ChatGPT ads are a new service line for freelance marketers

The early CPC and format reality

Before you pitch this, be honest about how young it is. The numbers are still moving, and pretending otherwise will burn you in front of a client.

Pricing has already changed once. ChatGPT launched on a CPM model, a flat rate per thousand impressions, and that rate fell from around $60 at launch to as low as $25 within ten weeks. Digiday Then OpenAI added cost-per-click bidding. An early version of the ads manager showed CPC bids between $3 and $5 per click for pilot advertisers, though the real cost varies with competition and ad quality. Search Engine Journal Treat every figure here as reported, not as a fixed rate card. Pricing runs through an auction that weighs relevance, so a sharper ad and a tighter landing page can win cheaper clicks than a rival who simply bids more.

The growth headline is loud, so attribute it carefully. OpenAI claimed its US ads pilot passed $100 million in annualized revenue about six weeks after launch, with roughly 85 percent of users eligible to see ads but fewer than 20 percent shown one on any given day. eMarketer The same reporting carried the caveat most sales pitches leave out. Agency executives said they had not yet seen measurable business outcomes, and click-through rates ran as low as 0.91 percent against a Google search benchmark near 6.4 percent. eMarketer

So the honest read is mixed. Reach is enormous, clicks are cheap-ish, and proof of results is still thin. The footprint is also growing. OpenAI opened the Ads Manager beta to UK advertisers in June 2026, its first market outside the United States, with more countries lined up behind it. Search Engine Land If you work with international clients, the channel is opening one market at a time. A freelancer who lays all of this out plainly earns more trust than one who promises Google-level returns on a platform this new.

How to turn this into a service you can sell

Strip the novelty away and the work is familiar. You set up a paid account, write the creative, tell the platform how to place it, wire up conversion tracking, and report on what came back. Media buyers do exactly this on every other channel. The skills transfer.

What you are really selling is timing. Most agencies have not built a ChatGPT ads offer, so a freelancer who can honestly say I run this channel has something specific to put on a service page that competitors cannot copy overnight.

A starter package can include:

• Account and Ads Manager setup, with the pixel and Conversions API installed so every result is trackable from day one.
• Creative written for the format. Short, plain ad copy that belongs next to a chat answer, not a banner pulled from a display campaign.
• Context and audience setup, mapping ads to the kinds of conversations the client wants to reach.
• A regular report tied to real conversions such as sales and sign-ups, never raw impressions.
• A written test plan with a starting budget, a stop rule, and a date when you both decide whether to scale.

The first client is the hard one. Land it and you own a case study no competitor has, which is exactly the kind of proof that earns the next referral.

Pricing and packaging the work

Do not price this as a percentage of ad spend. Budgets will stay small while everyone tests, and 15 percent of a $1,000 spend will not cover your time. Price the work, not the media.

A clean structure is a one-time setup fee plus a flat monthly retainer for management and reporting. The setup fee covers the account, the tracking, and the first round of creative. The retainer covers ongoing optimization, fresh creative, and the report the client reads each month. If spend grows later, you renegotiate the retainer rather than chaining your income to a percentage that punishes you for keeping budgets lean.

This is a textbook productized offer: fixed scope, fixed price, the same deliverables from one client to the next. If you have never packaged work this way, productized services give you the template for naming the offer, listing what is included, and quoting a price instead of rebuilding an estimate every time.

Put the deliverables in writing where the client can see them. A channel this new invites scope creep because nobody knows the rules yet, and a written scope plus a fixed report cadence protect both sides when an experiment flops. Some will.

Where ChatGPT ads sit next to AEO and SEO

Here is the connection most media buyers miss. Paid placement is only half of showing up inside an AI answer. The other half costs nothing in media.

Answer engine optimization, often called AEO or GEO, is the work of getting a brand cited in AI answers organically, with no ad spend behind it. An ad buys you a slot beside the answer. AEO earns you a mention inside it. A client who wants attention in ChatGPT needs both, and a freelancer who can speak to both at once is rare right now.

That pairing makes a stronger pitch than either piece alone. You run the paid channel for fast reach this quarter while building the organic presence that keeps working after the ad budget pauses. If you already do search work, structuring service pages for AI answers is the obvious companion skill, and the wider move toward SEO in the AI Overview era explains why clients are anxious about their visibility in the first place.

Sell the two together and you stop being a button-pusher on one platform. You become the person who owns a client's whole presence inside AI search, paid and organic. That is a retainer clients keep.

How to start without overpromising

You do not need to be an expert to begin. You need a small test budget and a clear plan. Mostly you need the discipline to tell the client the truth about a young channel.

Pick one client whose audience plausibly lives in ChatGPT and who can handle an experiment. Set a budget small enough that learning nothing would not hurt. Install the Conversions API on day one so you are measuring real outcomes instead of impressions. That one setup step separates a real test from a guess, because it ties the spend to leads or sales the client can actually see. Run for a fixed window, read the data with the client, and decide together whether to continue. Write down what happened, because those notes become the playbook you reuse on the next five accounts.

Set expectations before a single dollar moves. Tell the client this is a young channel with cheap clicks and unproven returns, and that month one exists to find out whether their audience responds at all. Clients trust a freelancer who says that out loud far more than one who quietly hopes the numbers work.

Once you package ChatGPT ads as a fixed monthly retainer, you need a clean way to scope the work, send the report, and actually get paid for it. Delivvo gives you one branded portal for the proposal, the deliverables, and the invoice, and the money moves through your own payment gateway, so the platform never takes a cut. See how it works →

None of this waits for the channel to mature. Take one client, run a small honest test, write down the result, and you already offer something almost no competitor lists. The window where ChatGPT ads are this open and this early will not stay open for long. Be early.