All About Advertising in Telegram Ads

According to the data from Inclient.ru portal, in 2022, Telegram was most frequently downloaded in India (70.48 million), Russia (24.15 million), the USA (20.03 million), Indonesia (19.61 million), and Brazil (18.04 million). The messenger is popular among users in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the USA. Moreover, by the end of 2022, the Telegram audience increased from 25.5 million to 48.8 million users.

"Nowadays, Telegram is second only to WhatsApp, and the gap narrows every year. It's no wonder our competitors are worried," said Durov.

The launch of the first official advertising turned Telegram into one of the most promising platforms for marketing in the near future. Let's figure out how it works.

Telegram Ads is an advertising account for setting up targeted advertising in public channels of the messenger. Advertising is shown in all open channels with an audience of more than 1,000 subscribers. To launch advertising, you need to write an ad text, set a bid, and choose a target audience.

The ad must consist of a title, text, and button:

• Title - the name of the channel with an active link to it.

• The text can be up to 160 characters long.

• The button can lead to the channel, bot, or message in the channel.

You can't attach images, gifs, or videos, but you can use emojis in ads.

How advertising works

Telegram Ads offers a unique advertising payment model - CPM (cost per 1000 impressions). You need to specify your bid, i.e., the price you are willing to pay for 1000 impressions. The minimum bid is only 2 euros.

An automatic first-price auction is used to determine impressions, meaning you compete for impressions of your ads. The higher your bid, the more likely your ad will be shown.

You are provided with the opportunity to choose the placement of ads - automatically or manually. You can also set targeting to subscribers of your own channel or based on user interests. You can also specify exceptions - topics or channels where you do not want to show ads.

With automatic setup, you choose a theme, such as travel, technology, or marketing, and the platform selects channels to place your ad. You cannot view the list of channels on the platform itself.

With manual setup, you can select specific channels where you want to place the ad by specifying links to them. You can specify up to 100 channels for one ad with exceptions taken into account.

When using targeting based on user interests, you can specify a country, region, or city, as well as specify interests themselves. The platform determines user interests based on their subscriptions.

What you can't advertise

There are several prohibited topics: