Name: Your 2026 ChatGPT Ads Holiday Playbook
Uploaded: 2026-11-04T17:51:22.549Z
Duration: 35 min 12 s
Description: Your 2026 ChatGPT Ads Holiday Playbook

Transcript for "Your 2026 ChatGPT Ads Holiday Playbook": Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining our 2026 ChatGPT Ads Holiday Playbook. I'm Julie. I'm in product marketing on the ads team, and I'm joined by Michael. Hi, everyone. I'm Michael, a customer success manager on the ads team. So we know how much this time of year can matter for your business and how much you have to get done. This is also our first holiday season with ChatGPT Ads, and so we're very excited to share with you what we've learned so far and give you a preview of what's coming next. And, apparently, as, you know, first holiday season, I think it calls for a very festive first holiday outfit. So... How to dress up to celebrate our big first holiday season. Yeah. We're committing to the theme here. So today, we want to make preparing your campaigns a little easier. So we'll explore the holiday shopping opportunity on ChatGPT, and then we'll walk you through five best practices to help get you ready with demos and a sneak preview of upcoming capabilities along the way. Before we get into the content, we recommend signing up at Ads.OpenAI.com or logging in to Ads Manager if you already have an account so you can follow along as we walk through these demos. And I'm really excited. I have some very cool news. Christmas came early this year. Yeah. It did. Everyone here is on the nice list. And what that means is if you're new to ChatGPT Ads, an eligible advertiser like you can take advantage of our holiday ad credits offer available now through December 31. We'll share this QR code again at the end, so don't worry if you miss it now. Okay. So before we get into our best practices, I wanna start by sharing how the shopping experience is continuing to evolve across ChatGPT. We've recently launched a new interface that brings not only text but now visuals and more interactive elements together, making it easier to explore products and work through a shopping decision. So let's take holiday gifting as an example. I am usually a very last minute shopper. I don't know about you. I try and get ahead of it, but I... Ends up being last minute no matter how. I aspire to to your level of, preparedness. But this year, I am trying to get ahead of it a little bit more with ChatGPT. And so examples of things that I'm I'm using and using it for are setting gift ideas for everyone in my family on my shopping list. So I have a coffee lover. I have a gardener. I... My kids love baking. And so I'm providing these kind of simple requests, but now they're coming back with this amazing visual gift inspiration where I can look at products and product images. I can compare details. I can refine my ideas. I have a running track list of everyone on my my wish list and gift list that I'm shopping for. And so it's creating this more useful interactive moment for product and brand discovery. And for advertisers, that raises a very important question this season, which is how can your business ensure that you're showing up while these shopping decisions are being made? And that's really where ChatGPT ads can come in to help your brand show up during this process of discovery and consideration. So here you can see a relevant ad that surfaced directly within the experience. And I wanna look at the broader shopping opportunity, behind some of these moments. So the experience we just saw is part of a broader shift that we're seeing across the the board around how consumers are shopping with AI. What we're seeing is that Adobe is forecasting that AI referred traffic to US retail sites is growing over a 130% year over year this holiday season with substantial growth around unsurprising key moments like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. And that forecast covers AI platforms broadly, but it also gives us a useful signal of how quickly AI is really becoming a key part of holiday research and shopping this season and beyond and why it's worth preparing for these discovery moments now. And there's another part of the opportunity. So what those shoppers do once they reach a retailer site. So the next part of this is that it's not really just about the volume of traffic coming from AI sources but the quality of it. So AI referred shoppers are converting at significantly higher rates and spending more time on-site than any other source. And these visits come from people who have already spent time thinking through what they need and want and what to buy and they may arrive more engaged and ready to take that next step and that's where the opportunity comes in that we want to help you prepare for. Really reaching people as they're still exploring in the early consideration set, comparing, and making decisions throughout the holiday season, ideally with your business in mind. So with that, Michael, I'm gonna hand it to you and would love to hear the playbook. Yeah. Definitely. And I totally relate to those consumers. I'm already starting my holiday research using ChatGPT so that when Cyber Monday comes around, I know where to get the best deals and have the products ready to go. Yes. So let's get into the foundations now. And what we're going to cover are really useful whether you're a newer whether you're using a newer creation experience or you're managing existing campaigns. So to help you prepare for the holiday season, we've organized a playbook around five best practices for your campaigns. Just like Santa, we have made the list and we've checked it twice. Yes. We have. First thing we wanna do is build a strong campaign foundation. Second, make sure you're giving your campaigns room to learn. Third, let campaigns... Campaign intelligence work toward your