In one study, a paid ChatGPT visit earned $0.89. Paid Google search earned $2.45

Happy Monday.

Somebody on your team has a ChatGPT ads line penciled into the 2027 plan, probably with the word "test" beside it so it feels cheaper.

Two researchers looked at what that test buys. Maximilian Kaiser of WU Vienna and Christian Schulze of the Frankfurt School tracked 387 sites with paid ChatGPT clicks, 102 of them with full financial tracking, and PPC Land's write-up is rough reading if you were planning to buy.

In U.S. traffic, a paid ChatGPT visit brought in $0.89. A paid Google search visit brought in $2.45. Conversion ran 0.37% against 1.17%.

Of the 87 advertisers buying both kinds of ad in the U.S., 73 recorded no sale from their ChatGPT ads, across 18,726 paid sessions. At their own search conversion rates, about 42 would have had no sale by chance. One advertiser accounts for 66% of the paid ChatGPT purchases among those 102.

At search's rate of return, with the 16 advertisers in the cost sample paying a median 72 cents for search, a ChatGPT click is worth about 26 cents (range 5 to 57). The largest publicly known account, over 15 days, paid $1.72.

The unpaid traffic looks great, at $3.27 per session in the U.S., the highest of five channels. The ads may be eating into it: across a separate panel of 1,898 sites, the researchers estimate ChatGPT sent 6% to 8% fewer unpaid visitors after ads launched, MarTech reports, though that's only significant after adjusting for faster North American growth.

Read the small print. It's one working paper, still under review, on sites with e-commerce tracking, about half of the paid sample in services, software, education and finance. Advertisers chose to buy, so it shows a gap and can't prove a cause. The data came from Grips Intelligence, where Kaiser is a scientific adviser.

Adthena's count was 1,082 advertisers in June and 6,333 in August, Digiday reports, and New Street Research put it near 60,000 by early October, MarTech reports.

So test it like someone who'll read the result. Cap the spend, set a stop date and compare revenue or pipeline per session against your own paid search. If you really want to show up in ChatGPT, that's an organic job. In this data, the unpaid visits are the ones that paid.

If your test comes back at 89 cents a visit, who in the room is going to say it out loud?

Today’s sponsor:

Ross Simmonds, founder of Foundation, on what's left when the budget stops:

He sells distribution, and the rest of the post says so. I wouldn't switch anything off before Black Friday. But do the math on paper: which channels would still send you pipeline on day 30, and which are a meter you keep feeding?

1.5%. AI token spend growth across August and September in Ramp's data, after a 42% jump in July, before picking up 8.9% from September 23 to October 23, TechCrunch reports.

Ramp sells corporate spend software, so read this as its own customers' bills. Volumes kept rising, so flat spend doesn't mean people stopped using AI, and none of it says what the spend bought. Ramp's economist calls it a buyer's market. Push on price at your next AI renewal.

Work out what a new ad channel has to earn before you fund it.

Paste in: six months of platform exports, plus the revenue your CRM credits to each campaign. You get back: a channel table, a break-even click price for any new channel and a list of where the numbers disagree. The full Ad Budget Optimization prompt adds budget elasticity and explicit dollar moves between campaigns.

"Let's test ChatGPT ads" means different things depending on who's in the room. To your paid lead it's a new budget line, and finance assumes an experiment with an end date. Your agency may already be pricing the retainer.

Today's paper won't settle whether the channel works for you, but your own result will get argued over. If the terms were never written down, the loudest person at the review wins.

So before any money moves, agree five things with your paid lead and your finance partner: the number that counts, the floor it has to beat, the maximum spend, the stop date and who makes the call.

Then hold the review on the day you said, even if the numbers are embarrassing. What your team learns about your expectations gets decided in that meeting.

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Pizza-La, a Japanese pizza chain, ran an official collaboration with the anime Dr. STONE from October 1 to November 1. But viewers spotted an ad on its official TikTok with poses and faces that didn't match the campaign, and the anime's production committee had never approved it, Dexerto reports.

The culprit was a setting. Operator Four Seeds says an AI-powered automatic ad generation feature was left on when staff set up the TikTok campaign. TikTok delivered the video. Pizza-La pulled it, paused its TikTok advertising and apologized.

By its own account, nobody decided to make this ad, which is a difficult sentence to say to a licensor. Which AI features are switched on in your ad accounts right now?

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