Between late August and the first of October, ThoughtMetric, which sponsors this blog, added four ad platform integrations that pull each channel into its own attribution reports: ChatGPT Ads on August 26, AppLovin on September 15, Criteo on September 28, and Snapchat Ads on October 1. Take my enthusiasm with the appropriate discount, but the timing is the interesting part. Two of those channels barely existed as self-serve options for Shopify brands a year ago, and all four are places where the platform’s own reporting is especially hard to take at face value.
What an ad integration actually does
It is worth being precise, because the word integration covers a lot of ground. Connecting an ad account pulls spend and delivery metrics from that platform into ThoughtMetric, where they sit next to the orders ThoughtMetric’s own tracking attributed to that channel. The result is a ROAS calculated on revenue that actually reached your store, using the same rules ThoughtMetric applies to Meta and Google, instead of a number each platform calculates for itself with its own windows.
That common yardstick is the whole point. Before these integrations, a brand testing AppLovin was mostly stuck reading AppLovin’s own dashboard. Now the channel can be compared against the rest of the mix on equal terms, with spend pulled in automatically.
ChatGPT Ads
OpenAI opened a self-serve Ads Manager to US advertisers in May, and ThoughtMetric’s integration followed in August. It is the most detailed of the four launches. Once connected, it reports spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, CTR, average CPC and CPM, ROAS, revenue, CAC, LTV, and new versus returning customers at the campaign, ad group, and ad level. Setup is an API key from your OpenAI ads account, and ThoughtMetric recommends adding its tracking parameter to the ads for the most accurate matching.
This is a separate thing from ThoughtMetric’s AI Connectors, which let you ask ChatGPT or Claude questions about your data. One measures an ad channel. The other is a way to query your reports. I went deeper on the measurement side in do attribution tools work with ChatGPT ads.
AppLovin
AppLovin opened its Axon Ads Manager to e-commerce advertisers by referral last October and publicly in June. Its placements are mostly inside mobile apps, often full-screen video, and AppLovin itself says the large majority of e-commerce conversions happen within the first hour. That makes it a channel where in-platform ROAS needs an outside check more than most. ThoughtMetric is not the only tool to add it, either. Polar lists an AppLovin integration too, so this is keeping pace with where the channel is going rather than a unique capability.
Criteo
Criteo is mostly retargeting for Shopify brands, and its help center lists a 30-day post-click window as the default attribution model. Retargeting audiences are people who already visited your site, so the question with Criteo is never whether it touches buyers. It is whether those buyers needed the nudge. ThoughtMetric frames this integration around seeing where Criteo sits in the customer journey, which is the right question. A channel that shows up almost entirely as the last touch before a returning customer’s order is doing something different from one that opens new journeys.
Snapchat
Snapchat has been a self-serve ad platform for years, so this one fills a gap in ThoughtMetric’s coverage rather than chasing a new channel. The measurement issue is window mismatch. Snap’s reporting defaults to 28 days after a swipe and one day after a view, against Meta’s seven-day click default, so in-platform comparisons between the two are not like for like. Measuring both inside one tool removes that problem.
Which one I would test first
For most brands between $1M and $20M, AppLovin. It now has real e-commerce scale, it is self-serve, and its inventory reaches people in apps where Meta and Google are not showing them anything. ChatGPT Ads is the more interesting long-term bet, but it is early, volume is thin, and conversion-optimized campaigns only started rolling out in June. Criteo and Snapchat are worth connecting if you already spend there, mostly so you can stop trusting their dashboards.
Whichever you pick, set a fixed test budget, judge it on new-customer orders in your own attribution rather than the platform’s ROAS, and run a holdout before you scale it. A new integration makes a channel measurable. It does not make it profitable, and the honest answer for some brands will be that one of these channels does not earn its spend.
Does this change which tool you should use?
Only if you are already testing these channels. Integrations are table stakes, and several attribution tools now cover some of these platforms. If AppLovin or ChatGPT ads are on your plan for the next quarter, check that whatever you run today connects to them before you launch, because adding measurement after the test starts means losing the first weeks of clean data.
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