How to Track ChatGPT Ads Conversions with Affise: Complete Setup Guide (2026)

On August 18, OpenAI announced its largest ad expansion to date: ChatGPT Ads is rolling out to 31 European markets, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Nordics. The rollout began the following week, six months after the first US pilot launched in February. With Europe added, ChatGPT Ads now runs in 35 countries.

The numbers behind the expansion explain why OpenAI is moving fast. ChatGPT has around one billion weekly active users, and OpenAI says roughly 20% show commercial intent – planning a trip, comparing software, furnishing a home. Tens of thousands of marketers have run campaigns on the platform, and OpenAI reported ad revenue growth of over 25% in August alone.

One caveat for European advertisers: at launch, campaigns go through OpenAI’s Ads Solutions team, agency partners, and technology partners. Self-service access through Ads Manager will follow later this summer, as it did in the US, where self-serve opened in May after the initial managed pilot.

Most ad platforms infer intent. Search comes closest – someone typing “best CRM for small teams” is telling you something – but even search compresses intent into a few keywords.

ChatGPT conversations don’t compress anything. People describe what they’re trying to accomplish, their constraints, and what matters to them in full sentences, often across several turns. When an ad appears in that context, its relevance is higher than any keyword targeting can reach. That’s the pitch, and structurally it holds: the platform knows the user’s actual task, not a proxy.

Ads appear only for users on Free and Go plans, visually separated from ChatGPT’s responses. OpenAI states that answers aren’t influenced by ads and advertisers get no access to conversation content. For businesses, the takeaway is simple: a new performance channel opened in the product where much purchase research happens, and European inventory is fresh with early advertisers facing little competition.

The platform has matured quickly. In the first six months, OpenAI added conversion optimization on top of CPM and CPC bidding, geo-targeting, custom audiences, and measurement beyond clicks through the OpenAI Pixel and Conversions API. That last part enables proper tracking – more on that below.

The campaign structure will feel familiar to anyone who has run Google or Meta ads: Campaign → Ad group → Ads.

Creating a campaign takes three steps. You name it, pick a campaign type (Standard), and choose an objective – Clicks or Conversions. You can attach a conversion event and set geo-targeting at the campaign level. This lets a European advertiser target specific markets from day one.

Once ad groups and ads are live, the Campaigns view shows delivery status, impressions, clicks, and conversions per campaign. In our test account, a Conversions campaign collected 1,767 impressions and 11 clicks over two weeks. The volumes are small but enough to confirm the reporting pipeline end to end.

For conversion campaigns, you’ll need a data source. Under Conversions, Ads Manager gives you a Pixel ID, a setup script for your site, and example event calls for events like registration_completed or order_created. This is also where you generate the Conversions API key — the piece that matters for server-side tracking.

A website pixel alone has blind spots. It misses conversions confirmed after the session – approved orders, qualified leads, deposits – and degrades under cookie restrictions, ad blockers, and browser privacy settings. Since OpenAI optimizes delivery based on visible conversions, every missed one skews optimization.

Affise closes this gap through the OpenAI Conversions API. Conversions registered in Affise are sent server-to-server directly to OpenAI Ads, independent of the user’s browser. Because Affise already forwards conversions to Meta cAPI and Impact the same way, adding OpenAI is a configuration task, not a website rebuild. Send conversions to Affise once, and Affise distributes them to each platform’s API. Structural difference from typical affiliate tracking. OpenAI Ads doesn’t accept redirect tracking links as ad destinations – your ad points straight at your landing page. So the click is registered from the page itself via the Affise WebSDK, not through a redirect. The flow:

The setup itself: create OpenAI Ads as an affiliate in Affise, add the WebSDK snippet to your landing and thank-you pages, pull your Pixel ID and Conversions API key from Ads Manager, and configure an affiliate postback with the OpenAI event type (order_created, lead_created, and so on — one postback per event type). Affise handles value formatting automatically, including currencies like JPY that carry no decimal places.

Two details worth planning around. First, OpenAI accepts conversions timestamped within the last 7 days – if your approval cycle runs longer, decide with your Affise manager whether to fire on registration or on approval. Second, keep your OpenAI pixel in place: the pixel and the Conversions API work together, and OpenAI deduplicates events arriving from both, so server-side tracking fills the gaps rather than double-counting.

Your first conversions run in validation mode – Affise verifies everything reaches OpenAI correctly before anything is recorded. Send one real test conversion, confirm it in Ads Manager, and only then scale spend against the signal.

The full step-by-step setup, including WebSDK code samples and the complete postback parameter reference, is in our documentation:

European inventory is live now, self-serve is weeks away, and CPMs won’t stay this quiet for long. If you want to have the tracking ready before your first campaign, your Affise account manager can issue the OpenAI conversions endpoint and walk through the validation run.