goals. Fourth, measure, learn, and optimize throughout the season. And finally, don't forget about that crucial q five period after Christmas. Together, these help you give the system useful context and signals, enough time to learn, and the flexibility to pursue the outcomes that matter most to your business. Let's begin with that strong foundation. Before focusing on the individual settings, think about the information your campaign has to work with. What is it your business offers? What does a valuable outcome look like to you? And which products are available to shoppers? Our ad system prioritizes relevance, and your website is a really important source of context about your business. Your website should really make it easy to understand what is it you're promoting, who is it useful for, and why someone might choose it. First, you wanna make sure that relevant product and landing pages are accessible and crawlable. That crawlable, component really helps send our system the right context about your business, and we'll drop documentation in this chat around how you can make sure your website is set up correctly. Second, include clear product descriptions, benefits, and details that help someone make a decision when it comes to buying. And third, keep that information current and consistent with your ads. This is especially true during the holidays because prices and availability and offers change really quickly. Your website helps the system understand what your business offers. The next step from there is helping it understand what does success look like to you as a business, and that's where conversion signals come in. Maybe you want someone to make a purchase or sign up on your website. Conversion signals help connect their engagement back to ChatGPT and your ads through those actions. This helps in two key ways. One, you can see whether your campaign is driving the results you want. And two, it gives our system a lot more information to optimize toward the outcomes you really care about. And there are two ways to send those signals. The pixel, which captures events on your website, and conversions API that sends them from your back end. Let's walk through the pixel setup so you can see how easy it is to get started. So to get started, you'll first visit the conversions tab within Ads Manager. From there, you'll click create data source and name your data source name. You'll notice automatic advanced matching is turned on, which is a tool that helps detect customer information from your website, and in a secure way, match it back to ChatGPT to find those same users. You'll then click create, and your pixel has now been created, and you have a pixel ID. You'll copy that ID so you can paste it onto your website and actually match back to the actions people are taking. From there, you'll actually create and define those events that we talked about, what it is that your business cares about. You'll choose a base event, which tells us what type of action it qualifies as. In this case, we'll choose order created, and then we'll name it so we can know what we're referring to. In this case, a website purchase. It also lists the window of the attribution, so how far we're looking back to track those actions. You'll then click create, and you're good to go. You now have your counts... You now have your custom conversion event. From there, you can then begin to set up campaigns to actually optimize toward these events. Now it's really important to set up those pixels and conversion events, but it's just as important to make sure that we've actually set them up with high quality scores. Once the events are flowing, the next step is to make sure that the signals you're sending are high quality. And that's where event quality score or EQS can help. It gives eligible data sources a score from one to 10, and it helps you spot opportunities to improve the conversion data you're sending. You can see here that this example has a score of eight out of 10 and has recommendations on how you can increase to a 10 out of 10. You can also, after you make changes, confirm that events are arriving correctly, and be sure to check back because your score updates daily. Think of EQS as Santa's little helper on that measurement journey you're on Yes. Especially before your busiest holiday periods. And EQS matters beyond getting you set up... Beyond getting your set up in order. But it's important because it also relates to campaign performance. In an analysis we ran, we found that campaigns from advertisers with high event quality scores had lower measured CPAs than their peers. The key takeaway here is pay attention to the quality of the signals your campaign receives. And now that we have your website set up, signal in place, let's talk about your product catalog. If your business is one that sells products, it's important to talk about this because you can upload your product catalog to help drive sales by leveraging one of our solutions, product feed ads. These ads can help showcase multiple options from your catalog along with more detailed information like price and ratings. Think of the feed as a spreadsheet. Each row includes a product and details like its description, image, price, availability, and website link. During the holidays, prices and availability change quickly, So keeping your feed up to date helps your ads reflect what shoppers can actually buy. I love the feed because when I see ads and it lists the exact price and the ratings, it helps me make a more informed decision about which product to buy and compare pretty easily. We're seeing that advertisers that have created product feed campaigns are getting better click through rates than non product feed peers. And the takeaway here is that if you have a product feed, we strongly recommend uploading it and creating campaigns from it because