Telegram Ads: Pricing, Targeting and Sponsored Messages

Telegram ads are CPM-priced sponsored messages of up to 160 characters, shown in public channels with 1,000+ subscribers. The official self-serve platform bills in Gram (formerly Toncoin), with a minimum bid of 0.1 Gram per 1,000 impressions (about $0.12 at CoinGecko's October 31, 2026 rate of $1.18 per Gram). Telegram's pages give no minimum deposit; agency guides put the first top-up at about 20 Gram (about $24). EUR accounts, bought through official partners, start from a few hundred euros, and partner Adsly's figures, updated in October 2026, show average EUR CPMs from €0.20 in Uzbekistan to €2.92 in Turkey. Telegram crossed one billion monthly active users, so the reach is real, but the targeting is not comparable to Meta or Google. This guide covers what each account type costs, what you can target, and when mini-app ad networks are the better buy.

The Sponsored Messages Model

Telegram's official ad format is called sponsored messages. Each one is a short placement of up to 160 characters that appears below the latest post in eligible public channels, and also in bots and search results. They're labeled "AD" so users can see them, but they sit inside the feed rather than as a separate ad unit. Billing is CPM-based, meaning you pay per 1,000 impressions, not per click.

The platform lives at ads.telegram.org, and it's simpler than you'd expect from a company that runs a privacy-first messaging app. You pick a cabinet (more on that below), fund it, write your message, choose targeting, set a CPM bid, and launch. No lookalike audiences, no retargeting, and only basic conversion reporting. What you get is reach into specific channel categories and geographies.

As Telegram's own API documentation puts it, the platform added sponsored messages as "a paid privacy-friendly way to promote bots and channels." That framing matters. The ad system is designed around what Telegram is willing to expose, which is channel-level context, not individual user data.

Ad Formats: Official vs. Third-Party

The official sponsored message is up to 160 characters of text plus one button, and where that button can go depends on the account. Self-serve accounts funded in Gram (formerly TON) can only link to Telegram destinations: a channel, a post, a bot, or a mini-app. EUR accounts, sold through official partners, can also link to external websites, but only in the markets Telegram has opened to them; partner guides say the US is not one of them. That split shapes how you build the funnel.

Third-party networks like RichAds and PropellerAds operate differently. They sell ad slots inside Telegram mini-apps and bots, mostly clicker and casual games, in formats the native platform doesn't offer: push-style ads, interstitials, video ads, playable ads, and bot ads. These formats can link externally. RichAds' 2026 pricing guide lists push-style ads from $0.015 per click, interstitial ads from $1.5 CPM, video and playable ads from $3 CPM, ads in bots from $3.8 CPM, and embedded banners from $0.4 CPM.

The distinction matters for funnel design. Official sponsored messages work best when you're driving users into a Telegram-native experience. EUR accounts or third-party networks are the route when you need external landing pages or more creative flexibility.

Where Telegram Ads Appear

Sponsored messages show in public channels with at least 1,000 subscribers, and Telegram Premium subscribers don't see them at all, so that audience is out of reach on the official platform. Channel owners get 50% of the ad revenue from impressions served in their channel. That revenue share gives owners a reason to grow past the 1,000-subscriber threshold, which keeps the inventory pool expanding.

Some bot dialogues also serve sponsored messages. Beyond that, placement is determined by your targeting: specific channels, bots, and search keywords, or users by topic, language, and country. That user targeting used to be EUR-only; partners report Gram accounts have had it since August 22, 2026.

How Much Do Telegram Ads Cost? CPMs and Minimums

Telegram's price floor is low, but what you actually pay depends heavily on niche and geography. The table shows the entry cost of each route; the sections below explain each number. Dollar figures for Gram use CoinGecko's October 31, 2026 rate of $1.18 per Gram.

Official CPM Model and Minimums

The Telegram Ad Platform getting started guide states the minimum CPM for sponsored messages is 0.1 Toncoin. Toncoin was renamed Gram on June 15, 2026, and at CoinGecko's October 31, 2026 rate of $1.18 per Gram that floor works out to about $0.12 per 1,000 impressions. The dollar value moves with the token, so check the rate before you budget. For EUR accounts, Telegram publishes no floor, and partner reports changed several times in 2026: eLama listed €0.70 CPM for most topics and €0.35 for politics from February, and reseller reports from late August give floors from €0.15 to €0.75, depending on targeting type and the advertiser's country. Ask your partner for the current floor.

