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How to spy on competitor Telegram Ads

Practical workflow for surfacing every ad a competitor runs — niches, creatives, spend estimates, channel targets.

4 min · updated 2026-09-23

Competitive intel is the cheapest research you can do before a launch. This guide walks through the practical workflow on tgadsspy.

#Why spy on competitors

Three concrete reasons:

1. **Creative shortcut** — see what messaging actually converts in your niche, skip 80 % of A/B testing

2. **Channel targets** — identify which channels carry their ads → those are the high-converting inventory for you too

3. **Campaign shape** — how many distinct creatives a brand runs, in how many channels, over what period: testing or scaling

#Step 1 — find the advertiser entry

Three entry points on tgadsspy.com:

  • **Search by name** — /advertisers?q=Catizen returns matched advertisers
  • **Search by niche** — /niches/crypto lists top crypto advertisers
  • **Search by channel** — /channels/<username> shows every advertiser ever active in that channel

You can also pop in a known Telegram username directly: /spy/<username>.

#Step 2 — read the advertiser page

The advertiser detail page summarises:

  • **First seen / last seen** — when the brand started running ads and last activity
  • **Total reach** — sum of audience touched (estimate)
  • **Channels touched** — unique public channels carrying their ads
  • **Niche breakdown** — which categories they buy in
  • **Creative mix** — banner / channel-pic / text / invoice / giveaway distribution
  • **Geo distribution** — which countries get served

Click any niche/channel/geo to drill into the filtered creative list.

#Step 3 — read the creatives

The detail page also shows recent creatives. For each:

  • Banner image (mirrored permanently — won't expire)
  • Text + CTA copy
  • Target URL
  • First-seen and last-seen dates (active duration = fatigue signal)
  • Payment source (Gram / EUR / Stars)
  • Target channel preview (where the ad actually showed)

A creative that ran for 60+ days is a winning creative — copy the angle.

#Step 4 — set up alerts

Don't manually re-check the page. Use the alert system:

  • **Advertiser alert** — get pinged whenever this advertiser launches a new creative
  • **Channel alert** — get pinged whenever any advertiser runs ads in your target channel
  • **Keyword alert** — get pinged whenever ad copy mentions your tracked keyword

Free tier: 1 alert. Pro tier: unlimited. Alerts go to @tgadsspybot or webhook.

#Step 5 — read the shape of their buy

The Media Buy summary on the advertiser page shows what we can actually count:

  • **Distinct creatives** — how many different messages the brand has in rotation
  • **Channels** — how many channels the brand has appeared in
  • **First and last seen** — the window our archive has watched them, not the window they have been advertising

You will see spend estimates built as impressions × niche CPM. We cannot do that arithmetic for you and neither can any other third party: Telegram exposes neither impressions nor CPM outside the advertiser’s own cabinet. What our archive gives you instead is the shape of the campaign — how many distinct creatives a brand runs, in how many channels, over what period. That tells you whether a competitor is testing or scaling, which is usually the actual question behind "how much do they spend".

#Pro patterns

Advanced workflows:

  • **Multi-competitor compare** — open 3 competitors in tabs, compare niche/geo overlap
  • **Vs pages** — /advertisers/vs/competitor-a-vs-competitor-b for side-by-side stats
  • **CSV export** — download full creative history at /advertisers/[slug]/ads.csv for spreadsheet analysis
  • **API access** — /api/v1/advertisers/[slug]/creatives for programmatic feeds

#Don't be the easy-to-spy advertiser

If competitors can spy on you the same way, two countermeasures:

1. **Frequent creative rotation** — don't let any single creative run for 90+ days

2. **Targeting diversification** — spread across many channels so no single channel-pull reveals your strategy

You cannot hide entirely — Telegram Ads is fundamentally public by design. But you can make the spy work harder.

Keep reading

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