we'll... You'll likely get better performance. And I'll show you just how easy it is to get set up. You'll go to the feeds tab within ads manager and click create feed. You'll name the, you'll choose the name for your feed and make sure that you've indicated that this is for your products. Next, you'll choose how you wanna connect your feed. There are three options, uploading a CSV, using a hosted URL, or an SFTP connection, which is great if you're working with a feeds partner. We'll choose upload CSV, hit create, and there we go. We have the shell for our, newest feed. From there, we'll be prompted to upload the feed itself, and our system will validate the file, make sure everything is flowing correctly. We're capturing all of the details that I mentioned, like price, availability. And then if you... In a few short seconds, the feed is uploaded. You'll even be prompted to create a product feed campaign directly from there. And, Julie, with these foundations in place, now let's talk about best practices for campaign setup this holiday season. Alright. Thank you. So our second recommendation here is to give campaigns time to learn. So holiday research doesn't start on Black Friday. What we've seen, from ChatGPT data from last year is that product search activity is already elevated now in the weeks leading up to Cyber five or the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. We also saw elevated activity during Cyber five itself, including key days like Black Friday. So the two parts of this slide are showing different comparison periods, but they point to the same planning lesson, which is people are researching all throughout the season ahead of and during these key shopping moments. And for your business, the practical takeaway is that it's important to show up now while shoppers are still early in their decision making and still making up their minds. The next reason it's important to start now is because it gives our system time to learn what works to drive outcomes for your business ahead of these peak days. So the earlier you start, the more time we have to understand your signals from things like, event quality score and the information from your campaign, can continue to work for you. So keep campaigns running consistently. Make sure that your conversion measurement is working and check the EQS score to make sure that the quality of your signals you're sending will provide ample opportunity for us to do that optimization. And that brings us to our third recommendation, which is letting campaign intelligence work for you towards your goals. So as ChatGPT is becoming more helpful for shoppers, we also wanna make advertising more intuitive and helpful for your business. You know your products. You know your customers and what success looks like. And especially during the holidays, your time is so valuable. So getting started with a new ad platform should build on the knowledge you already have and take more of that setup and the day to day work off your plate. I love that. Makes your life easier so you can focus on what's really important during such a peak time of year. Yes. And so our vision for ChatGPT Ads is to incorporate intelligence by default. So we wanna create an experience that quickly understands your business. It helps you create a campaign and then learns how to work towards your outcomes. So I wanna share with you a quick demo and preview something that we're working towards that you may start to see in your own campaign experience over the coming days and weeks. So I'm gonna go in to create a new campaign and in an adjusted flow that you may start to see, the first step is really giving us context about your business. And for many businesses, the best starting point is your website. So here, we're gonna do a demo for a brand called Harbor Coffee Co. They sell coffee products directly on their website, and so we're gonna put in their website. You can also put in a a destination URL and get started. And from that, our system is using our advanced AI and models to deeply understand your business, the products that you sell, how you position your products, all of your imagery, and make a recommendation to you about the goal that may make sense. In this case, because it's a d to c brand, we're recommending purchases as the starting goal. You can, of course, always change that goal. We have other goal options. But with this, it includes intelligent bidding by default, which allows our system to automatically adjust bids to adapt delivery of your ads to progressively achieve the outcome of purchases as we capture more and more signals. That is so cool. The fact that you can just let our system build it all for you, I feel like that's going to be a game changer. Very advanced here. And, of course, we will continue to provide transparency and control. So for bidding, they're also gonna continue to be manual bidding if you prefer to fine tune bids yourself or if you want to set something like a target CPA. And a target CPA allows us to understand what your goal is and then bid accordingly to ensure that your average CPA never exceeds this target. So it creates a great guardrail for us to understand what you care about and where that limit is. From there, after you've, you know, confirmed your optimization and your bidding choices, now we can move to the next step, which is creating your first ad. And again, the context that you already provide in creative inputs helps us to make recommendations about different ad formats that we can run across the experience. And so in this case, we're pulling an imagery that already exists on your website. We're making recommendations for the call to action and the headline through a new system of intelligent creative, which allows us to provide enhanced headlines and text and, with the setting you choose, optimize that creative for