Telegram Marketing
Advertising on Telegram mini apps gives brands a strong advantage: lower costs, less competition, and access to an active, highly engaged audience. However, even promising campaigns can underperform. For example, you might see decent click numbers, but conversions don’t follow, and the budget disappears faster than expected.
In this guide, we’ll explore the most frequent mistakes in Telegram mini app ads and share practical tips to help your campaigns deliver meaningful results.
- How Telegram Mini App Ads Work
- Mistake #1: Choosing the Wrong Ad Format for Your Campaigns
- Mistake #2: Targeting Broad or Unqualified Users
- Mistake #3: Not Tracking Conversions With Postbacks
- Mistake #4: Using Weak or Ineffective Creatives
- Mistake #5: Not Leveraging Rewarded Ads
- Mistake #6: Setting Up CPM and CPC Lower Than Recommended
- Mistake #7: Not Retaining Your Audience
- Mistake #8: Not Excluding Your Existing Audience
- Wrapping Up
How Telegram Mini App Ads Work
Every month, more than 500 million people, which is nearly half of Telegram’s total user base, interact with mini apps for gaming, trading crypto, booking services, transferring money, and more. For many users, TMAs have become a real alternative to traditional mobile apps. They open instantly, don’t need to be downloaded, and let people access services without leaving Telegram.
More brands start realizing the potential of Telegram mini app ads to reach and convert highly engaged users. These ads are shown at natural breakpoints, complementing the overall user experience and keeping interactions smooth.
Telegram mini app ads
What are the benefits for advertisers? In comparison with standard ad platforms, Telegram mini app promotions generate much higher engagement. For example, the average click-through rate for TikTok ads is around 0.84%, while our data shows that TMA campaigns achieve significantly higher CTRs. Below are the key performance benchmarks for Telegram mini app ads across Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, and the USA:
Telegram mini app ads benchmarks. Source: Telegram Marketing Statistics and Trends: The 2025 Report
CPC and CPM rates are lower than on other platforms, however, poor strategy can quickly lead to disappointing performance. Let’s take a look at eight common mistakes in Telegram mini app campaigns and how to prevent them.
Mistake #1: Choosing the Wrong Ad Format for Your Campaigns
Telegram mini app ads support different ad formats, and the most popular are:
- Static and GIF banners. Static banners deliver your message simply and efficiently, while GIF banners bring your ads to life with subtle motion that draws more attention.
- Video ads. Short and engaging, video ads help you tell your story quickly and spark an emotional connection.
A common mistake advertisers make is choosing an ad format without first clarifying their campaign goals. For example, if your aim is to encourage users to subscribe to your Telegram channel or register for a game, a banner ad is usually the most effective and cost-efficient choice.
Using only one ad format is another common mistake. For wider reach, we recommend using both banners and videos for a simple reason: some TMAs don’t support specific ad types. Using both helps you engage as many users as possible and reduce risks of missing out on potential customers. For example, in our Telegram mini app campaigns for Altery, we ran both static banners and video ads to maximize reach and engagement.
To make your ads more effective, keep an eye on the top 20 Telegram mini apps and see what types of ads they run. Analyzing trends and popular creative approaches can give you inspiration, help understand what resonates with users, and provide direction for your creative strategy.
Mistake #2: Targeting Broad or Unqualified Users
Targeting a broad audience is a common mistake that can lead to unqualified traffic. For example, when you target Telegram users in India, your ads may also reach people using India-based VPNs who aren’t genuinely interested in your product or service. To avoid this and maximize your budget effectiveness, we strongly recommend narrowing targeting by device language and filtering out VPN traffic.
It’s also important to analyze the traffic coming from Telegram mini apps because this is the only way to understand what actually drives quality users. Here’s a trick: a high CTR doesn’t always mean your campaigns are performing well. In some cases, creatives are shown in a forced format, where users have to click the ad just to close it — which can push click-through rate close to 100%. In most cases, a good, healthy CTR is between 35% and 70%.
Mistake #3: Not Tracking Conversions With Postbacks
Postbacks are notifications sent from a Telegram mini app to an analytics system whenever a user completes a specific action, such as opening a wallet or registering for a game. Postbacks allow you to optimize campaigns based on real outcomes, and not using them is a critical mistake: you’re essentially running campaigns blindly.
Let’s explore how it works. When a user completes a desired action, such as opening a wallet, a postback is sent to confirm that the target action was completed in that TMA. This allows you to track which apps are performing well. If a mini app ID shows few completed actions, you can exclude it from future campaigns to focus your budget on higher-performing placements.
Mistake #4: Using Weak or Ineffective Creatives
When designing an ad creative, it’s important to keep your niche and audience in mind. For example, based on our experience, crypto platforms and digital wallet providers get the most interaction with clickbait-style creatives, as these resonate with their audiences. These could be bright, flashy videos or eye-catching animations that grab attention instantly.
Failing to A/B test multiple creatives is also a frequent mistake. Always test at least three different ones at the same time. This lets you see which ones resonate best with your audience and optimize your Telegram mini app campaigns more effectively.
Mistake #5: Not Leveraging Rewarded Ads
Task ads give users rewards, such as points or bonuses, for completing simple actions like subscribing to a Telegram channel or playing a game. They feel more like in-app achievements than promotions, which encourages users to engage actively. On top of that, task ads are cost-efficient for advertisers, since you only pay when the desired action is completed.
Task ads in a Telegram mini app
Rewarded ads are especially useful for:
- Growing your community
- Attracting users to a Telegram bot
- Driving players to a Telegram mini app
However, for goal-oriented actions such as registrations, leads, or other high-value conversions, video and banner formats are usually more effective.
Mistake #6: Setting Up CPM and CPC Lower Than Recommended
If you set your CPM or CPC below the recommended level, your campaigns will run very slowly. What is more, the system will learn to operate at this low bid, which means that later, if you want your ads to run faster, it can take a lot of time and effort to adjust the bids and get the campaign back on track. To avoid this mistake, we suggest setting your CPM and CPC at or above the recommended level from the start, so your campaigns can deliver efficiently and scale quickly without delays.
Mistake #7: Not Retaining Your Audience
If you have an exclusive offer or a discount, make sure to show it to your existing audience. Let’s say you have a Telegram bot with 50,000 users. You can export their IDs, upload them to the ad platform, and target ads specifically to these users. This approach helps retain your audience and get more value from users you’ve already acquired instead of focusing only on new ones.
Mistake #8: Not Excluding Your Existing Audience
Another common mistake in Telegram mini app campaigns is targeting your existing audience when the goal is to reach new users. Showing promotions to people who already know your product wastes budget and makes it harder to accurately measure the campaign performance.
A simple solution is to upload your existing user list to the ad platform and prevent ads from targeting those IDs. That way, every dollar goes toward reaching fresh prospects who haven’t engaged with your product yet.
Wrapping Up
When Telegram mini app campaigns start underperforming, the first thought is often to raise costs and hope it fixes things. In many cases, that’s a mistake, as it can mask the real issues rather than solve them. It helps to audit what’s already running and check the fundamentals — targeting, formats, creatives, bids, and tracking — before increasing the budget. Small adjustments in the right places can deliver better results and ROI than simply spending more.
