How to Run ChatGPT Ads in Indonesia

Last verified 30 September 2026. ChatGPT Ads Manager is still in beta, so some screens and options may change after this date.

ChatGPT ads opened to advertisers in Indonesia on 23 September 2026, and eligible Indonesian businesses and individuals can now sign up through OpenAI's self-serve Ads Manager. We set up two Search Agency campaigns a week after the launch, one generated automatically from a landing page and one built by hand, and going by the timestamps on our screenshots the whole setup took about 35 minutes.

The screens themselves are simple. What slows people down are the checks around them, like the phone verification Ads Manager asks for right after launch, the business verification that asks for tax details, and a landing page that OpenAI's ad crawler can't reach. Every screenshot below comes from our own account, with personal details blurred.

What ChatGPT ads are and who sees them

A ChatGPT ad is a small card that appears below ChatGPT's answer, showing the advertiser name, favicon, a title, a line of copy, an image and a link to your landing page. OpenAI says it only shows ads to people on the Free and Go plans. Users on Plus, Pro or any Business plan never see them, and neither do accounts identified as belonging to someone under 18.

There are no keywords to bid on. The system matches ads using the context of the current conversation, your landing page, your title and copy, the context hints you write, and, when a user has ads personalization switched on, some signals from their wider ChatGPT use. That makes the ad itself and the page it links to far more important than they are in keyword-based search ads, because they are part of how the system decides where you appear.

When more than one ad is eligible for the same conversation, OpenAI chooses between them with a relevance-weighted, second-price auction. Your bid counts, and so does how well your ad and landing page fit the conversation, which means a closely matched ad can win against a higher bid. In a second-price auction the winner pays a price set by the competition instead of its full maximum bid.

Conversation-based matching also doesn't mean advertisers see the conversation. OpenAI says advertisers never receive a user's chats, chat history, memories, name, email, precise location, IP address or sensitive information, because the matching happens inside ChatGPT and what comes back to you in Ads Manager is performance reporting. Ads are also kept away from sensitive or regulated topics such as personal health, mental health and politics, and users can switch off ad personalization, dismiss ads and see why a particular ad was shown to them.

The platform is growing fast. OpenAI reported that ChatGPT ads reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days and now runs in more than 60 countries, with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan added in the same September rollout.

What to prepare before you open Ads Manager

Most of the delays we hit came from details we didn't have ready. Gather these first and the setup runs in one sitting.

• A work email on your company domain, since Ads Manager warns you if you sign in with a personal Gmail address.
• A credit card issued in the same country as your ad account, because OpenAI says a card from a different country may not be accepted.
• Your registered business name for business verification, plus your NPWP if you want it printed on invoices, since the tax ID field itself is optional.
• An Indonesian mobile number that can receive a WhatsApp message or SMS.
• A landing page that OpenAI's crawlers are allowed to fetch.

The last item is the one that silently breaks campaigns. OpenAI states that advertisers must allow OAI-AdsBot and recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot too. If either is disallowed in robots.txt, crawling stops and ad validation fails. Firewalls, CDNs and bot protection tools can also block these crawlers with a 403 error even when robots.txt is fine, so ask whoever runs your hosting to check. A robots.txt that allows both looks like this.

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Allow: /

1. Generate your first ad from a website URL

Start from OpenAI's Advertise in ChatGPT page and click Start now. The ads side runs on a normal OpenAI account, so the same login you use for ChatGPT works here.

When we signed up, the banner offered Rp 1.5 million in ad credit to new Indonesian advertisers who spent Rp 1.5 million within 14 days, for sign-ups before 30 September 2026. Offers like this change, so read the banner on the day you sign up.

Clicking Start now takes you to the standard OpenAI sign-in, where you can continue with email, Google, Apple, Microsoft or a phone number. A brand-new account then asks for a full name and age before it lets you through, and whatever you type as the name here is separate from the business details you give later.

The first real screen asks for one thing, your website address. OpenAI reads the page and builds an ad preview plus a recommended campaign, and nothing goes live until you approve it. We entered our SEO Fighter Bootcamp page.

While it works you'll see a short Thinking state and a note that the campaign is designed around the themes, products and brand details it found on your site. For us it took only a few seconds, though a slow or heavily scripted page may take longer to read.

