Random thing I noticed this week.

Random thing I noticed this week, not sure if it means much, but it stuck with me.

I’m currently running a paid ChatGPT ad for a client’s hotel. At the same time I looked at how people who found the same hotel through ChatGPT organically, without any ad, actually behave once they land on the site.

The organic ChatGPT visitors engaged at around 65%. The paid ad landed at 45%. Organic Google was in between, at about 58%.

I don’t have a big theory here. But someone who gets a specific answer from an AI and clicks through out of genuine curiosity is just in a different headspace than someone clicking a sponsored box.

Maybe that’s obvious. Maybe it’s just one hotel, one short period, nothing to build a rule on. But it does make me think, again, that a good ad only really works once the organic groundwork is already there, not instead of it.