PAID MEDIA
Pushing the Boundaries: What We Learned from Our First ChatGPT Ads Test
Melissa Spaulding - Associate Director of Paid Media @ Propellic
When OpenAI rolled out ad placements within ChatGPT, we moved quickly. We launched a first wave of campaigns for a client to see how this entirely new conversational ad landscape performs compared to traditional channels.
The early results are in, and they are telling. Here is a breakdown of what we’ve observed so far.
1. CTRs Are Competitive with Meta
One of our biggest questions going into this test was whether users would actually engage with ads inside a conversational AI interface. The answer is yes.
Across roughly 46,000 impressions and $3,000 in spend between July 1 and 15, our broad informational campaign generated a 1.59% Click-Through Rate (CTR). For context, the Meta travel accounts we manage average 1.2% to 1.8% CTR across all objectives, with top performers clearing 2.0%. Awareness campaigns, the closest comparison to what we ran, typically sit at the lower end, around 0.5% to 1.2%. A 1.59% CTR clears that awareness range and lands inside our blended travel range, in a channel that did not exist a year ago.
SEO & GEO
Are You Optimizing for the AI Your Buyers Actually Use?
Emily Souydalay - Director of SEO & GEO @ Propellic
For months, I refused to download the Claude app. Not because I wasn’t using Claude - I was using it constantly - but because Chrome on my iPhone felt like enough. The result: my mobile AI usage looked nothing like my desktop usage, for no reason deeper than friction. One person, two devices, two completely different AI footprints.
Now multiply that by every buyer in your market. That’s the problem with how most GEO plans get built. They start from a leaderboard - ChatGPT is biggest, so optimize for ChatGPT - when they should start from the audience: who your buyers are, what device they’re holding, what task they’re trying to get done, and whether they’ve ever paid for an AI tool in their lives. Skip those four, and you’re optimizing for a market average that describes nobody.
AI usage is a behavior, not a personality trait.
Which AI someone uses is not a fixed trait you can look up once and file away. It changes with the job. A physician who lives in Perplexity at work because she needs cited, defensible answers may still plan the family’s Alaska cruise in ChatGPT, and check a flight detail in a Google AI Overview she never asked for. Same person, three AIs, one afternoon.
So the useful question is never “which AI does this person like?” It’s “which AI, for this job?” For travel brands, the job is trip planning - and that narrower question is one you can actually answer.
Half the AI your buyers use, they never chose.
There are two layers of AI exposure, and they behave nothing alike. The deliberate layer is the one we all picture: someone opens ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or the Gemini app on purpose. The ambient layer is bigger and much quieter: Google’s AI Overviews sitting on top of searches people were already running (about 2.5 billion people meet those every month), Copilot preloaded on Windows machines, Meta AI living inside WhatsApp and Instagram, Siri riding along on every iPhone.
Nobody downloads the ambient layer. It arrives with the device. And most market share charts collapse both layers into one ranking, which is why the numbers disagree so wildly depending on who’s measuring - web traffic, app downloads, surveys. Separate exposure from choice, and the picture finally becomes useful.
The demographics will humble you.
Pew’s latest data shows 61% of US adults under 30 have used ChatGPT. Among adults 65 and older? Nineteen percent. If your bookers skew 60+ - and for many of the tour operators we work with, they do - a ChatGPT-first plan is optimized for someone else’s customer.
THE TRAVEL MARKETING PODCAST
How Kampaoh Reached 80% Direct Bookings
For most travel and hospitality brands, relying on OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) like Booking.com is a necessary, expensive evil. But what if you could flip the script, dodge commissions that start at 15% and climb past 20% once visibility programs stack on, and drive 80% of your bookings directly through your own website?
In our newest episode, we sit down with Víctor Martínez Calvo, the CTO of Kampaoh, a rapidly expanding European glamping startup that has scaled "easy camping" to over 90 locations across four countries.
Víctor isn't your traditional "server-room" CTO. By deeply integrating technical infrastructure with Kampaoh's marketing strategy, he and his team bypassed off-the-shelf, half-million-dollar enterprise software. Instead, they built a custom AWS data lake and a Customer 360 platform from the ground up. The result? A marketing engine that delivers hyper-personalized guest experiences at a fraction of the cost.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- The Power of First-Party Data: How Kampaoh tracks the entire funnel to send hyper-personalized messages.
- Ditching Email for WhatsApp: Why Kampaoh targets guests on WhatsApp the day before arrival to cut through inbox clutter.
- Flipping the OTA Model: How they strategically use Booking.com strictly as a paid advertising channel rather than a primary revenue stream.
- Gamifying the Journey: A sneak peek into Kampaoh's loyalty programs, including "Tribes" and physical passports that drive repeat bookings.
If you are a marketer trying to make sense of your tech stack, or a founder looking to bridge the gap between your IT and marketing departments, you do not want to miss this conversation.
"Joining the marketing part with the tech part can make amazing things... much cheaper than you can expect. Let's hope CTOs help more marketing guys."
Víctor Martínez Calvo, CTO of Kampaoh
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