GrubHub and over 40 brands spanning ecommerce, food delivery, and ride-sharing categories have been testing this integration for the last four weeks.
GrubHub has been in the ChatGPT ads pilot since February, when OpenAI opened it to advertisers, but had only a “limited picture” on metrics like conversions and attribution, and was “missing a huge chunk of what was happening before,” vp of growth, paid media, Brian Ryu told ADWEEK.
The limited performance data is reflected in the brand’s ad spend commitment, which has been “meaningfully lower” than other search platforms, Ryu said.
In February, advertisers could only enter a destination URL—such as a website—on ChatGPT’s ads manager, along with campaign objectives like reach or clicks.
“There was no app install or app advertising product for OpenAI at the time,” Brian Quinn, president and general manager, AppsFlyer, told ADWEEK.
For a business like GrubHub, where a core part of revenue comes from mobile apps, that meant advertisers were “effectively only able to advertise on OpenAI to drive people to a website,” Quinn said.
By integrating into OpenAI’s conversion API, AppsFlyer now lets advertisers attach an AppsFlyer deep link—a link that routes a person to a specific page inside a website or a mobile app, rather than to a homepage—to their ChatGPT campaigns.
“All of a sudden, now a brand has the ability to drive customers to the web or to an app, and they can measure app installs, in-app purchases, subscriptions, deposits,” Quinn said. “Anything that you do in an app that the business deems important can now be tied back to the OpenAI paid media campaign.”
The food delivery app began buying its ChatGPT ad campaigns with CPM bidding and recently moved to conversion-based bidding.
The in-app integration spans several markets including the U.S., China, India, EMEA, New Zealand and Australia.
Quinn would not share specific performance data. OpenAI declined to comment on the story.
ChatGPT, which has crossed 1 billion active users worldwide per Sensor Tower, is seeking new revenue streams ahead of a possible public listing.
This is the latest sign of OpenAI aggressively working to hit $2.3 billion in ad revenue this year, and $100 billion by 2030. That goal has drawn skepticism from industry analysts, who point to gaps in how OpenAI’s ad tools measure results and hesitancy among advertisers to commit larger budgets without proof that ads are working, ADWEEK previously reported.
The integration also marks OpenAI’s latest ad tech partnership: Adobe, Criteo, StackAdapt, Kargo, LiveRamp, and PacVue are others. Google has certified at least 1,100 adtech partners over the past 20 years, and Meta has certified over 1,000 in the past decade.
“OpenAI can eventually get to parity [with Google and Meta] in terms of adtech partnerships if they want,” said Nate Elliot, principal analyst, AI, Emarketer. “But it’ll take time—and given the company’s burn rate, impending IPO, and astoundingly aggressive ad sales targets, time seems to be the one thing they don’t have.”
Via AppsFlyer, GrubHub is testing acquisition-oriented campaigns, aiming to drive orders and account sign-ups on both its app and web interface. Ryu declined to share specific performance metrics, saying that it’s too early to draw meaningful conclusions.
Still, he noted that having some level of understanding of how consumers interact with its ads, and what that translates to on the app, closes “a huge blind spot.”
GrubHub sees a large portion of its search volume coming from non-branded searches–people that are not expressly searching for Grubhub, but are generally seeking out adjacent topics like food delivery or food items.
“From a sheer volume perspective, we see a lot more search behavior going to places like ChatGPT and leaning more towards discovery,” he said.
If its ChatGPT ads performance, especially after the AppsFlyer integration, moves the needle down the funnel and drives performance, Ryu said Grubhub “will scale up [its ad spend].”