Those floors are just floors. Real prices are set by the auction. Adsly's October 2026 data from its own EUR accounts, all countries blended, puts forex at €1.88 CPM, crypto at €1.91 and VPN at €2.61, and it publishes no figure for news. Its main finding is that the country moves the price more than the niche does.

Budget Requirements and Deposits

The cabinet you choose determines your entry cost.

• Gram (formerly TON) account: Agency guides put the first deposit at about 20 Gram, about $24 at the October 31, 2026 rate; Telegram's own pages state no minimum. It's crypto-native and cheap to test, but it can only link to Telegram destinations.
• EUR accounts: Direct access to Telegram has long required a €2 million commitment, so most advertisers buy EUR accounts through official partners and resellers. Entry deposits vary by agency, from roughly €250–€500 to €3,000–€5,000.
• Stars: Channel and bot owners can move Stars they've earned into their ad account, and Telegram adds a 30% discount when they do.

The EUR cabinet's deposit requirement is the biggest barrier for smaller advertisers. This is where resellers come in. Agencies and resellers buy bulk inventory and resell access at lower minimums, which is how most smaller teams get started without a seven-figure commitment.

CPM by Country

The published benchmarks disagree, so treat them as ballparks. PropellerAds' figures are averages from Q1 2025 campaigns, in TON (now Gram), with PropellerAds' own euro equivalents from that time, so don't convert them at today's Gram rate; Adsly's come from its own EUR accounts in 2026.

The gap is widest in the West: Adsly measured Britain and Germany at 0.27 TON and the US at 0.39 TON on its own Gram accounts between August 22 and October 3, 2026, far below PropellerAds' 2-2.5 TON for English-speaking countries. The 0.1 Gram floor is the same everywhere; what you actually pay is set by the auction, so let a small test give you your own number.

Third-Party Network Pricing

A UK casino offer (LeoVegas) run through RichAds' mini-app ads between February 27 and March 23, 2025 got 2.8 million impressions and 196,000 clicks on a $0.025 CPC bid and $1,800 in total spend. That produced 129 registrations at about $14 each, according to the RichAds case study. Gambling offers like this can't run on Telegram's official platform.

Look past the CPA: 196,000 clicks turned into 129 registrations, a click-to-registration rate under 0.1%. Mini-app traffic comes mostly from tap-to-earn and clicker games, so judge it on registrations and downstream revenue, never on clicks.

PropellerAds reported 18,000+ conversions for a tap-to-earn Telegram mini-app in a September-October 2024 case study, mostly from Nigeria, on CPA bids of $0.03-$0.05. The advertiser didn't disclose ROI, so read it as a volume result, not proof of profit. Both cases point to the same thing: Telegram traffic can convert, but you need to build the funnel to match how users actually behave on the platform.

Official Ads or Mini-App Networks: Which to Pick

Pick the official platform when the goal is a Telegram channel, bot or mini-app and you want to start with a small Gram deposit. Pick a mini-app network when you need an external landing page, a format Telegram does not offer, or an audience official ads never reach, such as Telegram Premium subscribers on some networks, and you can accept that the traffic comes mostly from games and bots.

Targeting Options

This is where Telegram Ads diverge most sharply from Meta and Google. There are no lookalikes, no demographic targeting, and no retargeting, and Telegram doesn't use private chats or contact lists for targeting. Both account types now offer the same two modes: Target Users, which reaches people by country, city, app language, device, and the topics of channels they follow, or direct placement in specific channels, bots, and search results. Target Users used to be EUR-only. Partners Adsly and telegram-ads.com report that Gram accounts have it too (Adsly dates the change to August 22, 2026), though Telegram's own help pages don't describe it yet and some guides still call Gram accounts channel-only.

Official Targeting: Topics, Language, Geo, Channels

What you can target through ads.telegram.org, on EUR accounts and, since August 2026, on Gram accounts:

• Topic categories: Finance, technology, crypto, sports, entertainment, news, etc.
• Language: Ads appear in channels matching the selected language.
• Location and device: Country and city, plus iOS, Android, desktop, or mobile.
• Specific channel lists: You can add individual channels by username to target their audiences directly.

That last option is the most powerful one on the native platform. If you know which channels your target audience follows, you can build a precise list and bid specifically for impressions in those channels. The trade-off is that narrow targeting raises your effective CPM as you compete for limited inventory.