you. So you're saying this built the ad for you. You didn't have to do any of this yourself? Nothing. And It's pretty great. The best part is that it's going to optimize your products based on the context of the conversation and where a consumer might be in their journey, really with the goal of optimizing again to hitting that that outcome that you set upfront. You, of course, can continue to manually create ads and upload images individually so that capability will be here. But we're really excited to continue to let automation and intelligence work for you and take take on more of that. So the last step here is just reviewing your campaign settings. That means setting your budget, ensuring you've picked the right locations, you want your campaign to run-in, confirming your destination, and you are ready to go. We really wanna make this holiday season as seamless as possible for you so you have more time to enjoy turkey with your family at Thanksgiving and less time having to manage the day to day of campaigns. So you'll still hopefully start to see some of these changes show up for you in your ads manager very soon. I feel like if this works that well, you could even afford to take a quick post turkey nap. Oh, yeah. I I always have to do that. Yeah. I have even more time on here. Yes. So with these three capabilities, we just wanted to kinda give you this preview of where the experience is going and putting intelligence into the system by default. But there are practical choices that you can make for your holiday campaigns today as these capabilities become available in your account. So the common thread here is simple. Align on the outcome, give the system useful signals like your website, and then let it take on more of those ongoing adjustments. So we're gonna walk through each of them. And, Michael, you should take the first one. Let's do it. The first thing that you want to figure out is how to choose the right objective. And the objective is so critical because it tells our system what outcome you want our system to work to. That could be views, clicks, or conversions. For holiday purchase goals, once conversion measurement is in place, we recommend a conversion objective build on impressions. And let's look at why the setup gives the system more flexibility to find holiday purchases. Let's use the example of Home and Apron as seen here. Their goal is to sell holiday gifts, but shoppers take different paths to get to that purchase. One shopper clicks the ad and buys a gift on the site. That would be considered a click through conversion. Another sees the ad, keeps researching gifts elsewhere, and later returns to Home and Apron to buy without having ever clicked the ad. That would be considered a view through conversion. And this is why we recommend setting up campaigns with a conversions objective build on impressions. It's because this campaign type lets our system optimize toward both click through and view through purchases, capturing a more full view of who's taking given action based on your ad. And we know that view through purchases can happen really quickly. In fact, more than half of eligible view through conversions happen within the first hour. So for your business, looking only at click based results can leave out a lot of eligible purchases that happen soon after someone sees your ad. Reviewing the click through and view through results together really does give you that fuller picture of the purchase journeys, that your measurement can recognize. And I think that it's really important during a busiest time of year to make sure you have as complete a view as possible. And now that we've talked about recommended campaign goals, let's talk about how to actually leverage bidding to optimize toward those goals. Yeah. So thank you. So the next setting we're gonna talk about is automatic bidding. So we saw earlier that product research builds throughout the holiday season and shopping opportunities change quickly. So automatic bidding helps your campaign respond and adapt quickly as the ads continue to deliver. So we align on your goal and your budget, but the system will adjust bids progressively to help get more of the outcomes you care about within that budget. So this reduces the need to kind of fine tune bids manually throughout the season. You can avoid doing this while you're running the rest of your business and you have more time back. But it also, again, allows the system to use all of our intelligence on your behalf to get to your results. So now let's look at the ad itself. That's our our next step where, you know, the same business can be useful to shoppers for many different reasons. Especially in ChatGPT, we see people come with so many different starting points and context when they're having a conversation. So someone might be looking for a seasonal product. Another person might be trying to find a gift for their brand or family, and someone else might be ready to buy the thing. I know I often, when I'm shopping, half of the time buy for myself Yeah. As I'm buying for someone else. So we really want to create a system that adapts creative for the moment and meets customers where they are. And so these examples from Home and Apron are showing how responsive ad formats can adjust for these different scenarios. So we'll have a single image ad, or more visual gifting options with multiple images, and products that include pricing and clear item details. So intelligent creative is going to continue to evolve, but our aim is to help your ads respond to more of those moments with less of the manual production work. And keeping creative enhancements on allows us to adapt existing copy and headlines and information that you provide us through your landing page to, you know, best position your products to customers. So as you're creating your holiday