Many are already starting to draw their own conclusion about the role of ChatGPT Ads for multifamily marketers. Our approach to this new platform has been different. We've decided to put them to the test and be open about the entire process.

We started by sharing 10 things we learned from setting up our first series of ChatGPT Ads for an apartment community. Now, as promised, we're sharing all of the data.

Let us be clear up front: This is one Class A apartment community in the Sarasota-Bradenton (Fla.) market. It's a small test sample on a brand new ad platform, and still well within the optimization window of any new Google or Meta campaign.

But it's real money against real ad inventory. So, instead of making assumptions, we'd rather show what's actually happening—and not wait until there's a perfect answer to the question: "Should I run ChatGPT ads for my apartment communities?"

Here's how things are going:

First 30 Days of ChatGPT Ads for Apartments

The community started with a $25/day budget. In the first month, it spent $351 in total. 

ChatGPT showed the community's ads 3,531 times in a month.

There's no benchmark to hold this number against yet. And because ChatGPT relies on context hints rather than keyword targeting, it's likely that the community's ads surfaced in answers that weren't necessarily direct apartment searches. So, we're just reporting the total number of impressions—cost per thousand impressions, which was $99.52—not judging it.

The average CTR was 2.92%.

ChatGPT Ads earned attention and showed some improvement over time, a hallmark of the optimization phase that takes place within other established ad platforms.

103 people clicked on the ad.

Clicks rose sharply, but then flattened towards the end of the month.

By the final week, visitors were spending about 10 seconds actually engaging with the website.

The first week total of just five clicks is a little misleading. The average engagement time from those clicks was 65 seconds, which was longer than the average engagement time from the community’s organic traffic.

Two of those five clicks qualified as Engaged Visits because those individuals completed a series of conversion actions on the community's website (think opening a floorplan page, watching a virtual tour, or clicking a form).

Were we onto something here?!

As clicks rose, however, their engagement quality weakened significantly.

In total, the first month resulted in 19 Engaged Visits—the most coming in the third week with seven. Out of 103 total clicks, that means 18 percent of ChatGPT ad traffic showed genuine engagement and could be considered more qualified.

Four floorplan views for the month. None in the final week.

Further corroborating those weakened engagement patterns is that there were only four floorplan page views the entire month, and none in the last week. That's an early challenge for ChatGPT Ads, especially in multifamily marketing, since opening a floorplan page is a website action that usually indicates higher leasing intent.

An engaged visit cost $18.49 on average.

Even though the ads didn't generate much traffic their first week, we were encouraged to see how quickly the new ad platform was able to produce engaged visits at $8.75. But as quality diminished over time, costs increased.

Raising our bid ceiling didn't change much.

Average CPC remained stable at $3.41. That number was likely influenced by us initially setting the max CPC at $3.50. After the first couple of weeks, OpenAI suggested it be bumped up to $4, which we did. Impressions and clicks peaked in the third week, but then dropped off again. Even with the higher ceiling, our actual CPC never got near it, as it was $3.17 in the final week.

Alongside that, half of the roughly $700 available that month went unspent. There simply weren't enough matching conversations to deploy the community's ad against.

Our takeaway after the first 30 days

Again, one community, one month of ad spend. It isn't large enough of a sample size to draw any final conclusions from. 

But click quality, floorplan page views, and cost per engaged visit are all currently trending the wrong way. Part of the issue this early in ChatGPT Ads' existence is the limited targeting control outside of context hints and location.

That leaves the ad copy itself as the next lever to look at. So, for the next month, we’re going to update the context hints and rewrite some of the individual ads to give prospects clearer signals about the apartment community before they click. Stay tuned to see if engagement times and floorplan page views recover.

We are eager to see what enhancements OpenAI makes to its ad platform over time and how much more control advertisers will gain to adjust and optimize performance. For now, we'll keep the ads running. If we stop, we'll say so.

First 60 Days of ChatGPT Ads for Apartments

As promised in our last update, we changed context hints and added our proprietary Engaged Visits metric—a set of custom conversion events we track on our clients' community websites—as a desired outcome.

With those changes, plus more time inside the 90-day optimization window that ads across platforms often need, we're glad to report a meaningful improvement in the metric that had worried us most. Here's our 60-day update, plus a look at how we stack up.

Average engagement time hovered between 7 to 13 seconds after the first month. In month two, it recovered to 20 to 36 seconds.

Visitors from these ads are spending more time completing engagement actions on the community's website than last reported.

Cost per Engaged Visit sat around $19 in the second month, while CPC stayed near $3.45.

The other positive signal was costs held flat at the same time engagement quality increased.

How does this apartment community's ChatGPT Ads stack up to others?

Since we published initial results—the first property-level data from an apartment community's ChatGPT Ads—another multifamily marketing company has shared results from their first test.

This is great as it gives us all additional benchmarks to understand as marketers consider whether or not to feature their communities on the new platform.

Their 30-day test spanned five communities across multifamily and senior living in multiple markets, with a mix of CPC and CPM bidding. Ours is a single property on CPC that covers eight weeks (so far), with a context-hint change midway through the testing phase. Making an apples-to-apples comparison isn't possible. 

With those differences in mind, here's what each test saw:

• Click-through rate. Our blended CTR is running at 2.58%, while their reported multifamily CTR topped out at 1.34%.
• Cost per engaged session. Ours is averaging around $3.62.  (We've used engaged sessions here, the GA4 metric they reported, rather than our usual Engaged Visits.) Theirs came in at $9.61 at their strongest property, and between $12 and $27 across their CPC and CPM cohorts.
• Engagement rate. Our community's sessions are engaging at 95%, compared with their reported range of 33% to 53%.

Our takeaway after eight weeks

We read this as a sign that property fit and campaign setup are significant factors in how ChatGPT Ads fare for multifamily marketers. But that's what testing is for, and it's encouraging to see more advertisers in the multifamily industry adopt ChatGPT Ads. Stay tuned for our next update!

Interested in joining the test group?

If you're interested in getting ahead in the AI-visibility race, we already have the infrastructure in place to help you get started. As AI-driven platforms become a bigger part of how renters search, being an early mover here can set your community apart.

Already a partner? Reach out to your account representative to learn more about joining the test group. New to RentVision? Contact sales@rentvision.com to learn more about how Predictive Advertising + ChatGPT Ads can take your community reach to the next level.

Campaign management and analysis from Brandon Scholting, Digital Ads Team Manager, and Riley Northup, Senior SEO and Digital Ads Strategist. Questions about the data? Contact marketing@rentvision.com.