What Telegram Does NOT Allow

No retargeting and no automated conversion optimization. The Statistics tab does count channel joins and bot starts after a view, and Telegram's Pixel Tag, added in 2025, reports website conversions for ads that link out, but only as reporting: bids aren't optimized toward those events.

If you want to measure what happens after someone taps your sponsored message, you're doing it through UTM parameters, bot analytics, or mini-app events tracked separately. Attribution is manual and imperfect. That's a real limitation for performance marketers used to Meta's attribution model. But it also means less competition from advertisers who won't run without full-funnel tracking, which keeps CPMs lower than they'd otherwise be.

Advanced Targeting via Ad Networks

Mini-app ad networks offer targeting Telegram's own ads don't, because they sell inventory inside mini-apps rather than Telegram's sponsored slots. Mobidea's overview of Telegram ad platforms notes that networks can segment by device type and operating system, as Telegram's own ads now can too, and that one network, OnClickA, also targets Telegram Premium subscribers, who never see official ads, and active wallet users with balances. That last signal is particularly useful for crypto and Web3 offers where wallet holders are the actual target audience.

If you need that kind of segmentation on a small budget, a Gram account won't get you there. Mini-app networks will.

Setting Up a Campaign: Step by Step

Choose Your Cabinet

Log into ads.telegram.org with your Telegram account. You'll choose between a Gram account (crypto funding, lower entry, Telegram-only destinations), an EUR account (fiat, bought through official partners and resellers), or Stars (if you own a channel or bot that earned them). For most advertisers testing for the first time, the Gram account is the lower-risk starting point. For larger teams with established budgets, the EUR cabinet is more practical.

Fund the Account and Set CPM Bids

Add Gram through a crypto wallet or EUR via bank transfer, depending on your account. Set your CPM bid above the minimum floor. In competitive niches or high-CPM countries, bidding at the floor means minimal delivery. In emerging markets with lower competition, the floor bid can deliver real volume.

A reasonable test scenario: fund a Gram account with about 20 Gram, add a short list of relevant channels in your target language, set a competitive CPM bid above the minimum floor, and run for two weeks to collect impression and click data before making any decisions.

Write Effective Sponsored Messages

160 characters. That's it. You need a clear value proposition, a reason to tap, and a destination. On a Gram account the destination must be a Telegram bot, channel, or mini-app; external URLs need an EUR account.

What works:

• Lead with the benefit, not the product name
• Say what the reader gets instead of telling them what to do: Telegram sets the button label itself, and partner guides warn that moderators decline imperative calls like "Subscribe" or "Buy" and questions aimed at the reader
• Match the tone of the channels you're targeting, a crypto channel audience reads differently than a news channel audience

What doesn't: vague promotional copy that could apply to anything. Telegram users are in reading mode, not browsing mode. They're in a channel for a reason. Your message needs to be relevant to that context or it gets ignored.

Select Channels, Topics, and Locations

Start broader than you think you need to. Narrow targeting in a market with limited inventory can starve your campaign of impressions before you have enough data to make decisions. Pick 2-3 topic categories, select your target countries, add a language filter, and let it run. Partners report Gram accounts have had this Target Users form since August 2026; if yours doesn't show it, build a channel list in your target language instead. Once you have data, narrow to what performed, and test a specific channel list as its own ad: Telegram doesn't let one ad mix user targeting with channel targeting.

Don't Chase CTR

Stop chasing CTR on Telegram. Seriously. A high CTR on a sponsored message means nothing if the users who tap don't complete the action inside the bot or channel. The metric that matters is cost per conversion, whether that's a channel subscription, a bot interaction, a mini-app registration, or whatever action sits at the bottom of your funnel. Set your kill threshold for cost per conversion before you launch, not mid-campaign when emotions are running high.

EUR accounts let you set a daily views limit per user, so you control frequency directly. Whatever account you use, plan fresh creative rotation if a campaign runs for more than a few weeks.

Telegram Ads vs. Meta and Google

Telegram's strength is niche community depth. Finance, crypto, tech, and B2B audiences on Telegram are highly engaged and often hard to reach efficiently on Meta. The platform has less ad clutter than any major social network, which means your message isn't competing with five other ads in the same scroll.

The weakness is measurement. If you can't operate without pixel-based attribution, Telegram is a frustrating place to run performance campaigns. The comparison from Adsly frames it well: Telegram isn't a replacement for Meta or Google, it's a complement for specific verticals and audience segments. Use it where it fits, not everywhere.

