5 Ways to Use ChatGPT in Performance Marketing

If you haven’t been living under a rock during the last few months, you will have undoubtedly heard about ChatGPT from OpenAI – the powerful large language AI model that allows you to interact with what is essentially an AI assistant in natural language for the first time.

At QueryClick, we are no strangers to AI, with our bespoke AI-driven attribution platform Corvidae, and we love the opportunity to understand how AI can impact our marketing efforts to help our clients.

Having had some time to have a play around with ChatGPT and understand it’s capabilities, I have to say I am rather excited about the potential applications AI tools such as these can have for marketing – and we won’t be replaced by robots just yet (fortunately!) as these tools allow us the opportunity to gain efficiency and help with day-to-day tasks.

Here are a few ways that I see ChatGPT, and OpenAI influencing performance marketing:

1. Form complex Excel formulas
2. Drafting content or blog articles
3. Ideation of creative
4. Programming and writing code
5. Ad copy and image mockups

1. Form complex Excel formulas

A lot of what we do, particularly in Paid Search, is wrangle with complicated Excel or Google Sheets formulas for reporting and data analysis.

Often, particularly with more complex sheets it can be tedious or difficult to form formulas. I have definitely spent countless hours debugging or trying to craft formulas from multiple sheets.

This is where ChatGPT could come in to help.

We can ask it, based on specific instructions, to create formulas with natural explanations of what each element does.

Now, this example is not too complex but does work. I have seen some instances where it returns incorrect formulas, however this should be used as an assistant only to help you on your way rather than spending countless hours trawling through Microsoft help or forums to find what you need.

The converse of this is also true, if you find yourself stuck with a formula and cannot figure out why it’s not working ChatGPT may be able to help out.

I purposely created a few errors in the formula we got from our previous query and it correctly identified and explained in simple terms what was wrong and the solution.

This is definitely a great way of quickly figuring out why a formula or query isn’t working for things like semantic errors or typos.

2. Drafting content or blog articles

In no way am I advising you to use ChatGPT to create copy or content for use on blogs, websites or ads.

However, ChatGPT has the ability to assist with things such as draft examples or helping to encourage ideas around a subject.

Using content straight out of ChatGPT is likely to have a detrimental impact on your SEO due to duplicated content as ChatGPT is simply repurposing content across it’s model and re-writing it in a natural fashion.

It does lead to the potential (and back to the days of Textbroker) where lower quality sites may use this tool to spin up poor quality articles and content.

Not too bad is it?

It’s definitely not in a state to simply pop up on a website, however I do see this as a good way of overcoming a creative block or helping draft ideas around particular subjects we may not be familiar with.

And, if you want to have a little fun you simply need to be specific in your ask such as asking ChatGPT to write the article in the style of a pirate!

3. Ideation of creative

ChatGPT is a text interface and so cannot produce images or anything other than text from it’s model.

However, OpenAI has another tool called DALL-E which can create unique AI generated art and images from specific prompts.

I got thinking, maybe I could use both tools to help in creative ideation for paid ads.

Using ChatGPT, I ask for it to provide me with an ideation prompt that I could then ask DALL-E to create concepts for:

The results from DALL-E below are not overwhelming, however you can see the potential applications here to help generate:

• creative concepts
• ideas for display ads
• unique creative concepts

You can ask DALL-E to create you absolutely anything you can imagine.

Key tips are to be specific as possible, a word like ‘light’ or ‘dark’ or an art style can make a huge difference. It also doesn’t always handle letters or words brilliantly.

However, as tools such as this advance I think we will find a lot more ability within the creative space to fuel performance marketing and paid advertising.

Related: 4 Design Tools to Create Killer Paid Social Ads

4. Programming and writing code

As a former web developer myself, this tool would have been majorly handy a decade ago for assisting with writing code and debugging tricky snippets of code rather than spending hours scouring StackOverflow.

ChatGPT has the ability to write out code snippets for you or check for errors based on what it finds from available sources within it’s large language model.

Conversions and tagging

A great use case of the tool for paid advertising in particular is assisting with tagging and tracking pixel events.

No need for developers, simply ask ChatGPT to create the tracker that you need.

Here, we ask it to create a javascript for GTM to send a Facebook custom conversion event back when a click is recorded.

A simple example with some obvious editing required, however you can see the potential in helping implement tagging and tracking situations.  

SQL queries

Another way that ChatGPT can help us is through crafting SQL queries from natural language asks.

Here, I ask it to create a SQL query to merge three tables with unique customer IDs where the customer has spent more than £300.

Off the bat, the interesting thing is that ChatGPT has assumed that I am talking about a customer purchase set of tables and has included other columns including address, name, amount and purchases as well as explaining in simple terms what each bit of code does.

For the non-programmer, this is a great use of the tool: helping to understand what the code does and how it can be applied.

Obviously some editing will be required to successfully run the query.

However, it illustrates the potential the tool has to assist marketers and non-programmers.

Debugging code

Finally, I believe that ChatGPT may be useful for debugging and fixing code errors.

Coming from a background of Unit Testing and countless hours browsing StackOverflow, this tool would have been extremely handy in fixing bad code or identifying errors to the untrained eye.

Simply adding a couple of mistakes into the previous SQL code, ChatGPT provides us with a comprehensive bulleted list of what is wrong with the code in terms we can understand.

5. Ad copy and image mockups

I doubt we will ever use ChatGPT for real world live PPC or Meta Ads any time soon.

However, after playing around with the tool I feel that ChatGPT, alongside DALL-E, can be useful for a couple of elements within PPC including:

• mocking up draft ads
• generating ad copy ideas
• mock ups of image ads

Obviously this does not replace the human touch to ad copy as, by looking at the results, we definitely would need to edit the copy.

However, when it comes to using it to generate initial copy ideas and concepts it does fit the bill.

In summary

ChatGPT from OpenA,I along with DALL-E, are just a couple of AI driven tools and research that are advancing at an extremely fast pace.

Tools like this and advancements in AI will undoubtedly change the way that we operate as marketers but also behaviourly how we search and ingest content.

For instance, there is already a search engine utilising the OpenAI functionality – You – which, in my mind, has the capability to compete with Google.

Whilst ChatGPT may help us in our daily tasks, AI and Machine Learning will become an every day part of our life as performance marketers, and I for one embrace it.