Where your ads are shown: countries, regions and postal codes

It is the least discussed part of the platform and the one that moves the most money. In Google Ads geographic targeting is half an hour of work: you pick countries, refine by city, exclude what you don't want and bid more where it pays. In ChatGPT Ads three of those four things do not exist, and the one that does works differently.

None of what follows is published in OpenAI's help centre: it says neither which levels exist nor which countries you can advertise in. We checked it ourselves, asking the platform and looking at what it answers, in October 2026.

The three levels that exist

A campaign can mix them: the country plus a list of postal codes. There is a fourth level the platform recognises internally but whose name it does not reveal; in practice, there are three.

💡 Ninja tip. There is no «city» level. If your business is city-based, the way to aim at it is through its postal codes — and Spain has 11,150 in total (we counted them one by one), so a provincial capital comes down to a few dozen.

And two details you only learn by measuring. In Spain, the «region» level is the 19 autonomous communities and cities — the 17 communities plus Ceuta and Melilla — not the 50 provinces: for a province you have to use its postal codes. And not every country has regions: a few only accept country and postal code, so if you are building an account for another market, check it before promising regional targeting.

The four things you cannot do

1 · There are no exclusions, of any kind

You only say where you DO want to show. There is no «all of Spain except the Canary Islands»: either you list the regions you want, or you add the whole country and take everything inside it.

If you come from Google Ads, this flips the order of your work: there you tend to open wide and trim; here you build upwards, adding only what you want.

2 · Targeting belongs to the campaign, never to the ad group

Two ad groups in the same campaign serve in exactly the same place. There is no way to say «this group in Madrid and this one in Barcelona».

The consequence is structural, and worth settling before you build the account: every area with its own budget is a campaign.

3 · There are no bid adjustments by area

You cannot bid 20 % more in one city. It is the same gap as with devices, and you work around it the same way: by splitting campaigns.

4 · ⚠️ Reports only break down by country

This is the one nobody expects and the one that really decides how you target: you can aim at 1,500 postal codes and there is no way to know which one works for you. Not by region either. The only geographic breakdown the platform gives is the country, and only for impressions: neither clicks nor spend.

⚠️ Pitfall. Very fine targeting is, here, a blind bet: you will not be able to measure it. Go down to postal codes because your business requires it — you have a shop, or you can only serve that area — not to «optimise by area»: that cannot be done on this platform.

And there is a way out, even if it costs more: if you want to compare two areas, put them in two separate campaigns. The per-campaign report does exist, so that is the only way to know which performs.

How many countries you can advertise in

91. If you try to use any other one, the platform rejects the whole campaign. These are they, by block:

Europe (33) — Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Americas (19) — Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, United States, Uruguay and the Virgin Islands.

Africa and the Middle East (18) — Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

Asia and the Pacific (21) — American Samoa, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Guam, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Northern Mariana Islands, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

China, Russia and most of sub-Saharan Africa are not there. The platform only publishes the list when it rejects something, so it can change without notice: if you are building an account for a market that is not here, check it before promising anything.

Two warnings for the EEA

If your campaign targets the European Economic Area or Switzerland, there are two more things worth knowing that are not geographic but cross over with it:

• Custom audiences are not allowed, so you cannot exclude your own customers or people who already signed up. That means that, in a European market, part of your budget will be spent on people who are already yours, and your only defence is the ad copy.
• And since targeting belongs to the campaign, a pan-European campaign cannot be split by country without splitting the campaign.

🔧 The Suite for ChatGPT Ads solves this

There is a technical detail that explains why hardly any tool offers this: to tell the platform where to serve you must send an internal identifier for each location, and it publishes no listing. There is no way to ask it which regions a country has.

In OpenAI's Ads Manager you don't notice — it does know its own identifiers — but any external panel has to build its own catalogue. Ours does: in each campaign's sheet, the 🌍 Where it runs block shows the truth in one line (not «Spain», but «1,542 postal codes · Spain» if that is what it has) and lets you search and add, add a whole province of postal codes at once, remove a complete level and undo the last change.

With one safeguard worth knowing even if you use another tool: a campaign with no locations serves worldwide. It is an easy mistake to make by emptying the list, and an expensive one.

What you would do today with this

1. Open the settings of all your campaigns and read their area. That is where the surprises show up: a campaign far finer — or far broader — than you thought. A campaign you created by copying another inherits its area as it was.
2. If you have postal codes, ask yourself whether you need them. If the answer is «to optimise by area», remove them: you won't be able to.
3. If you want to test two areas, use two campaigns. It is more work and it is the only way to measure it.