oCPC (Optimised Cost per Click).

The three abbreviations denote different things, and the differences matter commercially. With CPC you pay per click, and the system delivers to whoever it expects to click; what happens afterwards plays no role in delivery. With genuine CPA billing you would pay per action achieved; the risk of ineffective delivery would then lie with the provider. oCPC sits in between and is closer to CPC: when selecting, the system takes into account how likely a conversion is, but it still bills per valid click. The risk remains entirely with the advertiser.

For the optimisation to work at all, the conversion event must be reported reliably, via the OpenAI Pixel, the server-side Conversions API or both. If measurement is missing or patchy, the system optimises towards a signal it can hardly see. Making things harder, only a single standard event per campaign is currently supported: you have to decide which step is the goal and cannot weight several events at the same time. This decision is therefore not a technical side issue but the actual steering of the campaign.

An example of the consequences: a service provider chooses submission of the contact form as its conversion event. The form has two fields and can be filled in within five seconds. oCPC then aims delivery at people for whom exactly this event is likely, in other words those who fill in forms quickly, including many who only want a price. If the same business instead defines a confirmed appointment as the event, delivery becomes narrower, more expensive per click and considerably more useful. Nothing changes in the billing mode: in both cases you pay per click, including for clicks that never lead to an appointment. The model amplifies the definition of the conversion, much like Smart Bidding in Google Ads.

Assessing it therefore always requires a second calculation outside the platform: click costs divided by the number of genuinely usable enquiries, and further through to the order; the logic of cost per lead applies unchanged here. Which click prices to expect in Switzerland is an open question: as of 11 October 2026, OpenAI has not published price ranges for Switzerland or Europe, and no empirical value can yet be derived from a market that only opened on 1 September 2026. Only the budget floor has been published: CHF 20 per campaign per day for an account billed in Swiss francs. Figures from the US market exist, but they can neither be transferred to Swiss auctions nor converted into Swiss francs.