How Much Traffic Telegram Referrals Drive: 3 Examples

Telegram remains one of the most popular messengers in Ukraine, despite the controversial debates that have been ongoing around it for the past 2 years. In the Ukrainian space, there are over 33,000 active channels with an audience of 282.6 million subscribers.

Today we're breaking down how one of the organic traffic acquisition tools works — the recommendations block. We'll explain the widget's mechanics and share some interesting numbers. 

What recommendations are and how they work

Before recommendations were introduced, organic traffic on Telegram could only be gained when users subscribed after searching by keywords in a community's name. But now the messenger has an additional tool that not everyone knows about.

Similar Channels were added in the November 2023 update. The recommendations block appears at the bottom of the interface when subscribing to a new channel. 

Clicking the "View all" button opens a list of channels that Telegram considers relevant to the first one. If needed, you can subscribe to them immediately or at any time via the "Similar Channels" tab.

The messenger's help section states that the similar communities widget was added to make it easier to find channels on the same topic. The list is generated automatically based on audience overlap. 

In practice, there are cases where Telegram adds completely irrelevant examples to similar channels. For instance, it considers the most denim-clad political project to be related to the affiliate marketing space. Presumably, the audiences do overlap after all.

And among the 23 similar channels, there isn't a single Ukrainian traffic community. All the listed "media" belong to citizens of the neighboring country that never stops showing us its brotherly love. Draw your own conclusions. 

How many subscribers you can get from similar channels

Similar Channels is positioned as a tool for acquiring free traffic. Estimating the size of the potential audience that may come from recommendations isn't possible, since there's no way to manually get into the widget. 

Conclusions can be drawn based on the statistics of a specific channel. The screenshot below shows a community's targeted advertising figures. The author notes that in the first days of December 2023, over 200 users subscribed to his channel, while other admins whose communities he analyzed weren't as lucky — a maximum of 20 subscribers per day. 

On another marketing channel, the stats are slightly worse, but still decent. Even 5 subscribers a day converts into 150 per month. Given zero spend, recommendations are quite a solid tool. 

At Palai, our numbers look like this: 100–150 views per day and 5–10 subscribers. That's roughly 150–300 new readers every month. The vast majority of them are interested in affiliate marketing, making this a solid addition to the classic traffic sources in the messenger. 

We're hoping that in the future the recommendation algorithm will become more sophisticated and group communities by interests. For now, manual filtering is the only option.