining which ChatGPT surfaces a campaign can deliver on. The Platforms multi-select (sometimes referred to as eligible platforms) covers iOS App, Android App and Web, where Web includes both desktop web and mobile web. Note that Insights currently group device reporting into Mobile and Desktop, with mobile web counted under Mobile.
View-through conversion (VTA 1d): A conversion counted when someone converts within one day of seeing an eligible ad impression, where no qualifying ad click receives credit for the same conversion. Reported separately from the main Conversions total at campaign, ad group and ad level. It does not affect CPA, post-click conversion rate, bidding, billing or conversion optimization, and the one-day window is fixed.
Campaign-total budget: The total amount you are willing to spend across a campaign's full duration. It is a spending limit, not a pacing control — it is not distributed evenly across campaign dates and can be consumed quickly. Switching a campaign-total budget to a daily budget is not reversible on that campaign.
Minimum daily budget: The floor OpenAI sets on a ChatGPT Ads daily budget, which varies by your ad account's billing currency: $25 USD, £15 GBP, 25 CAD, 25 AUD, 25 NZD, 40 BRL, 150 MXN, 2,500 JPY and 25,000 KRW. It replaced the roughly $200,000 minimum commitment reported during the February 2026 managed pilot.
WorkMagic: A ChatGPT Ads measurement partner. Connecting ChatGPT Ads to WorkMagic lets you view performance alongside other channels and send conversion signals back to OpenAI through the Conversions API. Joins Hightouch, Triple Whale and Sonar Optimize in the partner stack.
Ad account ownership: Which party's OpenAI Ads Manager account media runs through in an agency engagement. When the account is the advertiser's, the advertiser keeps billing, conversion history, campaign learnings and audience data if the relationship ends; when it is the agency's, that history leaves with the agency. The most consequential structural term in a ChatGPT Ads retainer, and rarely volunteered.
Content hints: A common misspelling of context hints. There is no separate OpenAI feature called content hints — the mechanic is context hints: the natural-language descriptions of the conversations where your ad belongs, written at ad group level.
ICP (ideal customer profile): The definition of the customer a campaign is built to reach — firmographics, role, problem and trigger. In ChatGPT Ads the ICP is expressed through context hints as an audience-intent-topic combination rather than through keyword or interest cohorts.
Intent moment: The point in a conversation where a user shifts from exploring to deciding — describing a problem, comparing options or asking for a recommendation. The unit ChatGPT Ads targeting is built around, and the reason context hints describe conversations rather than keywords.
Location catalog: The downloadable CSV OpenAI publishes listing every location currently supported for ChatGPT Ads campaign targeting. Beyond country targeting, the United States supports state, DMA and ZIP code targeting; availability varies by country, so locations should be confirmed against the catalog or the campaign location picker.
Bulk upload: The Ads Manager Beta path for creating campaigns at scale rather than one at a time through the guided workflow. Useful when launching many ad groups — for example one ad group per intent across a large context-hint set.
Change log: An account-level record in Ads Manager settings showing what was changed and by whom. On a shared or agency-operated account it is the fastest way to answer “who paused this campaign and when”.
White-label ChatGPT Ads: An arrangement where a specialist operates ChatGPT Ads campaigns on behalf of another agency's clients, delivered under the agency's brand. The agency keeps the client relationship and invoice; the specialist does the platform work and reports into the agency.
Proxy conversion event: The measurable action optimized toward when the real revenue event happens too late or too rarely to bid against — typically a qualified demo, an activated trial, or an SQL stage in B2B. Deep enough to correlate with revenue, shallow enough to generate learnable volume.
Problem-aware / solution-aware / vendor-aware: The three buyer states worth splitting into separate ad groups in B2B. Problem-aware buyers describe the pain, solution-aware buyers compare approaches, vendor-aware buyers compare named tools. They convert at different rates and deserve different hints, creative and bids.
Multi-product carousel: An ad format OpenAI has been testing for product feed campaigns, showing several products from one advertiser in a single unit — the first meaningful departure from the single-product sponsored card. Catalogs with consistent titling across a product family are best positioned for it.
oppref: A click reference value passed on a ChatGPT ad click. When sending server-side conversions through the Conversions API, preserving and sending the available click reference values such as oppref is what allows those events to be attributed correctly.
Persona verification: The third-party identity-verification step in OpenAI Ads Manager account onboarding. Note that verification and account review are separate steps — completing verification does not always mean the account is ready to run campaigns.
First-mover advantage: The argument that an emerging ad channel offers cheaper attention before incumbent budgets arrive, and that early advertisers set the benchmarks later entrants must beat. In ChatGPT Ads it is a real but time-limited effect, and not a reason to test at a size you cannot afford to lose.