ChatGPT Ads in Lithuania: Competitive Advantage Is Determined Not Only by CPC, but Also by an Understanding of User Intent

As of 31 August 2026, the ChatGPT Ads Manager self-service platform is officially available in Lithuania as well. Ads are shown to ChatGPT users aged 18 and over who are on the free Free or Go plan. With a new advertising channel emerging, businesses are facing a number of practical questions – how much a click will cost, what the CTR will be, whether a lower CPA can be achieved. Still, ChatGPT Ads should not be judged by the usual performance metrics alone, because in this channel the broader context of user intent matters far more than specific keywords.

OpenAI emphasises that ChatGPT Ads is still at an early stage and does not yet have common market benchmarks by industry or campaign type. According to Expertmedia marketing strategist Žygimantas Kvartūnas and AdTrust head Gintaras Lesnikauskas, the first campaigns should not be evaluated by CPC or CPA alone.

This logic is reflected in the ChatGPT Ads system itself. Ad selection takes into account the context of the current conversation, user intent, the ad content, the landing page and the contextual cues provided by the advertiser (context hints). These are not traditional exact match keywords, so campaign planning focuses less on individual phrases and more on different situations.

“When you start working with a new advertising channel, the most important thing is not whether the first clicks will be cheaper. It is far more valuable to understand earlier than others at which stage of the user’s decision the brand becomes relevant and which message works at that moment. In the long run, such knowledge becomes one of the most valuable competitive advantages,” says Žygimantas Kvartūnas, marketing strategist at the marketing agency Expertmedia.

One important feature of ChatGPT Ads is that ad delivery is not determined by the bid alone. OpenAI states that it uses a relevance-based second-price auction model (relevance-weighted second-price auction), which also takes into account how closely a given ad matches the context of the user’s conversation.

Because of this, the ad message, the need scenario and the landing page become an important part of campaign performance. If an ad underperforms, the problem may lie not only in the budget or the bid, but also in a message that is too generic or a user situation that has not been defined precisely enough.

That said, OpenAI does not yet publish common performance benchmarks by industry or campaign type. This gives the first advertisers an opportunity to gather valuable data themselves and to understand earlier which user intent scenarios, messages and offers work most effectively.

“A new channel test should not end with an answer about how much a click cost. We need to know which need scenario brought in the highest-quality user, which message prompted action and how that was reflected in conversions. If we do not have these answers, we do not yet have a basis for serious optimisation,” shares Gintaras Lesnikauskas, head of the performance advertising agency AdTrust.

At the end of August, OpenAI announced that in less than 200 days ChatGPT Ads had reached a revenue level that, on an annualised basis, would amount to 1 billion US dollars. This does not yet show what results can be expected in the Lithuanian market, but it does indicate that the platform is rapidly developing into a fully fledged advertising channel.

So the advantage of an early start is not only the ability to begin before competitors. By starting earlier, brands can learn at a time when there are still fewer participants in the ad auction. That creates more opportunities to compete effectively for user attention. As the number of advertisers grows, this advantage diminishes, which is why knowledge gathered earlier becomes a significant competitive asset.