The cost of reaching a thousand people with ChatGPT ads has fallen from $60 to as low as $25 in ten weeks, according to Digiday . That number will not stay low. Every quarter that ChatGPT keeps growing as a place people ask questions and make decisions, more brands will notice, more budgets will move, and the cheap window will close.

When Facebook ads first launched, I was running my social media agency. We scrambled to understand them and started running campaigns for our clients before the big corporates had held their first meeting about whether to invest. We saw every benefit that went to the early movers back then. They got attention that cost pennies, built audiences before anyone else showed up, and made revenues their competitors could only dream of.

OpenAI recently turned on cost-per-click advertising inside ChatGPT, letting advertisers bid between $3 and $5 per click rather than paying for every thousand impressions. The company is reportedly forecasting billions in ad revenue. That signals one thing to anyone running a small business. The auction is open, the competition is thin, and the prices reflect it.

These tactics will help you grab traffic now, while clicks are cheap and the big spenders are still deciding whether to join in.

6 tactics to grab ChatGPT traffic while it stays affordable

Bid now while the auction is empty

Ad prices work on supply and demand. When few advertisers compete for the same attention, the cost per click stays low. ChatGPT's ad auction is new, which means the bidders who would normally push prices up have not arrived yet. You can win placements today for a fraction of what they will cost once enterprise budgets shift across.

Set up a small test campaign this week. Pick your single best-converting offer, the one you already know turns clicks into customers on Google or Meta, and run it inside ChatGPT at the lower end of the bid range. Track what a click is actually worth to you. When you have that number, you can scale.

Match your offer to question-led intent

People come to ChatGPT mid-decision. They are not scrolling for entertainment the way they do on social platforms. They are asking how to solve a specific problem, which products to compare, what to do next. That gives a click on ChatGPT a different quality from a click on a feed, and it favours offers that answer a question directly.

Write your ad to meet the question someone is already asking. If a user types a prompt about cutting software costs, your ad for a cheaper tool lands at the exact moment of intent. Map your top five customer questions, then build an irresistible offer for each one.

Build your conversion tracking before you need it

The reason brands eventually flood a platform is proof. Once advertisers can measure that a click turns into a sale, money pours in. You can get ahead of that by setting up tracking, so every click you buy teaches you something the latecomers will pay consultants to learn.

Install proper conversion tracking on your landing pages and tag every campaign by source. Run small experiments, change one thing at a time, and record what a ChatGPT click is worth against a Google or Meta click. Predict sales , bid with confidence.

Send clicks to a page that converts

A cheap click is wasted if it lands on a slow, cluttered page. The advantage of buying traffic early disappears the moment a visitor bounces. Your landing page does the work the ad started, and a weak one hands your budget back to the platform with nothing to show.

Build one dedicated page for each ChatGPT campaign. Match the headline to the promise in your ad, cut everything that does not move someone toward the action, and load it fast. Test two versions against each other and keep the winner. A page built to turn traffic into buyers turns a cheap click into a customer instead of a statistic.

Capture the visitor even when they do not buy

Most people who click will not purchase on the first visit. The goal of that first click is the email address, because once you have it you can sell to that person again through a campaign that costs you nothing extra per send. A click that leaves no contact behind is a click you paid for twice.

Offer something worth an email address on every landing page. A useful guide, a calculator, a short course, an AI version of you . Once someone joins your list, you reach them again and again through email, warming them toward the purchase they were not ready to make on day one.

Move budget while the numbers favour you

Advertisers reallocate spend when they can compare results across platforms on the same terms. Cost-per-click pricing inside ChatGPT now lets you do that directly, measuring it against what you already pay elsewhere. The early read will often show ChatGPT delivering cheaper clicks than your mature channels, because the auction has not caught up.

Move a small, fixed slice of your existing ad budget into ChatGPT and hold it there for a full buying cycle. Compare cost per customer, not cost per click, since a slightly pricier click that converts better wins.

How small brands beat big spenders to cheap ChatGPT clicks

The advantage you have right now is speed. A large brand needs three meetings to approve a test campaign, and by the time they bid, the price has climbed. You can launch this afternoon, learn from real clicks this week, and own audience data before the auction fills. The founders who treat this as their next business unlock will look back on these months as the cheapest customers they ever bought. The ones who wait will pay full price for the lesson.

Grab the free AI playbook for founders who want their time back.