A few seconds later it returned an ad titled "Join the Bootcamp" with the line "Live SEO training for the AI search era" and a photo pulled from the page. The copy was usable as it was. The audience description was less accurate, since it said the ad was built around "people in the United States who work in SEO" for a bootcamp that runs in Indonesia, so read that sentence closely before you move on.

2. Review the recommended campaign and create the ad account

The next screen shows the full recommendation, and both the ad and the campaign settings have an Edit link. Ours came back with the objective set to Clicks, Indonesia as the location, the bootcamp page as the destination, Maximum results as the bid strategy and an average daily budget of IDR 350,000. Change anything that doesn't match your plan here, because it's quicker than fixing it inside Ads Manager later.

Clicking Continue triggered an email check, since we were signed in with a Gmail address. Ads Manager suggests a work email and lets you switch accounts. If other people on your team will manage ads, switching to a company address now saves you moving everything later.

Then you set up the advertising account itself with an account name, country, currency and time zone. We used Search Agency, Indonesia, IDR and Jakarta time. Take this screen slowly, because the page warns that you won't be able to change this information after you continue, and OpenAI's billing help confirms the currency can't be changed later through self-serve.

3. Add a payment method and send the ad for review

Billing takes a card number, expiry date, security code, a billing address and an invoice email. There's also an optional business tax ID field where Indonesian advertisers can choose ID NPWP as the type, which puts your tax number on future invoices.

Once the card is entered, the form expands to ask for the cardholder name and billing address, and the Launch campaign button becomes active. Our filled-in version is below with personal details blurred.

Two lines on this screen are easy to miss. You're only billed for eligible clicks after the ad is approved and running, and OpenAI places a temporary authorization hold of $50 USD on the card, which your bank may take eight days or longer to release. Billing is postpaid, so charges happen when your spend reaches a payment threshold or at the end of the month, and OpenAI says new accounts start with a lower threshold that rises with a good payment history.

After you click Launch campaign, the ad goes into review. The confirmation says you won't be charged until the ad starts running, and Ads Manager opens with the campaign listed as Not serving until review is done.

4. Verify your phone number and your business

Inside Ads Manager a yellow banner asked us to verify a phone number for the ad account. The number has to come from the ad account's country, and the banner explains that without it you can't keep advertising once you reach the verification spending limit. The code arrives on WhatsApp by default, with an SMS option if you prefer.

Business verification comes next. The form asks for your business name, an optional DBA name and where the business is located. It runs through a separate verification window, and if you advertise under your own name without a registered business, the panel on the left lets you switch the advertiser type to Individual instead of hunting for an EIN or TIN you don't have.

After submitting, you'll see an Application in review message saying status updates will appear in your organization settings over the next few days. OpenAI's troubleshooting page says this review can take up to seven business days. In our case the ad itself switched from Not serving to Serving a few minutes later while the business application was still pending.

One thing to check after submitting business details is the advertiser name on your ad preview. A few minutes after we submitted ours, the preview in Ads Manager showed the registered company name instead of the brand name we had typed, so if your legal entity and your brand have different names, look at the preview before assuming people will see the brand.

5. Install the pixel and create a conversion event

Clicks alone won't tell you whether ChatGPT traffic turns into leads or registrations. For that you need OpenAI's measurement pixel, which you'll find when you set up a data source in Ads Manager. It gives you a pixel ID and a setup script that goes into your website's HTML head, near the top, with only one pixel setup script per page.

From there, the button to create a conversion event opens the custom conversion form. You pick the data source, choose a base event and give the conversion a name that will show up in reporting. We chose Registration completed for bootcamp sign-ups. The default attribution windows were 30 days after a click and one day after a view.

Ads Manager then gives you the event call to place wherever the conversion actually happens, such as a thank-you page or the success handler of a form. For a registration it looks like this.

oaiq(
  "measure",
  "registration_completed",
  { type: "customer_action" }
);

OpenAI's pixel documentation lists the standard events, including page_viewed, items_added, checkout_started, order_created, lead_created, registration_completed, appointment_scheduled, subscription_created and trial_started, plus custom events with your own names. If you'd rather send events from your server, the same dialog has a Conversions API tab. The pixel sets two first-party cookies, and calling oaiq("consent", false) removes them, which matters if your site runs a cookie consent banner.