ads, giving the system a strong starting point with clear copy, really high quality product images, and keeping your feed and creative content up to date is the best way to take advantage of the intelligence here that we're building. Okay. So, Michael, what's next? Great question. After you have built out your ads, you wanna start thinking about, not only building off of the foundation, but really making sure that the campaign is delivering and making changes based on what you're actually seeing. Finally, you should review your campaign results and use what you learn to decide how to improve your campaigns throughout the holiday season. Once your campaigns are running, it's critical to stay close to how they're performing. We recommend checking your campaigns every two to three days, especially because we believe holiday demand and competition will change frequently in the next few weeks and months. There are three things to look for. First, are your ads delivering? If delivery is limited, you can start with the basics. Check ad eligibility, check review status, the campaign dates, what your budget is, and, of course, bid settings. But second, ask yourself, are you seeing the results you expected? If performance is weaker than you'd like, confirm that your conversion measurement is set up correctly, and it's a great time to check your EQS, and be sure to, confirm that you're incorporating some of the best practices that we've covered in this webinar, especially leaning into those intelligent campaign features. And third, where are you seeing strong results? Those may be opportunities to gradually increase your budget on the campaigns that are really performing and exceeding your goals. Be sure to do so while keeping an eye on efficiency and making sure your results remain strong. Checking in doesn't mean you have to be changing something every time, but rather it's important for you because you are giving campaigns room to learn, looking for patterns, and make adjustments when the results support them. And we've talked a lot about preparing for the holiday peak, but there is another shopping moment that we don't want advertisers to overlook. But why... There... There's more. This is what we call q five in in this... In the biz. Our fifth and final recommendation is to plan for q five. This is the shopping period directly after Christmas and into early January. So the holiday peak at this point in the year might be behind us post Christmas, but people are often coming to ChatGPT for new reasons to explore and shop. So they might be, looking at relevant items, after Christmas to set goals for the New Year. They might be starting a new routine or taking advantage of kind of a post holiday offer. So this is a really good time to think about where your products naturally fit into those moments and plans. And so for a coffee business, like we talked about earlier, that might mean helping someone create a new morning withdrawal they're looking forward to. Or for home business, it might be making a space work better for the year ahead. So you don't have to reinvent your campaign at the end of December. You wanna use what you've learned throughout this busy period from your customers along with the results that you've seen and what's available to decide where it makes sense to keep investing and remarketing and messaging to a new customer base that you've built over this time. And so the key takeaway is that it's good to plan for that next moment now so you can keep reaching relevant shoppers as the holiday season turns into the new year. Okay. Should we do a quick recap of the playbook? Let's do it. So we've covered a lot of ground. We're just going to reiterate to make sure you have everything you need for a successful holiday period. Step one, don't forget to build a strong campaign foundation. Keep your website current, set up conversion measurement, and upload your product catalog if you sell products. Number two, give your campaigns room to learn. Launch early so they're ready for your biggest shopping days. Number three, let that campaign intelligence work toward your goals. Put automatic bidding and creative enhancements to work to help get the most out of your campaign. And four, measure, learn, and optimize throughout the season. Check-in every few days, address address issues, and gradually scale what's working. And don't forget about q five. Keep reaching shoppers with relevant New Year products and offers. And these are the five things to help you head into the holidays prepared and keep improving along the way. Alright. So today, we covered a lot of ground. We shared how shopping is continuing to evolve in ChatGPT. It's becoming more visual, more engaging. For shoppers that means new ways to discover your brand and products and decide what to buy. And for businesses, we're offering through ChatGPT Ads new ways to show up along the way as these decisions are being made. We're also very busy at work making the advertiser experience more intelligent so that you can spend less time managing the details of a new ad platform and more time growing your business with us. The steps we covered today are intended to help you prepare for the holidays and give your campaigns a strong foundation as that ad experience continues to evolve. And as promised, we mentioned we would share the QR code again. You can visit ads.openai.com to get started or log in to ads manager, and eligible new advertisers can take advantage of our holiday ad credit offer through December 31. So don't forget about this gift. Thank you for spending time with us today during such a busy season. We hope you're leaving with a clearer plan and a little more time for everything else on your holiday list. So from me and Michael and the entire team at ChatGPT Ads, thank you so much for joining us, and happy holidays. Thank you.