What Works in 2026

Budgeting and Bidding

Test with a Gram account first if you're new to the platform. The roughly 20 Gram entry point lets you validate channel placements and messaging before committing to an EUR account deposit. Once you have CPM and click data, you can calculate a realistic cost per conversion estimate and decide whether the EUR cabinet's website links justify the larger deposit.

For the expensive geos, budget from the top of the country benchmarks above and work backward from your acceptable cost per conversion. For emerging markets, the math is more forgiving, but conversion rates from those audiences need to justify the traffic quality.

Offers That Actually Work

Telegram Ads work best when the destination is Telegram-native. Sending users to a bot that delivers immediate value (a tool, a report, a signal) converts better than sending them to a channel they have to evaluate. Mini-apps are increasingly effective because they provide an app-like experience without leaving Telegram.

Verticals with documented traction: crypto and DeFi, fintech, news and media, B2B SaaS targeting tech-savvy audiences, and compliant finance offers (Telegram bans get-rich-quick and guaranteed-return promotions). The Native Ads Affiliate Marketing launch plan covers the broader affiliate angle, but Telegram specifically rewards offers where the value is obvious in 160 characters or less.

Cross-Channel Funnel Integration

Use Telegram Ads for top-of-funnel discovery into a bot or channel, then convert inside Telegram over time. Users who join your channel or start your bot can be re-engaged through organic posts. That's where the "no retargeting" limitation becomes less painful: you're building an owned audience inside Telegram, not relying on the ad platform to bring them back.

For external conversion goals, use UTM parameters on your bot links and track completions server-side. It's more work than a Meta pixel setup, but it's workable. Teams running multi-channel campaigns often use Telegram as the discovery layer and Meta or Google for conversion, but only visitors who actually reach your website can be retargeted there: users who stay inside a bot or channel never load your pixel. Pick a tracker that carries the click ID end to end before you launch; the free affiliate tracking software guide compares the options.

Risks, Policies and Compliance

Content Policies and Disallowed Categories

Telegram restricts certain categories from sponsored messages. The lower CPM floor partners list for the politics niche is a price tier, not a green light: Telegram's Ad Policies and Guidelines prohibit ads promoting political campaigns, parties, candidates, or movements. The same rules ban adult content and dating services, gambling and betting, payday loans, get-rich-quick and guaranteed-return offers, and unverified supplements. You also need to comply with local advertising laws in every country you target, including country-specific restrictions on financial products and certain types of offers.

Telegram's moderators review both the ad text and the destination. The guidelines ban ALL-CAPS, gimmicky emoji, line breaks, and bullet lists in the text, and a promoted channel needs a profile photo, a full description, and a post from the last two weeks. Keep creative straightforward and avoid anything that could be read as a guarantee of financial returns.

Fraud Prevention

Telegram uses impression-based billing, so you're charged for impressions served, not clicks generated. Telegram's creator terms let it withhold channel owners' rewards for invalid activity, but that protects Telegram, not your budget. Watch your impression-to-click ratio yourself. Abnormally high impressions with near-zero clicks can indicate placement in channels where your ad is technically served but the audience is disengaged or mismatched.

Working with Resellers Safely

If you want EUR billing or website links, official partners and resellers are the realistic route, and the usual affiliate scam red flags apply when you choose one. The real question is what kind of reporting access you actually get. Do they give you campaign-level dashboard access, or are they just sending you a summary spreadsheet? Can you see impressions, clicks, and spend broken out by placement? Transparent resellers who give you dashboard access are worth the slightly higher CPM markup. Ones who only share aggregated reports are a problem, because you can't improve what you can't see.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who Should Run Telegram Ads in 2026

Honest answer: not everyone. If your funnel depends on pixel-based attribution and you can't operate without it, Telegram's official platform will frustrate you. If you're in a vertical where Telegram communities are genuinely active, specifically crypto, fintech, tech tools, or news, the combination of low CPMs and high-intent niche audiences makes it worth a structured test.

Start with a Gram account. Pick one language and a short list of relevant channels. Write three message variants. Set a kill threshold for cost per conversion before you launch, not after. Run for two weeks, look at cost per bot start or channel join, and decide from data. That's the minimum viable test. Anything less and you're not actually testing Telegram ads, you're just spending money on them.

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