ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage

Insanity

Ads are part of the enshitification of ChatGPT. In the short-term it might offer them some kind of lifeline and I'm sure in their next investor call they'll highlight their revenue from Ads. But if their competitors (including open-weight models) can offer similar quality and ease of use, Ads is just another reason _not_ to use them.

martokus

Can confirm. I've spend over $1000 as a test and I see even worse results. Absolute garbage compared even to cheap garbage paid social traffic.

giancarlostoro

If I were Mark Zuckerberg I would be salivating waiting for a call from Sam Altman.

billyp-rva

> ChatGPT recommends bidding somewhere around by £2 per click, but I bid between £0.15 and £0.07 and was still able to get traffic. However 0.46% is a shockingly low conversion rate. I'm not an ad guru by any means, but isn't it expected that you will get junk clicks with a bid like that? Seems like a you-get-what-you-pay-for scenario.

advisedwang

> ChatGPT recommends bidding somewhere around by £2 per click, but I bid between £0.15 and £0.07 and was still able to get traffic Did they try bidding more? It's possible they are just only getting the dregs. (In which case the ads would be expensive instead of garbage )

water-data-dude

For what it's worth, the picture at the top of the article is a textbook example of very high accuracy!

ok123456

This will end in another 'adpocalypse' episode. Something like: ChatGPT generates recipes from the Anarchist Cookbook and adds Home Depot ads at the end, or inserts Amazon affiliate links for the Turner Diaries.

nikole9696

I have no idea why anyone would click on any ad anywhere other than by accident, not knowing if the link might take them to some malware site these days.

ryanmcbride

Everything with ads is garbage. All the time. It poses no benefit to humanity even a little bit.

zenethian

It’s wild to me that people click ads.

cmiles8

Yes, ChatGPT ads are a heaping pile of garbage. I feel sorry for anyone that’s wasted perfectly good marketing spend on such nonsense. Outside a captive platform like Amazon, most ads are garbage and a total waste of money. If I’m on Amazon trying to buy X and my search for X “promotes” an option to the top of the list yeah that probably influences me buying that. But the broader online ad ecosystem is a total waste of money. Yes, I once searched a question about golf balls… no I don’t want to see “targeted ads” about golf balls following me all over the internet for the next three weeks.

EcommerceFlow

It's interesting the ChatGPT referrals conversions match Googles. Shows once they tune a few knobs, they could have a cashcow on their hands.

jandhdhshhh

Speaking as a consumer, I’ve always found ad targeting to be way off for Google, YouTube or even facebook. The few times I got ads I ChatGPT it was also off. It’s kinda ironic that with all that AI, they choose not to use any of that intelligence to target ads better. It makes you wonder what all those engineers are working on if not the main revenue driver.

jabart

We can't use ChatGPT Ads because ChatGPT banned our company for ads for political content even though we are a CRM/Compliance tool for campaigns and the only ad we had was the autogenerated ChatGPT one they made. No chance at an appeal either. We had this issue with Bing Ads but microsoft fixed it and even personally called to apologize about the mixup.

symfrog

I have run many ad campaigns across various platforms, and I have come away with 2 main thoughts: 1. Click fraud is rampant, and the ad platforms seem to not care in the least as long as they can drain your budget. 2. The ad bidding process is completely opaque, and no auditing seems to be done, my inclination is that there is large scale fraud here too.

snailmailman

Is there any ad targeting that is good? The main place I see ads is YouTube on iOS. I used to have ad targeting turned off, but I’ve since opted into all of googles tracking and ad-targeting, in attempt to curate the ads I see and improve them. I’ve had all the Google tracking and ad-targeting turned on for close to a year now. Google still can’t even target me ads that are in English. I can’t read Chinese or Turkish or Spanish but I still get ads in those languages. Most of the ads are still scams or questionably legal products. And nearly all advertisements are blatantly targeted toward the wrong demographics. I get both “you can buy this multi million dollar hotel” and “you can use food stamps at our store”. I sometimes see advertisements for local politicians (same state), which might be targeted, but I just as frequently see ads for politicians I cannot possibly vote for. (opposite side of the country)

VCFundedGenYer

I'm fine with ad targeting being garbage and you should be too. That means you can't be tracked because it's too stupid to do so.

Anon1096

HN isn't really a good place to have an informed discussion on ads efficacy unfortunately. In this thread we have many many people talking about how online ads in general are completely worthless. All of the top comments I see are harping on things like Google Ads having bad targeting for reasons like you are getting recommendations on products you just bought (having experience in the ads industry, yes this is actually a good signal that you might buy another one, even if you don't want to believe it). Meanwhile, the article is actually discussing ChatGPT ads specifically compared to Google Ads, which they do have success with. Anyway, my guess is that it's a combination of 1. OpenAI being new and not having the massive work needed yet to set up a fully successful ads network, but they're recruiting a lot of talent from the area + recsys so it's probably not too far off. And 2. we don't really know in general yet how best to do in context ad recommendations. I think this will also improve pretty rapidly with how much talent is working in the space. The best ads will probably look a lot more like Google Search per-request targeted ads rather than Instagram style per-user targeted ads, but I believe we'll see lots of gains fast.

hermitcrab

Strange how this went straight from front page to position 157.