Telegram has recently become a trendy source of very high-quality traffic. Does high quality mean expensive?
Let’s not get stuck into long intros, and just look at precise figures. We asked Telegram media buyers to answer the simple question:
What is the minimum budget you need to run Telegram ads?
Telegram Advertising Types: Quick Overview
When we say ‘Telegram traffic’, we mean three options of how you can find converting users in the Paperplane messenger:- Official Telegram Ads. This is an advertising platform of Telegram for promoting offers through short creatives published at the channels’ feeds:
Here, you have three basic targeting options. The first allows you to show your ads only at specific channels you pick yourself. In the second one, you can opt for a wider reach and select channel topics, user interests, and GEOs. And the third is targeting your own base of phone numbers.
- Seeding in Telegram channels. This is a way of Telegram marketing when you purchase native advertising posts at various channels, related to the topic of your offer. Here is an example:
- Telegram Mini-App ads. This one is an exclusive PropellerAds format that allows you to display ads in Telegram mini apps. Here is an example of how it might look to a user:
Minimum Budgets for Official Telegram Ads
There are two facts about the official Telegram Ads platform budgets we want to begin with.- First, Telegram Ads don’t cooperate with solo buyers, minor teams, and small or mid-sized businesses directly. Instead, it partners with large agencies that sell Telegram advertising services to everyone else.
- Second, Telegram Ads are not limited by the short message we showed to you in the example above. It can look like a fully-fledged ad, with an image or even a video. But that’s an exclusive feature: you need to pay €10,000 to purchase a Premium advertising account and get access to posting ads like this:
So, here are the minimum budgets to enter the official Telegram Ads platform. How much do you really need for a successful campaign? As we spoke to experts from different countries, the first idea we got is that your budget largely depends on the GEO you target.
For example, according to Timur Bakiev, the owner of ClickMe, Telegram Ads are one of the cheapest advertising methods in Uzbekistan: you can aim for CPMs as low as €0,02, so an investment of €1,000 can result in about 50 million impressions. So, you can begin with about €300 allocated for testing, and €700 for the rest of the campaign, and that might be quite enough.
Note: this will work unless you target specific channels when setting up your campaign. If you want to target particular placements, the CPM will be about €2.
Timur Bakiev: One of our recent case studies was a campaign promoting a Telegram channel to collect new subscribers. It targeted users by interests and resulted in 2,402 new channel subscribers with a total spend of only €41,88 spent.
Bulat Kamaliev, the lead of the Telegram Ads team at Magnetto.pro – a marketing agency and a seller of Telegram Ads in CIS countries – agrees that a minimum campaign budget doesn’t always need to be extremely high: it can start at €500 for most verticals. However, you need to estimate your vertical and product to understand more precise figures:
Speaking about Telegram minimum budgets for a single ad, the figures might vary from €2-€4 per bot/channel subscription, or €5-€10 per click if we drive traffic to a site/landing page. The trick is to allocate a little more than the average cost per subscriber or click in a given industry.
Here are the budget examples for various verticals if we want to target specific channels with niche audiences:
And here is how you can plan your budget for a wider audience – when you set your Telegram Ads campaign targeting by channel topics or interests:
After the testing stage, you can analyze the results, and optimize the budgets accordingly: stop the campaigns that don’t perform well or enlarge the budget for the successful ones.
Budgets for Ads in Telegram Channels
If you are not ready to invest €10,000 for the freedom of posting videos and images in your Telegram Ads creatives, you can still create such ads by purchasing placements in Telegram channels. Here, prices depend exclusively on the channel owners’ appetites: they can charge from $1 to $10,000 per 24-hour placement. Of course, the bigger and the more popular the channel is, the higher prices they offer.Timur Bakiev: if you want to seed your ads at, say, 10 top channels of Uzbekistan and have $10,000 for that, you can spend about $3,000 on the most popular one, and distribute the rest of your budget among the other channels. However, you don’t need to stick to a specific number of channels or choose the biggest ones. If your budget is only $100, you can try out cheaper placements – and it might work out for you, too.’
Budgets for Telegram Mini-App Ads
Now, for the most exclusive part! Telegram Mini-App Ads is a brand new traffic type, and not all the media buyers fully understand how it works. Thanks to Viktoriia Demskaia, PropellerAds account strategist, we can now unveil the mystery of Telegram Mini-App traffic prices and minimum budget.Let’s begin with the main takeaways you need to know about Telegram Mini-App budgets:
Takeaway 1. If Telegram Mini-Apps ads are unexplored for you, it’s better to plan your budget for them as a separate traffic source – not just a single campaign.
Takeaway 2. The actual sum will largely depend on the GEO and the conversion flow. To make things simpler, let’s highlight the following conversion flow types…
- Channel or bot subscription
- Brand awareness
- Registration/Deposit/Other Complex Action
Channel/Bot Subscription Price
On average, costs for subscription to a channel or bot vary between $0,01 – $0,03. The optimal budget will be $50 here. This flow is pretty simple, as you just need a user to subscribe to hit a conversion, so you can monitor such campaigns with your standard tracker, or use the one built in PropellerAds.Here is how it works in action:
Our partner ran several CPA Goal campaigns with a flow that suggested users subscribe to their Telegram bot. Here are some details:
- CPA (cost per bot subscription): $0,02 or less
- Daily budget: $150
- GEO: WW
And here is a piece of their daily stats from one of these campaigns:
Brand Awareness Price
Here we count on CPC prices, and they vary from $0,01 to $0,04. The suggested minimum budget for Telegram Ads for brand awareness is $50 per day, and campaign tracking is also easy and available with standard trackers.Registration/Deposit/Other Complex Action
Here, your minimum Telegram ads budget will depend to a large extent on the GEO. For example, CPA prices start at around $1 in CIS countries but can vary from as little as $0.25 to $0.40 in Indonesia or Vietnam. The total budget will also be higher: depending on the GEO you are targeting, it can be around $100 – $200 per day.To understand the optimal budget for such a complex flow, you can check out a traffic chart on the PropellerAds self-service platform.
Tip from Viktoriia: It’s better to allocate a little more so that the campaign can properly optimize and find converting zones. But, it can only be optimized if you use a postback. We are currently testing a special framework for tracking conversions in such complex flows, and will soon publish a guide on it.
To sum it all up, here is a quick table:
Testing budgets
It takes at least a week to see how the traffic behaves and which days bring the most conversions. We mean, your Telegram Mini-App campaigns might convert worse during weekdays than on weekends (or vice versa). If you don’t run the campaign for a sufficient amount of time, you won’t get the full picture.So, the rule:
Take the minimum daily budget and multiply it by 7. After at least 7 days, this test will help you understand how your audience behaves throughout the week. In the future, it will assist with optimization, and you can add a schedule to certain campaigns to increase your reach and maximize the value of your business.
This gives us some more or less precise figures: if you want to test channel subscription campaigns, you need at least $350. If you go for registrations or deposits, make sure you have $700 or more.
To Sum Up
As you can see, Telegram can be quite budget-friendly for media buyers – depending on your goals, GEOs, and traffic type, the spending can be minimal, while traffic quality remains high. The budgets for more complicated campaigns in expensive verticals are bigger, of course – but the ROI is worth it, after all.So, why wait?
LAUNCH TELEGRAM MINI APPS CAMPAIGN NOW!
