ChatGPT Advertising in Sydney: Setup, Costs and What Gets Approved

ChatGPT ads are paid cards that OpenAI shows inside ChatGPT conversations: when someone asks a relevant question, a labelled sponsored card appears under the answer with a headline, one line of copy, an image and a link. Sydney businesses can open an account with an Australian company today, pay per click or per impression, and target New South Wales or individual postcodes. We opened an account for Melmel in September 2026 and built four campaigns with eleven ads. Everything below comes from that build.

What the ad actually is

Ads Manager calls the format a chat card. It has four parts.

Fifty characters is tight in English. It forces you to drop the agency throat-clearing and say the thing.

No keywords. You write a context hint instead

Anyone coming from Google Ads looks for the keyword tab first. There is none. The structure is campaign, ad group, ad, and the ad group asks for a context hint: a sentence or two describing the conversations you want to sit beside.

For our web design ad group the hint reads roughly: small business owners in Sydney asking how to get a website built, what it costs and who to hire. It reads like a brief to a person. Write it too wide and the ad drifts into unrelated chats. Write it too narrow and it never shows. There is no volume data to check in advance, so the first fortnight of reporting is your keyword research.

Targeting: state or postcode

Location is set on the campaign. We tested the location lookup: Sydney returns no city-level option, New South Wales returns the state, and a postcode such as 2000 returns that postcode. That leaves two practical setups.

• Target all of NSW. Fine for anything sold online or delivered across the state.
• Add postcodes one by one. Better for a restaurant, clinic or salon that lives on customers within a few suburbs. A dozen postcodes around the shopfront keeps spend out of Wollongong.

You can also include or exclude custom audiences, such as existing customers, once you have them loaded.

How you are charged

The platform has no sign-up fee. The campaign objective decides what the system optimises for, and the ad group billing event decides what you pay for.

Budgets are either a daily limit or a lifetime cap on the campaign. We chose pay-per-click with our own maximum bid and a lifetime cap per campaign. The platform is new, and we would rather see two weeks of numbers before handing over bid control.

A conversions objective needs the OpenAI pixel on your site and real conversion events flowing back first. Without them the system has nothing to learn from.

Review: the copy that got rejected

Every ad is reviewed. Nine of our eleven were approved in roughly ten minutes. Two were rejected twice. Both had a headline that named review management directly, and one rejection reason read “Scams and fraud: low-confidence scam”. The reviewer, human or not, appears to have read it as a fake-review service.

The same service with a headline about being chosen first on Google Maps passed on the first attempt. What we took from it:

1. Headlines should describe what the customer gets. Leave the method for the landing page.
2. Avoid guarantees, “number one” claims and negative trigger words such as removal or fake.
3. Do not promise that ChatGPT will recommend the advertiser. It is their ad slot and they will not approve that sentence.
4. After two rejections, build a new ad. Editing the old one put it in a queue that was still pending five hours later.
5. The landing page has to show what the ad says. If the ad quotes a price, the page needs the same price.

Which Sydney businesses should try it now

That last row on the left matters in Sydney. Accountants, builders and migration agents who serve the Chinese community have fought over the same Google keywords for a decade. The Chinese-language ad slots inside ChatGPT are close to empty today. They will not stay that way.

Check the website before you pay for clicks

An ad delivers someone to the door. We have watched plenty of budgets disappear after that point: the page takes five seconds to paint, the text overlaps on a phone, there is no number to tap, and the visitor leaves.

So before we open an account we run a free website audit that looks only at what affects paid traffic:

1. How long the landing page takes to show content on a phone over 4G.
2. Whether a phone number, form or chat option is on the first screen and works.
3. Whether the page says the same thing the ad says.
4. Whether the OpenAI pixel can be installed and a form submission can be recorded as a conversion.
5. Anything likely to stall review, such as inflated claims or a missing privacy policy.

You get a one-page list split into “fix before launch” and “fix later”. The first group is usually a day or two of work, less if we built the site. If the site needs more than patching, our Sydney web design page has fixed prices. If you also want ChatGPT to mention you inside the answer, that is AEO work, and it runs alongside ads rather than instead of them.

Our fast-track launch process

1. Free audit. You send a URL, we send the list.
2. Account and verification. The account is opened under your company. Billing, data and history stay yours. We work inside it as a member.
3. Ads. Two or three variants per service in English, Chinese or both. We produce the images.
4. Pixel. Form submissions, phone taps and orders recorded as conversions.
5. Review. We rewrite rejected ads until they pass.
6. After launch. A weekly report: spend, enquiries, and what changes next week.

With your material ready, launch usually takes under a week. Our own account went from sign-up to eleven ads in review in one day.

Frequently asked questions