Telegram: New Targeting

Publication date: 11 Jul 2023

At the beginning of July 2023, Telegram updated its privacy policy. This was done “in order to comply with territorial restrictions when displaying adverts”. Such a change made it possible to get additional ways to place ads.

• According to SimilarWeb, Telegram ranks 110th in the ranking of the world’s most popular websites. In June, it was visited by 286 million users. The service is most popular in Russia, Ukraine, India, Italy and Brazil.

Primarily, the changes affected the improvement of targeting. As the experts of the service specify, it was previously possible to specify the language in the targeting settings. However, the same language is frequently used in several neighbouring countries. Therefore, to avoid showing inappropriate ads, advertisers have the option of displaying advertisements depending on approximately certain countries and cities to which the user’s IP address belongs.

Features of Telegram’s new targeting

When creating an advert, you can now use the “Target Users” menu.

1. Apart from language, it is now possible to set up targeting by country and region (location) of the user.
2. “Target Topics” enables the advertiser to set up targeting by user’s interests.  For example, if a user is subscribed to a sufficient number of large public channels on a certain topic (“Finance”, “Politics”, “Sports” etc.), then in the future he will see adverts targeting channels of this category in other large channels as well.
3. “Target Audiences” is an opportunity to configure targeting in Telegram according to the databases provided by the advertiser. As an example, an advertiser can use an impersonal list of encrypted identifiers based on phone numbers (but not containing the phone numbers themselves). Afterwards, the advertiser can customise the adverts and define the range of users to whom certain adverts will be shown.

Recall that the messenger is constantly evolving and introducing new features: in June, Telegram announced the introduction of stories.