How to Send Offline Conversions to OpenAI/ChatGPT Ads [2026]

Someone clicks your ChatGPT ad, fills out a form, and becomes a customer two weeks later. The problem is that the conversion happened somewhere else, so OpenAI needs a way to connect that customer back to the original ad.

That's what offline conversion tracking does. With SourceLoop's OpenAI integration, you can send these conversions back to OpenAI without building the API integration yourself. You just need your OpenAI API key.

How Offline Conversion Tracking Works

Let's keep this simple.

Imagine someone sees your ad on ChatGPT and clicks it.

They land on your website and fill out a form.

But that is not the real business outcome. Your sales team might contact them, qualify them, and close a $5,000 deal two weeks later.

The website saw the form submission.

Your CRM saw the deal.

OpenAI needs to know that the person who clicked the ad eventually became a customer.

That's what sending an offline conversion does.

OpenAI's official conversion measurement guide explains how conversion events are matched to eligible ad clicks.

With SourceLoop, you can connect these pieces without building that API connection yourself.

What You Need

Before you start, you need:

1. An OpenAI Ads account
2. Your OpenAI Conversions API key
3. A SourceLoop account
4. Your conversion data connected to SourceLoop

That's it.

You don't need to write your own API integration or maintain a separate conversion-sync system.

Step 1: Create Your OpenAI API Key

First, open OpenAI Ads Manager and go to:

Settings → General → API Keys

Click Create New Key, give the key a name such as SourceLoop, and create it.

Copy the API key and keep it somewhere safe. You’ll need to paste this key into SourceLoop in the next step.

Important: This is the API key under Ads Manager → Settings → General → API Keys. You don't need an API key from the regular OpenAI API platform.

Step 2: Open SourceLoop

Log in to your SourceLoop account.

Go to your Ad Platforms or integrations section and find the OpenAI integration.

SourceLoop is designed to handle the connection between your attribution data and ad platforms, so you don't have to build the API calls yourself.

If you're also sending conversions from your own backend, SourceLoop's server-side conversion tracking can handle events that never happen in the browser, such as payments, subscriptions, and backend events.

Step 3: Add Your OpenAI API Key

Paste your OpenAI Conversions API key into SourceLoop.

SourceLoop uses the key to connect to your OpenAI Ads account and send conversion events.

Save the connection.

Once the connection is active, SourceLoop can start sending the conversion events you configure.

Step 4: Choose Which Conversions to Send

Now decide what you want OpenAI to know about.

For example:

• New lead
• Demo booked
• Trial started
• Qualified lead
• Purchase
• Customer
• Revenue

The important part is to send meaningful business outcomes, not just every little website action.

If a $5,000 customer is the goal, you want your advertising platform to eventually learn about that customer, not just the button click that happened two weeks earlier.

This is also where having proper marketing attribution becomes useful. You want to preserve the journey from the original ad click through the eventual conversion.

Step 5: Let SourceLoop Connect the Conversion to the Ad

This is the part that usually makes offline conversion tracking complicated.

Someone clicks an ad.

They visit your website.

They may come back later.

They fill out a form.

Your sales team works the lead.

The deal closes.

SourceLoop keeps the attribution information attached to that conversion so the eventual outcome can be sent back to the advertising platform.

OpenAI uses a click reference called oppref when available to connect a conversion to an eligible ad click.

This is why preserving the original attribution information matters.

Step 6: Check Your Results

After you start sending conversions, give OpenAI some time to process and attribute them.

You can then check your conversion reporting in Ads Manager. OpenAI's Measure Results guide explains where conversion data appears and how to interpret it.

Don't worry if the numbers are not identical to what you see in another analytics tool. Different platforms can use different attribution windows, timestamps, deduplication rules, and measurement methods.

That's It

You don't need to build a custom server, write API requests, or maintain your own conversion pipeline.

The basic setup is:

OpenAI Ads → API key → SourceLoop → Your conversion data → OpenAI

Once it is connected, SourceLoop can handle the conversion syncing in the background.

The bigger benefit is that you can move beyond asking:

"How many people clicked my ChatGPT ad?"

and start asking:

"Which ChatGPT ads are actually producing leads, customers, and revenue?"

That's the real value of offline conversion tracking.