ChatGPT Ads Are Live in Lithuania. Here's What I've Learned Running Them.

ChatGPT started selling ad space, and it’s already switched on for Lithuania. You can open the ads manager, set a budget, and run a campaign to a local audience right now. I’ve been testing it since it opened up, first on our own agency account, now setting it up for clients. I’ll walk you through what the platform already does well, where it’s still rough, and how we build campaigns around the gaps.

How ChatGPT ads compare to Meta and Google ads

When I explained the difference to a client, I told them ChatGPT stands in the middle, both on price and on how it works.

Think about the two ad types you already know. On Meta or display, ads just find you. The algorithm shows them to whoever it thinks might care, and they turn up whether you were looking for something or not. Google Search is the opposite. You type in exactly what you want, you have clear intent, and the ad meets you there.

ChatGPT ads land between those two.

There’s no keyword list where you drop in your terms and bid. Instead you write context hints, almost the way you’d talk to ChatGPT itself: who you are, who your customers are, what your product does, the kind of conversations where you’d be relevant. The platform’s own wording is that these hints guide matching but aren’t exact-match rules. You’re describing your audience in plain language.

Who actually sees ChatGPT ads

The ads only show to people on the Free plan or the cheaper Go plan. If someone’s paying for a more expensive version, like I am, they see nothing. Same logic as YouTube, where paying removes the ads. That still leaves the bulk of ChatGPT’s users.

One thing to keep in mind if you sell to large corporates: people on company-funded Business and Enterprise accounts usually sit on the ad-free side, so senior buyers inside big organizations are harder to reach this way than owner-managers and specialists are.

And the whole platform is still marked beta. There’s a little badge on it everywhere you look. That cuts both ways. Some tools you’d expect aren’t switched on yet, but the auction is also thin and learning the platform is cheap right now. Work it out now and you’ll understand it long before the businesses waiting for the polished version.

How the targeting works

There’s none of that Meta-style precision here. There you can say: women aged 18 to 26, living in Vilnius, within a certain radius, interested in pet food. On ChatGPT the frame is much wider. Instead of assembling filters, you’re writing the description, and right now that’s what separates a campaign that works from one that doesn’t.

What works for us: describe the problem your customer is trying to solve, not the category you sell in. Someone asking ChatGPT how to pick a language course is having a different conversation from someone typing “English courses Vilnius” into Google. Treat it like a prompt. Write it, run it, see what comes back, rewrite it.

Custom audiences: where it gets interesting

You can create custom audiences: upload your own client list, emails or phone numbers, as a CSV, and ChatGPT tries to match it against real people, same as we already do on Meta. You can build an audience to reach, or one to exclude.

A few limits worth knowing.

There’s a minimum before a list works for targeting: 25,000 matched users, with OpenAI recommending closer to 100,000. Smaller lists can still be used to exclude people rather than reach them. However, OpenAI currently tells advertisers to avoid custom audiences on campaigns targeting the EEA, Lithuania included, so for today this is worth knowing about rather than building on.

And this is the part where I’d be careful: uploading contact data is still sharing personal data with a third party. Just because a company’s emails or a manager’s name are technically public doesn’t mean you can freely use them for ad targeting. GDPR still applies, and if this is a real tactic for you, check it with your DPO or a lawyer before you upload anything.

What you can see, and what stays hidden

This is the real limitation of the beta. You get impressions, clicks, spend, CPC, CPM, and conversions if you’ve set them up. What you don’t get is the context. You’ll see something like 2,600 impressions and 11 clicks, but not what those people were talking about when your ad showed, or what got them to click.

Compare that to Google Search. There, if I’m advertising holidays and I notice the traffic drifting toward people hunting for cheap flight tickets, I can see it and exclude it. On ChatGPT you just get: spent this much, got these clicks. What’s under the hood, you don’t see.

Judge this channel by the platform dashboard alone and you’ll undersell it.

The workaround I use: static UTM parameters on the landing page, set before the campaign goes live, not after the first reports come back thin. Then in Google Analytics you can see that the traffic arrived, what it did on the site, and whether it converted. That’s the number that decides whether a channel stays in the plan anyway. We’ve measured paid channels in our own analytics rather than trusting platform dashboards for years, so this isn’t extra work for us. It’s just more necessary here than elsewhere.

No, ChatGPT ads won’t sneak into the answers

People worry about this, so to be clear: ChatGPT doesn’t drop your ad into its answer. You can’t ask it for the five best restaurants in Vilnius and get yourself slotted into third place as an ad. It’ll list the five, and then a banner-style ad might appear separately below the answer: “visit this restaurant.” The answer and the ad stay apart. The ad sits at the bottom of the chat, clearly marked, with a favicon, a headline, a description, and a small image.

