In this piece I will share the method we use to bring targeted subscribers into Telegram channels — subscribers who then read your content and buy, with a 4× payback.
Who this method suits
— Personal and expert blogs monetized by selling various products (business, online education, investing)
— Businesses with a funnel built through a Telegram channel
— Online schools
But this method will not suit
— If it matters to you that your subscribers are only in Russia
— You have an offline business and need an audience in a specific Russian city
This article is about attracting an audience through targeted ads on Instagram — a platform considered lost in Russia for almost 3 years now.
My team and I have been focused on traffic from Instagram and Facebook for 9 years.
And even after the platform left Russia we keep delivering customers from it to online businesses.
Why consider Instagram ads as an alternative channel at all?
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How the algorithm works. When advertising through Telegram Ads or seeding we spend a lot of time on where to show the ad (which Telegram channels); on Facebook that is not needed. You only need to formulate the offer well, and the platform finds the audience you need by itself. But if you do it wrong, you can easily attract unqualified subscribers or fraud traffic.
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Thanks to the algorithms, the cost per subscriber in almost any niche will be lower than or comparable to seeding / Telegram Ads
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The ads work fast. Compared to traffic from Yandex, advertising through Facebook we do not have to watch our money being spent on “training the algorithms” for a week — Facebook does it much quicker
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The biggest advantage — thanks to the well-working algorithms you can attract a super specific audience:
Need padel fans? Easy.
Need IT people who want to launch their own startup? Sure.
Gather entrepreneurs into biohacking? Simple.
That is, a specialized audience can be assembled noticeably easier and cheaper than through other traffic channels.
What Telegram channel ads on Instagram look like
The scheme is fairly simple:
Instagram ad → Mini-site revealing the channel’s benefits → Jump into the channel → Subscription
For the ads to bring targeted subscribers at an acceptable price, you need to work on several things at once:
- Correctly define exactly which ad you show. The training of the algorithms depends on it, and the audience selection will be wrong otherwise
A common mistake here is addressing the wrong audience and using the wrong visual style
If you get this stage wrong, you can attract unqualified users.
- The next step is working on the mini-site.
It seems like a not very important stage, but the cost of your subscriber depends on its content. If the mini-site is done badly, then even if you bring the right audience to it, the cost per subscriber will still be high.
- And the last, but not least, step — choosing where in your Telegram channel to send the subscriber after the click on the mini-site. When promoting Telegram channels we only take the whole thing on comprehensively: we do the ads, the landing pages, and test different promotion approaches ourselves.
And how to measure payback?
The question then arises: if you attract subscribers, how do you measure the payback of exactly these subscribers from the Telegram channel? And how do you know that exactly your subscribers buy?
We found a way to track the analytics precisely, and I will tell you about it now.
First, we connected the “Subscription source bot” service — it lets you identify which source a subscriber came from.
Second, at the stage of user registration in the pre-order form we started collecting their Telegram username.
And then it is a matter of technique: with a simple script we joined the requests from the pre-order form with the subscriber’s source and got:
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The number of subscribers who came from Instagram ads
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The number of pre-order form requests left by subscribers from Instagram
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The number of deals made by subscribers from Instagram
On top of that we got one more important piece of information: since we knew the date of subscription to the Telegram channel and the date of the product purchase and the deal, we could determine the deal cycle.
