Plenty of Malaysian businesses may not need a ChatGPT Ads agency yet, and an honest agency will tell you so. Ads Manager is self-serve, so the real question is whether the work around it is worth paying someone else to do.
Here's how we'd decide. If you haven't yet, read our guide on how to advertise on ChatGPT in Malaysia first, so you know what the job involves.
What Managing ChatGPT Ads Involves Week to Week
Most of it is small and repetitive. Someone checks that every product line is allowed to run. Someone rewrites context hints that aren't getting impressions, nudges bids, confirms the pixel still fires after the last website update, tests a landing page and turns the numbers into a report your finance team can read.
None of that is hard. It's just a steady stream of jobs that nobody notices until one is missed. It's the work you're deciding whether to keep or hand over.
When Your Own Team Can Handle It
In our view, you can skip the agency if you sell one main product, start with a modest budget and already have someone running Meta or Google Ads in-house. This person already understands bids, conversion tracking and landing pages, and the channel rewards those habits.
If that describes you, follow the guide above, keep the fee and put it into media. Hire help only if the weekly checks start slipping.
Where a ChatGPT Ads Agency Earns Its Fee
We see three situations where paying for management makes sense.
Several channels at once. If you already run Google Ads, social and organic work, someone has to decide how ChatGPT fits beside them. Our paid search management team often has to untangle which channel deserves credit for a conversion.
Policy grey areas. A brand with a mixed portfolio needs someone to decide which lines can run. OpenAI's Ad Policies say finance and health ads are generally prohibited outside the US, and legal services ads outside the US are currently prohibited. A bank with a travel card or a clinic with a wellness shop sits right on that line.
Tracking and consent. This is where we think the money is. In the Google Ads accounts we manage, the gains often come from fixing tracking, not from changing bids. A broken conversion event makes every bid decision a guess. The same will hold here, and a cookie notice that isn't wired to the pixel's consent controls is an easy way to lose data.
An agency can't buy you a place in ChatGPT's answers, whatever a pitch deck says. OpenAI states that ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers, and earning that mention is GEO work, not ad buying.
Questions to Ask Any Agency Before You Hire
Ask us these too.
- Policy screening. Ask how they check that each product line is allowed to run before any money is spent. Given the finance, health and legal limits, a vague answer is a warning sign.
- Pixel experience. Ask if they have installed the Measurement Pixel on a live account, what broke and how they found out.
- Context hints. Ask who writes and tests them, and whether that covers BM and Manglish phrasing, since that's how many Malaysians actually ask.
- The first 30 days. You want a plan with tracking first, not a promise of leads.
- Account ownership. It should be yours, so you can leave with your history.
What ChatGPT Ads Management Costs
There are two separate costs. Media spend is what OpenAI bills you for views, clicks or conversions, and the management fee is what an agency charges to run the account. They shouldn't be mixed into one number.
On media, OpenAI suggests a starting maximum bid of USD3 to USD5 per click. In our first four days of running ads in Malaysia, we saw an average CTR of 2.39%, an average CPC of RM1.84 and 14 conversions. It's a small early sample, not a benchmark.
On the fee, we don't quote a market rate because we haven't seen a reliable one for a channel this new. It depends on scope: one campaign or many, ads only or ads plus tracking and reporting. Be wary of any agency that quotes a flat price before it has seen your account.
If you'd rather talk it through, at Cleverus we will tell you whether you need us at all. See our client results across Malaysia and Singapore, or book a ChatGPT Ads strategy call.
References
OpenAI. (2026). ChatGPT Ads expands to Southeast Asia and Taiwan. Available at: https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-ads-expands-southeast-asia-taiwan/.
OpenAI. (2026). Ad Policies. Available at: https://openai.com/policies/ad-policies/.
OpenAI Help Center. (2026). Ads in ChatGPT. Available at: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt.
OpenAI Help Center. (2026). Ads in ChatGPT: The Basics. Available at: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-the-basics.
OpenAI Help Center. (2026). Create Campaigns for ChatGPT Ads. Available at: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001210-create-campaigns-for-chatgpt-ads.
