How to Monitor Competitors' Telegram Ads in 2026: What Alerts Catch and What They Miss

Telegram does not publish a library of running ads. On most big platforms you can look up the ads a brand is running; on Telegram you only see what the platform chooses to show your own account. To follow a competitor you need an archive that records sponsored messages over time, and a way to hear about new ones without checking every day.

This guide explains what such monitoring can realistically cover, how to set it up, and where its blind spots are.

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1. Where Telegram ads appear#

Telegram's developer documentation describes four places for sponsored content (Telegram API):

• channels — a sponsored message under or between posts;
• bots — a banner above the chat;
• search — sponsored channels and bots between your own results and global results;
• video — a text ad during full-screen channel videos.

In September 2026 a partner also reported Banner in Bot, which shows ads inside bots to a chosen audience (AdIndex). The changelog has the dates for each placement.

2. Why no tool sees every ad#

Telegram ads are targeted and shown to each viewer separately. Through resellers, the euro cabinet targets by country, language, interests, specific channels and bots, search and retargeting (aksanov.digital). An archive records what its own observing accounts are shown, so it is always a sample. A campaign aimed at a narrow audience may never reach those accounts.

The sample can still be large. On 23 September 2026 the public tgadsspy API listed 585,770 ad creatives (API). By where the ad button leads:

Destination	Creatives	Share
Channel	396,421	67.7%
Bot	120,923	20.6%
Personal account	43,827	7.5%
Website	24,515	4.2%

Mini apps (6,281, 1.1%) are counted within bots. By payment rail as labelled in the archive, 80.4% of creatives are marked as Gram (formerly TON) and 19.6% as euro cabinets. These are shares of creatives recorded in the archive, not shares of money spent.

3. Read country labels carefully#

Some archives put a country flag next to an ad. Ask what it means. In the tgadsspy archive the flag is the region the collector asked for when recording the ad, not a measured place of viewing and not the advertiser's targeting. When no account is available in the requested country, another one is used without notice (tgadsspy). If you need a country breakdown, use a classifier's estimate of the ad's market, and treat request labels as a sampling detail.

4. What alerts catch#

tgads.observer sends a Telegram notification when a matching ad appears in the archive. Two alert types are worth starting with:

• Keyword alerts match whole words in the ad's text and title. Use your brand, your competitors' brand names, and the product words your market uses, in each language you sell in.
• Channel alerts fire when an ad that is new to the archive is recorded in a channel you follow. Add the biggest channels in your niche to see who buys placements there, and your own channel to see who advertises next to you.

Two details matter:

• An alert fires when a creative is recorded for the first time, not on every later impression. A long-running ad produces one alert, not hundreds.
• New ads are checked every minute, so the delay comes from when the archive first sees the ad, not from the alert itself.

5. What stays invisible#

• Suggested Posts and paid posts. They are published as ordinary channel posts, not as sponsored messages, so ad archives do not capture them. The channel's share of a suggested post is 85% (Telegram API config), and that money never shows up in ad data. To follow this activity, you have to watch the channels' posts themselves.
• Search ads are not covered by the archive's alerts.
• Narrowly targeted campaigns that never reach the observing accounts.
• Budgets. An archive shows that an ad ran, where and for how long. It does not show what the advertiser paid.

6. A weekly routine#

1. Go through the week's alerts and open each new creative.
2. Note the destination: a channel, a bot, a mini app, a personal account or a website. Each points to a different funnel.
3. Mark creatives that keep running. An ad that is still recorded weeks later is more likely to be working than one that disappeared after a day.
4. Compare the wording of offers. New discounts, trials and hooks show up in the text before they reach competitors' websites.
5. Adjust your keyword list: add new product names you saw, and remove words that only bring noise.

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FAQ#

Does Telegram have an official ad library? No. The Telegram Ads homepage and the ad policies do not offer a public search of running ads.

Can I see a competitor's budget or CPM? Not from an archive. Minimum CPMs are published by Telegram and resellers; actual bids and budgets are only visible in the advertiser's own cabinet.

Why did an ad I saw in Telegram not appear in the archive? Your account was targeted and the observing accounts were not, or the ad appeared in a placement the archive does not record.

Do alerts work for ads in any language? Keyword alerts match the words you enter, so add keywords in every language you need to follow.

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Sources: Telegram API: sponsored messages, Telegram API config, Telegram Ads, ad policies, aksanov.digital, AdIndex, tgadsspy public API. Data checked on 23 September 2026.