That image is small, by the way, and sits off to the left. Think carefully about what goes in it, especially since a lot of people ask these questions on their phones. Bold, simple, not crammed with detail.

For the SEO and GEO crowd, this should be reassuring. Nobody outbids their way into an organic answer. The recommendation itself still has to be earned, and that’s what GEO work is for.

What ads add is a separate slot underneath, and you can have it running in days. That’s useful while the organic side builds, but it isn’t a shortcut around it. One buys you a place next to the conversation, the other puts you inside the answer. If you can, do both: the ad for speed, the organic position because it’s the one nobody can outbid you for.

Which businesses ChatGPT ads suit

This channel isn’t for everyone, and I don’t think the honest message is “rush over, we’ll sort out your ChatGPT ads.” Plenty of businesses don’t need them.

Where it fits: people who come to ChatGPT with a problem, looking for a solution. Someone planning a trip, comparing course providers, or working out who to hire for a job at home is weighing up options, and that’s the moment to show up. Local services, travel and experiences, digital products and courses are the categories the platform is open to right now, and they happen to be exactly the ones where people compare before they commit.

Where it’s less obvious: product ecommerce. I don’t think many people open ChatGPT to shop for dog food yet. They’ll go to Google, where Shopping (coming to Lithuania soon) and Search let you split campaigns by brand and category in a way a context description can’t match.

Who can’t run these ads yet

Before you plan anything, check whether your category is eligible. Two things are going on: some categories are off the table everywhere, and some could work in principle but are closed outside the US.

Currently closed outside the US, Lithuania included:

Financial services. Loans, consumer credit, mortgages, credit cards, investment and brokerage, insurance, payment services. Financial education or budgeting tools that don’t sell a financial product may still qualify.

Medical and health services. Clinics, diagnostics, dentistry, procedures, treatments, certain devices and supplements. General fitness or wellness without medical claims may be fine.

Legal services. Law firms, representation, immigration, injury claims, document preparation. Legal education and training may qualify.

Off the table everywhere: gambling and betting, alcohol and tobacco including vapes and nicotine, dating and adult services, political advertising, weapons, drugs, counterfeit goods, scams, credit repair and debt settlement.

Travel, hotels, restaurants, ecommerce, SaaS, courses, events, entertainment and most everyday consumer brands are the realistic candidates.

OpenAI has rewritten these policies several times this year, so treat this as the picture in September 2026 rather than a permanent map.

Are ChatGPT ads expensive in Lithuania? Should you jump in now?

The minimum daily budget depends on your billing currency, and for a euro account it’s 15 EUR a day, so the entry cost is low. On click prices, what we’re seeing in our own tests is that a click costs noticeably more than the same click on Meta. That’s our experience so far rather than an industry benchmark, and the platform is young enough that nobody has reliable ones yet.

But cost per click is the wrong comparison, and it’s where I watch people talk themselves out of this too early. A Meta click is usually attention you interrupted. A ChatGPT click is someone who was already working through a decision and went looking for a provider. Those aren’t the same visit and they shouldn’t be priced the same. Judge this on cost per enquiry or cost per booking. If a channel costs more per click and still brings a cheaper lead, the CPC wasn’t the number that mattered.

Why I’d test now instead of waiting: it’s the same bidding logic, but with far less competition. Right now you can probably buy the ad cheaper than you will in a few months, once everyone’s built their accounts, loaded their budgets, and planned it all out.

How I’d test it without overthinking it

You don’t need to find some big new budget for this. My advice to clients who ask where the money comes from: just take a slice off Meta or TikTok for the test.

• You don’t have to run it for a whole month. If budgets are tight, two to three weeks is enough to test.
• Around 300 EUR is enough to see what it does. That’s not the kind of number that breaks a business.
• Put UTMs on everything and judge the results in your own analytics, not just the platform dashboard.
• Write the context description around your customer’s question, not your product name, and rewrite it once you’ve seen the first week of traffic.

The window is open because most people don’t even know this exists yet. This is a good moment to be among the first.

So, should you?

If your business is one where people compare options before they commit, and you’ve got a bit of test budget you can borrow from another channel, I’d give it a run. The setup isn’t complicated once you’ve done it a few times, and the cost of finding out is small.

We’re running these campaigns now, with the measurement built in from day one, and we’ll say so if your account isn’t the right fit. Come talk to us and we’ll work out whether ChatGPT ads belong in your mix.