How to look for high-quality channels, what budgets to lay down and how not to get cheated and get live leads, says 4D Communications Agency.
Telegram is actively gaining an audience, eclipsing both Western social networks and VKontakte in the Russian market. Advertising, of course, is getting more expensive every day, but this is not a reason to refuse it – in the messenger you can find a very warm and reading audience, channels on highly specialized topics, subscribers for expensive segments and B2B.
But first you need to understand: do you need advertising in Telegram at all? If you have a simple service (manicure, minor repairs, etc.) or an organization with a specific location without an exclusive USP (local cafe, atelier, car repair), then it will be more profitable for you to advertise where there is a geo-target. Telegram, alas, does not track the location.
So, we decided that advertising in Telegram suits us. How to allocate the budget correctly so that it shoots right on target?
The most important thing is the selection of the audience
If you are targeting, you need to think about what audience your ad is for: gender, age, income, location, interests, and so on. It’s the same here, but in reverse: you determine who your ad is for, and then look for channels where this audience can sit.
Here, no algorithms will help you, only your own analytics: the more thoughtfully you approach the choice of channels, the higher the effectiveness of your advertising will be. For example, you need LLC owners. What do you think, in which channel of your target audience is more: in the channel “Great quotes about business” for 200 thousand subscribers or in the channel “Taxes for LLC owners” for 2000 subscribers?
Channel catalog from Telega.in
And how to find these suitable channels?
The easiest way is through the free TGStat service. You can search in channel selections, in ratings by topic, simply in the search (by keywords and filters) or through citation. The latter method works great if you’re trying to find multiple channels on a very narrow topic – usually channels in small niches advertise and mention each other.
Screenshot of TGstat
In order to find a channel through quoting, go to TGStat in the statistics of the channel that you already liked, open the “Quoting” tab and search there. And in the “Subscriber Acquisition” tab, you can see how many subscribers your competitors brought from this channel and what creatives they used to achieve this result.
Screenshot from TGstat
How much money is needed?
You need to be prepared for the fact that the price of advertising can vary greatly depending on the area. If you want to advertise discounts on products in the federal supermarket chain, you can safely go to the mass Russian channels, where the cost of viewing can be 0.5-1 ruble.
If you have an expensive niche – for example, entrepreneurs, then the cost will be about 3-7 rubles per impression. Although there are channels that are much more expensive – for example, when the channel is run by a media personality, where the quality of content is very high with very rare topics, or when the author simply highly appreciates his channel.
How to evaluate the quality of a channel?
Channels with red labels, advertising of illegal services and scammers, you can immediately skip. There will also go channels in which advertising is published very often – people stop reading the posts. We also do not recommend placing ads in channels where the ER (engagement rate) is below 20%. Ideally, you need to calculate it yourself, and moreover, by advertising reach, and not in the usual way: divide the advertising reach by the number of subscribers, multiply by 100 and get the advertising ER. If it is more than 20% – great!
Statistics of the channel “Zucchini caviar by stock” from TGstat
Before ordering advertising, be sure to check the channel also for cheating: go to TGStat in the “View Analysis” tab and see: does the view graph look like nervous jumps or like a slide? If the second, everything is in order: the post gains most of the views in the first hours, and then the views gradually fall. In boosted channels, the graph can be sharp jumps – this means that the author bought views.
You can also check the “Subscriber Acquisition” tab: if there is a sharp increase “out of nowhere”, then the channel is most likely also boosted. Although sometimes this is the result of overflowing traffic from other social networks – then you need to carefully check the author’s other social networks, views, earlier advertising placements and evaluate their realism. In addition, you can see the number of subscribers by the hour – if there are sharp “tides”, then this is most likely a cheat.
Where to drive traffic?
There are three main options – to your Telegram channel, to a bot or to a website. In the first two cases, it is quite easy to count traffic through the same TGStat or an individual link that can be created in the settings of your channel or bot. In the second, for analytics, you will need a service that captures transitions and targeted actions – for example, Yandex Metrika.
Yandex Metrica
It’s worth leading to a site if all business processes are tied to it, or a working funnel is set up there and there are many products that are more convenient to choose on the site. In other cases, it is better to advertise on a channel or in a bot, depending on what you have and for what purposes.
How to do analytics?
The most important figure is the cost of the target action. It can be a subscription, a purchase, an application left, and so on. By dividing the cost of advertising by the number of applications, we can understand the cost of the target action, and then calculate how much it paid off. If your goal is views, then cost per view will be a key metric.
We advise you to create your own internal channel database, in which you could keep statistics on previous advertising campaigns, and better predict the effectiveness of advertising in the future. Collect unsuitable channels in the database too: they will come in handy so as not to step on the same rake and spend less time checking new channels.