6. Build a campaign by hand in Ads Manager

The automatic flow is fine for a first test, but a second campaign is better built from Create in Ads Manager, where every setting is visible on one page. We built one called AI Search for our AI search service.

Campaign type is either Standard or Product feed. Standard is for sending people to a page, while Product feed builds ads from a product catalog, and OpenAI notes that product feed campaigns can only target and exclude at country level.

The objective sets how you bid and pay. Views bills per thousand impressions, Clicks bills per click, and Conversions optimizes toward the event you created while billing by impressions. Locations can be narrowed below country level, so we targeted Jakarta Raya instead of all of Indonesia, and there's a separate field for locations to exclude. Eligible platforms covers Android app, Android web, desktop web, iOS app and iOS web, all ticked by default.

Three more fields deserve attention before you move on, since they are easy to skip. Each one is hard to fix once data starts coming in.

• Tracking parameters accept placeholders such as {campaign_id}, {ad_group_id} and {ad_id}, so you can tag clicks for Google Analytics.
• Custom audiences let you include or exclude your own lists, but OpenAI requires at least 25,000 matched users for an include audience.
• Text customization is switched on by default, and it lets AI rewrite and translate your headlines and descriptions, which may then be shown without your review.

That last setting is useful for reaching people who chat in Bahasa Indonesia when your ad is in English. If your copy includes prices, promotions or claims that legal has approved word for word, switch it off. The budget field also explains how pacing works. With a daily budget of IDR 350,000, Ads Manager told us the maximum daily spend would be IDR 700,000 and the maximum seven-day spend IDR 2,450,000, because OpenAI allows up to twice the daily budget on a single day and up to seven times it across a week.

7. Set up the ad group and write useful context hints

Each campaign holds one or more ad groups. The ad group screen asks for a name, the bid strategy, optional tracking parameters, a default destination URL and context hints. Maximize results was the only strategy offered in our flow, and OpenAI's help page describes it as automatic bidding that goes for the most clicks or conversions within your budget without guaranteeing a cost per result. The same page mentions a manual max bid option for advertisers who want a ceiling.

Context hints are the closest thing ChatGPT ads have to keywords, and they're easy to get wrong. Our first attempt was a comma-separated list, "AI search agency, GEO agency, AEO agency, ChatGPT ads agency". OpenAI's guidance on context hints asks for something different, a clear natural phrase focused on one idea that adds detail your ad and landing page don't already make obvious. Their examples read like "Cushioned everyday running shoes for beginners training for their first 5K".

Rewritten that way, our hints become sentences such as "Indonesian companies that want their brand recommended in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews" and "Marketing managers comparing SEO agencies in Jakarta that also cover AI search". Each one describes who the service helps and when it's useful. Keep in mind that hints guide matching without acting as targeting rules, so they can't force a geography, a schedule or an exclusion.

8. Write the ad, check the summary and read your first results

The ad screen asks for an ad name, a destination URL, tracking parameters, a title of up to 50 characters, a description of up to 100 characters and an image. Images should be PNG or JPG, ideally square and at least 256 by 256 pixels. We used our logo, the title "AI Search Agency" and the description "Be the answer AI give to your customers. Start your AI search campaign today!"

Even at 77 characters the description triggered a warning that copy may be truncated in some placements, and the preview on the right cut it off after "Start your AI searc...". Put the part that matters in the first 60 or so characters so it survives the cut. One ad is enough to get started, but OpenAI recommends adding several title and description variations for each offering, each taking a different angle, so the system has more options to match with different conversations. The campaign summary then shows everything on one page, including campaign name, objective, location, platforms, budget, ad group, context hints and the ad. Every block has an edit pencil, so this is the last place to fix a wrong URL before you launch.

For a first Clicks campaign, OpenAI suggests a starting bid of $3 to $5 USD per click, so a daily budget of Rp 350,000 buys a small number of clicks while the campaign learns. Reporting in Ads Manager shows impressions, clicks, conversions, spend, CTR, average CPC and average CPM, and refreshes about every 15 minutes. Give the campaign enough days and budget to collect real volume before you judge it, and compare cost per registration against what the same result costs you on Google Ads or Meta. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on context hints, conversion tracking or a budget plan before you commit spend, our paid search team can help you plan ChatGPT ads alongside the Google Ads you already run.