A ChatGPT ad takes an afternoon to set up. Building it so you can tell whether it worked takes more care, and that's where most first campaigns go wrong.
Here's the order we'd follow for a Malaysian business. If you're still deciding whether the channel suits you, read our explainer on how ChatGPT Ads work in Malaysia first. For how ads sit beside organic visibility, see ChatGPT Ads vs GEO.
Check Your Business Can Advertise First
Do this before you open Ads Manager. OpenAI's Ad Policies say ads for financial services and health services outside the US are generally prohibited, and legal services ads outside the US are currently prohibited. Most Malaysian banks, insurers, clinics and law firms are out for now.
If you sell something else, you can move on to setting up your campaign in Ads Manager.
Set Up Tracking Before You Spend a Ringgit
We'd put tracking ahead of the ad itself, and it's the step we'd never skip. A campaign that can't show what happened after the click is a guess with a budget.
OpenAI's Measurement Pixel records standard events such as lead_created, order_created and trial_started, and the Conversions API covers events a browser can't send. Pick the one action that matters to you, a booking or a purchase, and confirm it fires on a test run. Add UTM tags too, so GA4 gives you a second opinion. The pixel has consent controls, so make sure your site's cookie notice is wired to them.
Write Context Hints and a Landing Page That Match How Malaysians Ask
Context hints are plain descriptions of the conversations you want to appear in. OpenAI says they aren't exact-match keywords and don't guarantee delivery, so write them like a brief to a smart colleague, not a keyword list.
Here's an illustration for a Penang café, not real campaign data:
- English: "brunch spots in George Town with vegetarian options"
- BM: "kafe sedap di Pulau Pinang untuk sarapan keluarga"
- Manglish: "where got good cafe near Gurney, not too crowded"
Malaysians mix all three, sometimes in one sentence. Our post on Manglish and voice search shows how far real phrasing drifts from textbook English.
The card is small, so the landing page does the selling. It should answer the question the chat was about, load fast on a phone and state the price or the next step. In our web design and Google Ads work, generic landing pages waste paid clicks and weak ad copy hurts less, and we'd expect the same here. If yours needs work, our landing page design in Kuala Lumpur team can fix that before you spend.
Pick a Bid Model and a Starter Budget
You can buy views (CPM) for reach or clicks (CPC) for traffic. There's also a conversion-optimised option that needs tracking live before launch. It still bills by clicks or impressions, not conversions, and it accepts one standard conversion event per campaign. Custom conversion events aren't supported yet. OpenAI quotes its bid guidance in USD, but ad accounts have a billing currency and MYR is on the list, so check which one your account uses.
Our advice is to start with clicks and get the tracking proven. Move to conversion-optimised once conversions record steadily.
Think in clicks, not ringgit, when you budget. Say you want 100 clicks before judging a campaign. OpenAI suggests a starting maximum bid of USD3 to USD5 per click, which would put the test at up to USD300 to USD500 in OpenAI's terms. Our own early numbers are lower. After two days of running ads in Malaysia, our average CPC is RM2.05, so 100 clicks would cost about RM205. That's an early reading, not a benchmark, and it will move as the auction does. Test two sets of hints and you need that sample twice.
Read Your First 30 Days
Ads Manager reports impressions, clicks, spend, CTR, average CPC, average CPM and conversions. Here's what we're seeing two days in: an average CTR of 2.11%, an average CPC of RM2.05 and 5 conversions. It's a small early sample, so use it as a reference point and not a benchmark. Compare each metric against your own first week.
These are our rules of thumb, not OpenAI guidance:
- Few impressions, spend well under budget. Widen or rewrite the context hints before touching the bid.
- CTR slipping week on week. Refresh the title, copy and image.
- Clicks but no conversions after two weeks. Check the pixel fires, then check the landing page.
- Average CPC too high for your cost per lead. Lower the bid cap, or try CPM billing.
- Conversions arriving steadily. Shift budget to a conversion-optimised campaign.
Policy checks, pixel tests, hint rewrites and bid checks add up to a lot of small jobs. Each one is easy to get wrong and hard to spot.
Cleverus is a Malaysian digital agency that works on ChatGPT Ads setup, including tracking, context hints and bidding. If you'd like to discuss a first campaign, you can. Book a ChatGPT Ads consultation.
References
OpenAI. (2026). Ad Policies (updated 10 September 2026). Available at: https://openai.com/policies/ad-policies/.
OpenAI Developers. (2026). Measurement Pixel. Available at: https://developers.openai.com/ads/measurement-pixel.
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.
OpenAI Help Center. (2026). Conversion-optimized Campaigns. Available at: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001412-conversion-optimized-campaigns.
