Google and Meta have dominated small-business paid acquisition for years. ChatGPT is now becoming a realistic third place to test, and getting started is becoming considerably easier.

Adform has been selected as one of OpenAI’s technology platform partners supporting ChatGPT Ads in Europe. For advertisers and agencies already using Adform, that means ChatGPT campaigns can be bought, managed and measured alongside their other digital advertising rather than treated as a completely separate experiment. Volkswagen and Vodafone are among the European advertisers already testing the channel.

For SMBs, though, the more important development is accessibility. OpenAI has already opened self-service ChatGPT Ads Manager across 31 European markets, including Spain, and the addition of technology partners means advertisers increasingly have multiple ways to access the platform. You no longer need to be a huge brand negotiating an experimental campaign directly with OpenAI.

That matters because ChatGPT offers advertisers something quite different from another social feed.

People often use ChatGPT while actively trying to make a decision. They ask which software fits their business, compare products, plan holidays, research purchases or explain exactly what they need and the constraints they have. OpenAI says more than one billion people now use ChatGPT every week, creating a potentially enormous new advertising audience.

For a small business, this could provide another way to reach customers with strong intent without relying entirely on Google Search.

OpenAI has also been adding the infrastructure performance marketers expect. ChatGPT Ads now supports conversion optimization, geo-targeting and custom audiences, while the OpenAI Pixel, Conversions API and third-party measurement integrations provide ways to measure results beyond the initial click. Ads remain clearly separated from ChatGPT’s answers and currently appear only to users on Free and Go plans.

The Adform partnership makes the channel particularly interesting for agencies and businesses already running paid media across several platforms. Instead of looking at ChatGPT as an isolated campaign, advertisers can connect ChatGPT-driven conversions with their wider Adform activity and evaluate where the channel contributes across the customer journey.

That makes testing easier and potentially more useful. An SMB does not need to move a large percentage of its Google or Meta budget into ChatGPT. A controlled test can answer much simpler questions: Are our customers there? What does a qualified visit cost? Does ChatGPT generate conversions? And how does that performance compare with the channels we already use?

The opportunity is not necessarily that ChatGPT Ads will immediately outperform Google Search. Google has decades of advertising optimization, enormous commercial intent data and a mature ecosystem around it.

The opportunity is diversification and targetting ease.

Many small businesses are heavily dependent on one or two paid acquisition platforms. That creates risk and increasingly expensive competition for the same audiences. A new channel with more than a billion weekly users gives SMBs another place to find potential customers, and early-stage advertising platforms can offer opportunities before competition and pricing mature.

There is also a potentially important difference in how intent is expressed. Someone searching Google might type “best CRM small business.” Someone asking ChatGPT can explain that they run a six-person agency, need automated follow-ups, use Microsoft 365 and have a €100 monthly budget.

That richer context could eventually make conversational advertising extremely effective.

SMBs should not blindly move budget into ChatGPT because it is new. But the barrier to testing it is becoming low enough that businesses already spending meaningfully on PPC should start learning how the channel behaves.

Google and Meta are not disappearing.

But paid traffic may finally be getting another major platform worth adding to the spreadsheet.

Original source: https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-ads-expands-across-europe